Complex Intimacies: Sex Work, Human Trafficking and Romance between Italy and the Black Sea Coast of Romania
Assistant Professor Trine Mygind Korsby has contributed the chapter 'Complex Intimacies: Sex Work, Human Trafficking and Romance between Italy and the Black Sea Coast of Romania' to the book A Sea of Transcience: Politics, Poetics and Aesthetics along the Black Sea Coast, edited by Tamta Khalvashi and Martin Demant Frederiksen.
The volume examines the concept of transience in relation to The Black Sea through a series of chapters, poems and photo-essays.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, Trine Korsby’s chapter explores the case of a young Romanian woman who was previously identified as a victim of human trafficking by the Italian state, and who is now creating a new life for herself back in Romania. The woman’s story illuminates what entering, leaving and navigating within a vast anti-trafficking system looks like over the course of several years.
The chapter explores the contested themes and categories of human trafficking, human traffickers and victims of human trafficking. Trine Korsby suggests the concept of ‘complex intimacies’ to capture some of the complexities of the intimate and romantic relationships between the sellers of sex and their facilitators that may develop – also in cases that have been judicially ruled as human trafficking, within the legal system.
The chapter thus investigates some of the contradictions and complications that are part of the lives lived within the often-stereotyped categories related to human trafficking.
Read more about the book on the publisher Berghahn Books´ website