We use cookies to enhance your experience on our website. By continuing to use our website, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time. Find out more

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $45.50

Format:
Hardback
224 pp.
6.125" x 9.25"

ISBN-13:
9780199942190

Publication date:
January 2013

Imprint: OUP US


Other Dreams of Freedom

Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking

Yvonne C. Zimmerman

Series : AAR ACADEMY SER

Widely recognized as one of the most pressing human rights issues, human trafficking has captured worldwide attention as a crucial moral and political issue, perhaps nowhere more than in the United States. Since they were signed into law in 2000, U.S. federal laws and policies on human trafficking have been understood as concrete expressions of the civic values of personal and political freedom. Yet these policies have also been characterized by a marked preoccupation with regulation, especially sexual regulation.

Yvonne C. Zimmerman offers a groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between freedom and sexual regulation in American approaches to human trafficking. She argues that the religious values of American Protestantism have indelibly shaped the federal government's approach to engaging human trafficking, and that the trajectory of the U.S.'s anti-trafficking efforts cannot be fully grasped without an understanding of the unique ways in which sex, morality and freedom are connected in Protestant Christian configurations of the moral world. Zimmerman shows that the anti-trafficking project expressed a vision of freedom whose structure and logic were thoroughly Protestant, particularly under the George W. Bush administration. Zimmerman's analysis challenges the assumption that combating human trafficking necessarily entails sexual regulation, and reveals the extent to which the preoccupation with sexual regulation has functioned to discourage alternative understandings and practices of freedom, particularly for women.

Other Dreams of Freedom demonstrates that if opposition to human trafficking takes the promotion of freedom as the point of departure, then freedom must not be identified strictly with religiously and culturally Protestant understandings, but in ways that permit other understandings of how freedom is constituted, practiced, and maintained.

Readership : Students and scholars of religion and human rights, politics, sexual history and philosophy.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Gender, Sex and Religion in U.S.--- American Anti-Trafficking Activism
1. Trickle Down
2. Standing on the Premises: Theology and Religion in the Bush Administration's Anti-Trafficking Project
3. Theological Foundations of Moral Imagination
4. Cultural Foundations of Moral Imagination
5. Bad Sex
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Yvonne C. Zimmerman is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Methodist Theological School in Ohio.

Making Sense - Margot Northey and Joan McKibbin
Religion and Human Rights - Edited by John Witte, Jr. and M. Christian Green
Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights - Edited by Thomas Banchoff and Robert Wuthnow

Special Features

  • Provides an extensive examination of the American approach to combating sex-trafficking.
  • Shows the profound effect of Protestant principles on American sexual regulation.