Rewriting the victim: dramatization as research in Thailand's anti-trafficking movement

This work unites feminist international research with the writing, composing, and production of a musical designed to critique the discourse about the trafficking of women in Thailand. Through writing and producing 'Land of Smiles,' a two-act, 15-song musical inspired by field research that includes over 50 interviews with female migrant laborers, sex workers, community-based women's rights activists, non-governmental organization (NGO) employees, and other development actors in Thailand's anti-trafficking movement, playwright, composer and feminist scholar Erin Kamler presents one of the dominant stories about human trafficking and shows that the voices of the people, most often women, can illuminate the problems and highlight the difficulties in finding solutions.

In this book, Erin Kamler brings together feminist international research with the writing, composing, and production of an original musical designed to critique the discourse about the trafficking of women in Thailand. Through this study, Kamler illuminates a theory and praxis that she calls Dramatization as Research, or DAR. Ultimately, Kamler shows how the arts can be used as a feminist communication intervention and a vehicle for understanding the cultural dimension of human rights.

"The international movement against the trafficking of women, which has gained momentum over the past two decades, is driven largely by the United States, in tandem with state governments and NGO workers. Feminist organizations have played a key role in carrying out anti-trafficking policies, but are increasingly divided over what those policies should look like. The primary divide exists between those feminists who want to abolish prostitution (as a key link to trafficking) and those who argue that what sex workers need is not to have their livelihoods taken away through paternalistic policies, but improved working conditions to alleviate the dangers associated with their work. A primary criticism of US NGO workers, well-intentioned as they may be, is that they misunderstand the cultural and economic conditions of the women they purport to help. This book provides a unique response to this misunderstanding. On one level it shows how this movement is, in fact, based on a Western mindset that problematizes women and puts its own interests before those of the women it is trying to help. But the project's primary innovation is in the method that it develops to explore the conflict of cultural values that gives rise to the aforementioned debates: what the author calls dramatization as research (DAR).This project, based around the author's work with migrant laborers, sex workers, activists, NGO employees, and other members of the anti-trafficking movement, combines feminist theory with the writing and production of a musical about the trafficking of women in Thailand"--