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Overall, the chapter presents the main aim of the book, which is to bring migrants’ own experiences to the center of academic and public debate. It introduces the concept of sexual humanitarianism to analyze how fixed and sexuality-related notions of vulnerability operate as migration-control mechanisms. The concept analyzes how groups of migrants are strategically problematized, supported, and intervened upon by humanitarian institutions and NGOs according to vulnerabilities that are supposedly associated with their sexual orientation and behavior. The current global focus on trafficking and slavery as the key concepts to understand the relation between migration and sex work reflects the sexual-humanitarian hegemony of neo-abolitionism in policymaking, which obfuscates that only a minority of migrant sex workers are trafficked and legitimizes repressive interventions. The chapter also introduces the main concepts and the auto ethnographic, participative and creative methodological approach adopted by the author to analyse and explain the complex understandings and conditions of agency of migrant sex workers, most of whom decide to sell sex in the short term in order to avoid being exploited in other labour sectors and to afford a better life for themselves and their families in the future.

How does the theorization of subjectivity and agency as embedded in mobile orientations help us to understand the nexus between migration, sex work, agency, and exploitation? The conclusion offers a final appraisal of the way migrants working in the sex industry both reproduce and challenge sexual-humanitarian selfrepresentations as they try to fulfill their mobile orientations. At the same time, the chapter analyzes how the “global sentimentality” produced by sexual humanitarianism around the issues of trafficking and “modern slavery” becomes complicit with neoliberal politics. The chapter also reflects on the broader social implications of these dynamics for the sustainability of the global democratic polity. It highlights the strategic role of sexual humanitarianism and the forms of affective global governance it engenders in the neoliberalization of everyday life and the deterioration of the democratic polity in three main ways: by promoting neo-abolitionist affective rhetoric over factual evidence; by obfuscating the inequalities engendered by neoliberalism and protecting those responsible for the precarization of global labor markets from facing their responsibility; and by preventing people from the Global North from acknowledging their own increased exploitability and precariousness in neoliberal times.

Chapter 9 discusses the methodological implications of the author’s filmmaking practice, with particular reference to experimental ethnofictions as strategic, political/artistic interventions within the sexual-humanitarian onto-epistemology. The chapter shows how his films Normal, Samira, and Travel seek to reproduce the socio-anthropological truth of the people and dynamics they portray, and the intersubjective relations and affects through which knowledge emerges. At the same time, the three films’ ethnofictional approach challenges the criteria of authenticity and credibility that characterize sexual-humanitarian research, documentary filmmaking and interventions. In the chapter, the author defends the socio-anthropological ‘truth’ of the ethnofictional characters and situations he portrays on two grounds. Firstly, because they are accurate reproduction of real research interviews and ethnographic dynamics. Secondly, because they resonate affectively and sensuously with the real dynamics, relationships, and circumstances through which knowledge emerged during fieldwork. The chapter argues that creative and participative documentaries have the potential to affectively and cognitively challenge, on the basis of research evidence, the sexual-humanitarian “post-truth” simplification of migrant sex workers’ mobile orientations, which conceals the real responsibility of neoliberal policies for the socioeconomic constraints that limit their agency.

Chapter 6 draws on the findings of Migrant Workers in the UK Sex Industry, a research project directed by the author between 2007 and 2009. The study found that the large majority of migrants working in the London sex industry are neither forced nor trafficked, and that by selling sex they try to avoid the unrewarding and exploitative conditions they meet in other sectors. The chapter discusses the resistance that the research findings met among sexual-humanitarian institutions and organizations targeting all sex workers as potential victims of trafficking by contextualizing it within the emergence of new forms of affective and ‘post-truth’ global governance. Drawing on the interview with Alina, a young woman from Moldova who had been trafficked and subsequently went on to work in the sex industry autonomously, the chapter shows how the deployment of irony in interviews with former victims of trafficking facilitates the emergence of complex experiences of agency and exploitation. The chapter also discusses the politics of representation of migrant sex workers by introducing Normal, the third film in the author’s Sex Work Trilogy as the interview with Alina inspired the film and formed the basis of one of its six characters.