The Living Consequences

The United Nations has issued a comprehensive new report on global human trafficking, focused on efforts at enforcement.

Highlights include the fact that reported cases of human trafficking, including forced labor and sexual exploitation, have been on the rise, and that women play a significant role in perpetrating human trafficking.

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Traces of the Trade has been named the best documentary in the “Courage in Filmmaking” category for 2008 by the Women Film Critics Circle.

Gender played a central role in our discussions of race and privilege during the filming of Traces of the Trade, even though this issue did not appear in the finished film. So I think that this award, by an organization promoting the voices and perspectives of women in film, is a particularly fitting tribute to the work that Katrina Browne and everyone involved with the film has done.

The awards ceremony will be broadcast live on Wednesday, December 31 at 11am on WBAI-AM (New York) and streamed online at wbai.org.

I want to point out a candid and revealing post on race and gender by Renee, who writes the blog Womanist Musings.

Renee writes from what she terms “a womanist perspective,” but she has also described herself from the outset as a “woman of color,” and her latest blog entry explores the implications of that perspective.

Renee’s thesis is that online, as in the outside world, the perspectives of women of color are marginalized, even within the feminist community:

It is like we are some sort of “special interest group” who have completely divergent needs. That’s right I’m saying it, white women are “the women” and we are just a side group looking for scraps.

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Several of us from Traces of the Trade attended the White Privilege Conference in Springfield, Mass. over the past few days, where we offered a screening and discussion of the documentary and solicited feedback.

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One issue which came up frequently while filming Traces of the Trade was the importance of gender in our society, and the parallels between gender and race.

While there are, of course, many ways in which gender and race are not parallel, it was often instructive, in a group consisting solely of white people, to point to ways in which the men in the group shared privileges in our society which the women did not.

I plan to write more on this subject another time, but for now I want to point out a strikingly different post on the film’s acceptance into competition at Sundance. Melissa Silverstein writes, over at Women & Hollywood, about the women represented among the films in the Sundance lineup, including in Traces of the Trade.

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