Threadbare: Clothes, Sex, and Trafficking

Threadbare: Clothes, Sex, and Trafficking

Threadbare: Clothes, Sex, and Trafficking

Threadbare: Clothes, Sex, and Trafficking

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Overview

Ever wondered who makes your clothes? Who sells them? How much they get paid? How the fashion and sex industries are intertwined?Threadbare draws the connections between the international sex and garment trades and human trafficking in a beautifully illustrated comics series. Anne Elizabeth Moore, in reports illustrated by top-notch comics creators, pulls at the threads of gender, labor, and cultural production to paint a concerning picture of a human rights in a globalized world. Moore's reporting, illustrated by members of the Ladydrawers Comics Collective, takes the reader from the sweatshops of Cambodia to the traditional ateliers of Vienna, from the life of a globetrotting supermodel to the warehouses of large clothing retailers, from the secondhand clothing industry to the politics of the sex trade. With thoughtful illustrations of women's stories across the sex and garment supply chain, this book offers a practical guide to a growing problem few truly understand.Featuring the work of Leela Corman, Julia Gfrörer, Simon Häussle, Delia Jean, Ellen Lindner, and Melissa Mendes.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781621067399
Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
Publication date: 05/03/2016
Series: Comix Journalism Series
Pages: 160
Product dimensions: 5.80(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range: 14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Award-winning journalist and bestselling comics anthologist Anne Elizabeth Moore was born in Winner, SD and grew up in St. Paul, MN. Currently in Chicago, she is the author of Unmarketable from the New Press (Best Book, Mother Jones) and a series of memoirs from Cantankerous Titles including New Girl Law and Cambodian Grrrl (Best Book, Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award). She is the former editor of Punk Planet, The Comics Journal, and the Best American Comics series from Houghton Mifflin. Her cultural criticism has appeared in the Baffler, The New Inquiry, Jacobin, Tin House, Salon, TPM, Truthout, and Al Jazeera. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, the ChicagoReader, and many others, and she has appeared on CNN, WTTW, WBEZ, WNUR, Radio Australia, and Voice of America. She is a Fulbright scholar and the recipient of a USC Annenberg Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship and an Arthur and Lila Weinberg Fellowship at the Newberry Library. She has two cats and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The United States

If the United States isn't the birthplace of fast fashion, it is certainly its spiritual home and primary beneficiary. Named for and based on the concept of fast food (in which cheap and easy hot meals are always available to the consumer, with a limited array of modifications), fast fashion has sought to make stylish but affordable clothing available to the consumer, created in a set palette of styles, patterns, and designs. A major difference between fast food and fast fashion, however, is that when the former is consumed, it's actually gone. Fast fashion would never have taken off if the clothing it produced could only be worn once; instead it was made "rare" (and nearly disposable). Designs and styles would be sold for only a limited time, and social pressure to stay on trend — plus quick construction and cheap materials — would do the rest, a solution that doubled as a revolutionary marketing strategy. This meant that the traditional four seasons of fashion quickly gave way to an ever-replenishing stock of affordable clothes. Inditex (Spanish owner of Zara stores and a few other outlets) paved the way for these industry-wide changes, although the Gap, Nike, Mango, Forever 21, H&M, and many others quickly followed suit, speeding up production lines, streamlining designs, and pushing new apparel items out the door in as few as six weeks.

That's where Threadbare begins. An introductory strip with Julia Gfrörer explains how the changes fast fashion set in motion at every stage of the apparel industry — from display to warehousing, from retail to policy — turned an in-home pursuit into an unfathomably vast industry in just about a hundred years. In that time, the garment industry has become the entity that most deserves to be taken to task for the global gender wage gap, although the poverty it inflicts isn't visible in the ads. Fashion advertising depicts women as carefree, thoughtless consumers. They may be independently wealthy; they may not be. They don't even care! The image projected by the fashion industry is that economics simply do not matter, but any fashion model — overworked, underpaid, and often as malnourished as a garment factory employee — will tell you otherwise. I lucked out by getting to spend a little time with Sarah Meier, an eloquent former supermodel, whose thoughtful takes on race, gender, sexuality, and economics in the modeling world set the tone for Threadbare. This is the debut of "Model Employee," drawn by Delia Jean, the first of the strips created exclusively for this book. (You'll want to note, for later, how seamlessly Meier addresses similarities between modeling and sex trafficking, nearly as an aside.)

Of course, the billboards, taxi signs, and print ads that are the output of models' underpaid labor offer most consumers their first awareness of fashion as an industry. To work, ads must convince you to visit a store, where you will be bombarded immediately with demands to shop now, and to return soon to shop again. Gfrörer's frenetic linework in "Let's Go Shopping" captures both the appeal of fast fashion and its crass, unseemly underbelly. She brings the same frantic pace to "The Business of Thrift," in which fast fashion's embrace of throwaway culture proves to be quite profitable for some.

Two strips drawn by Melissa Mendes finish out Chapter One, although they were originally slated to go to another artist. A scheduling conflict made for a last-minute substitution and my first collaboration with Mendes, who would go on to become my most frequent collaborator. The strip, too — "Zoned" — was enormously successful, as thousands upon thousands of readers shared our findings about shady Foreign Trade Zones, where so many of the products that enter the U.S. are housed for a short time. Of course, this is all laid out in a clear and above-board system of policy that Mendes and I explore in "Red Tape," which further looks at the bizarre connections our laws make between the apparel trade, terrorism, and intellectual property rights. Mendes's deeply silly underwire-inspecting officer with the Department of Homeland Security — covered in brassieres at the airport — belies the fundamentally troubling sense that the heavy regulations and surveillance aren't actually about terrorism at all.

CHAPTER 2

Austria

In my young adulthood, I was enamored of men's fashion in Austria: Waldveirtlers, for example, offered a classic, high-quality leather boot that somehow exuded a casual, androgynous cool in direct negation of my own aggressively cool Doc Martens. I perceived a near-French adoration of scarves. Skinny but not skin-tight jeans. Simple cotton ring-necked shirts dyed in natural tones like wine or forest, if not black. No one bathed; it was the 1990s. We didn't bathe in the U.S. either. On visits, I would import American peanut butters and toothpastes for my friends. After every trip, I brought home suitcases full of pumpkin seed oil and Styrian wine.

My interest in men's fashion gradually waned. In the fall of 2013, I realized there was a reason. I was sitting in a bar in the capital city, Vienna — and even the bar was different. Airy, not dark and wooden. No local or even German indie music playing, but some overproduced electronic international dance thing. The wine list had wines from around the world, and my friend and I drank something French. This was my first clue: I was in the country that produced several of my favorite wines in the world. I looked around and was not aesthetically impressed by the dress of our fellow patrons. "What happened to men's fashion?" I asked my companion. The table to our right was filled with men who spoke English to each other in Austrian accents. They wore standard, dark-colored business suits and spoke of their common workplace, a bank. "When did it get so boring?"

It wasn't just fashion, of course, and certainly not just men's apparel. Nowadays, the American toothpastes and peanut butters of my youth are produced under their original American brand names in factories just outside of Vienna and sold at local drug stores throughout the country; it's easier to get pumpkin seed oil in the U.S. than it used to be, although it is not yet mass produced here (a rare instance of globalization that I would applaud). Even less corporate-backed food trends jump the pond quickly: When I was researching these strips in Vienna in May 2014, I could not find kale anywhere, although it was mentioned on the cover of nearly every magazine in the airport when I left the U.S. Five months later, when I returned to present the completed strips at Vienna Art Week, kale had arrived. It was available in every grocery store, as if it had always been there.

The shifts in fashion over the years had garnered a similar lack of attention. Few I spoke to could pinpoint that any change had occurred at all. I'd originally intended the Austrian chapter of this book to be composed of interviews with men recalling how and when they'd undertaken changes in dress and style. Some of this remains — my interview with Simon Häussle, who I later asked to draw a few strips for the book, offers insight into how individuals adopt the uniform of the global citizen — but the larger picture that was building quickly captured the majority of my attention. Austria had been a proud textile-producing nation, deeply invested in local production and hand-crafted wares. A vast political agenda had been enacted to uproot those instincts — a force we now call neoliberalism — and folks like Johann Perzi (page 62) are feeling the change personally. Remnants of earlier days are present, certainly —"Connie, Urban Planner," (page 72) who comes from a textile-producing family, notes the recent reprise of the dirndl and the spectacle of Conchita Wurst — but as Connie explains, tiny nods to individual choice hide within them a cultural conservativism that may not have Austria's best interests at heart. I remain intrigued by how few noticed the massive cultural shifts, but the larger story — of who initiated these changes, and how folks brought them about — eventually took over the chapter.

While many of these strips were first published in a limited, two-color risograph edition printed by the good people at Issue Press in Grand Rapids, Michigan — including several shorter strips not included here — Delia Jean's opening strip, "Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal," appears here for the first time. None have been published digitally; all were created in residency at das weisse haus in Vienna, Austria, and published with their support.

CHAPTER 3

Cambodia

I knew when I started the comics journalism series for Truthout that I would be returning to Phnom Penh during the run of strips; I did not know that my plane would land on the first day of the largest garment worker strike in Cambodia's history. Even further from my mind was any awareness that these uprisings would end so violently. Had I been gifted with foresight (and a touch more cynicism), it might have further crossed my mind that the events I would experience after I stepped off the plane at Pochentong International would go on to provide the perfect object lesson to the story I was tracking. From a remove, it was completely clear: the international policies that drive production of U.S. and EU-consumed apparel offshore and keep wages too low and options too limited for far too many women in the world are driving national and industrial leaders to kill those same women when they speak up about low wages and bad working conditions. There is no alternative reading.

On January 3, 2014, military police opened fire at a Special Economic Zone on the outskirts of Phnom Penh and killed at least five garment workers, injured over 40, and arrested 10. Others remain missing to this day, and corroborating, if unofficially recognized, reports about a sixth body have emerged. (See Melissa Mendes' "Outta Sight! (Outta Mind)," on page 85.) The country was devastated; over half the nation, keep in mind, had survived the Khmer Rouge regime and had personal, visceral experience with state violence. I was also devastated; I had been meeting with and interviewing protestors for weeks on this trip; years, if we count previous excursions to the city. These were people I cared about deeply, and their government had just shot them. I forgot, almost entirely, about this project.

An immediate ban on gatherings of more than 10 people in any location was enacted, in an effort to quell the organizing that can emerge from crass displays of aggression such as the citizenship of Phnom Penh had just experienced. I was teaching at a college; I had 12 students. Class was effectively cancelled by government decree. I had nothing to do.

Had the apparel strike continued without violent intervention, in other words, I would have been occupied with other duties on January 4, 2014. I would never have found occasion to visit an anti-sex trafficking NGO that sits just a few kilometers south of Canadia Industrial Park, where the protestors had just been shot. I would never have entered the facility that claims to offer human trafficking victims a life free of enslavement; never would have realized that what a "life free of enslavement" means to this and many other NGOs around the world was a job in the garment factories. Just the day before it had become clear that a life in the garment factories was not one free of violence, danger, or coercion. Ironically, had the garment workers' uprising been allowed to continue, I would never have stumbled across the deep influence the apparel industry holds over organizations that seek to respond to human trafficking. (I won't tell you any more about it here; you'll get much more out of Ellen Lindner's amazing depictions starting on page 91.)

For NGOs to associate with the garment industry is not a crime: appallingly low wages paid to supposed victims of sex trafficking — lower even than factory work — should be but isn't, either. More distressing, at the NGO I visited the day after the strikes ended, I witnessed consistent confusion about what exactly constituted sex trafficking, as well as the regular misgendering of clients. These conflicting statements, aptly illustrated by Leela Corman in "The Grey Area," (page 102) reflect larger problems. Not only do they signal concerns regarding funding that international donors may wish to keep in mind, but they could constitute human rights violations. And those are crimes.

CHAPTER 4

The World

By now it will be clear that the globalization of the garment industry means that the precise locations of these incidents matters very little. It is unfortunately true that labor and human rights abuses take place at every stop on the production and distribution line. A Bangladesh garment factory building collapse echoes the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in the U.S. a century earlier. A Cambodian sex worker is jailed and placed in rehabilitation as a trafficking survivor just as an American one will be, or an Ecuadorian one, or a Chinese one, in the U.S. We're calling this chapter "The World," then, as shorthand for "how international policies created in the U.S. operate on the ground throughout the world, and then are repatriated and used to suppress women domestically, too."

Our narrative in this chapter starts with Somaly Mam, a self-proclaimed former victim of sex trafficking in Cambodia. Mam claims to have rescued more than 4,000 girls from sex slavery through her Cambodian NGO AFESIP and its global fundraising arm, the Somaly Mam Foundation. Mam's influence on U.S. policymaking is vast. She was named Glamour's "Woman of the Year" in 2006, a "Hero of Anti-Trafficking" by the U.S. State Department in 2007, and one of Time's "Most Influential People" in 2009.

Many of these accolades can be traced back to her friendship with New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, which only soured when a May 2014 Newsweek story debunked many of Mam's claims. Following up on several years' worth of investigative work by reporter Simon Marks, Newsweek outlined the many allegations of falsehoods in Mam's biography. These include her own childhood exploitation and accounts of her daughter's kidnapping by pro-trafficking thugs. Perhaps more important, a full accounting of Mam's falsehoods includes several stories told by survivors who lived in her facilities, who later say they were coached by Mam and staff with lurid tales of their harrowing escapes from brothels. The most renowned of these, Somana Pros (who met with Hillary Clinton and was featured on Oprah) has acted, since 2005, as an ardent and outspoken activist on sexual health and women's rights. She is featured prominently telling her own tale of rape and abuse at the hands of a pimp in Kristof's 2012 PBS series Half the Sky — she is missing an eye, and describes a brothel-owner stabbing it out — but a local paper dug up medical records that indicate she had had a tumor removed in 2005, right before Pros moved to Mam's facility.

Even Mam's saviorhood, however, is disputable. A January 2014 independent report from the Urban Institute found that only 49 percent of the 674 women and girls at AFESIP shelters between 2008 and 2012 could be considered "trafficked" under any definition of the term.

Unfortunately, these falsehoods have proven quite profitable, to Mam as well as to right-wing Christian fundamentalist NGOs, which have used the mantle of human trafficking to promote agendas that are clearly unrelated, such as abstinence education in U.S. schools and Christian religious instruction in Buddhist or Muslim areas abroad. And while Mam can't be held accountable for the impact of her tales, she can be taken to task for establishing the culture of permanent victimhood we grant to anti-trafficking NGO clients. When I entered my first human trafficking NGO, what I witnessed was not shocking: totally normal Cambodian women in a large room, sewing apparel. (I had witnessed similar scenes many times.) What was shocking was that I was not allowed to ask the women any questions about "their previous lives," a distinction that covered any question I might ask. I certainly wasn't going to ask if they were excited about the jobs they'd be placed in, in the low-paying, high-risk garment sector. Usually, an enforced culture of silence shrouds abuse and coercion. Yet somehow we've been given to believe — by Mam, Kristof and hand-selected victims who sometimes turn out, later, to have been fed scripted hard-luck tales — that here, silence is nothing but healing.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Threadbare"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Anne Elizabeth Moore.
Excerpted by permission of Microcosm Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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