Mellan mäns händer Kvinnors rättssubjektivitet, internationell rätt och diskurser om prostitution och trafficking

Sammanfattning: The present study has a three folded focus, framed by one over all aim; to critically discuss and evaluate the constructions of women’s legal subjectivity in dominant feminist discourses on prostitution and trafficking. First, I set out to develop a gender theoretical understanding of prostitution. I relate prostitution to a context of reproduction and gender, where the separation between women’s sexuality and reproduction is understood as operating as creating a split femininity, and likewise to construct a unified masculinity. Secondly, I examine the discursive orders on prostitution and trafficking. I examine the frameworks of thought on prostitution and trafficking as they have been formulated in an international debate (on international law) during the last decades. Thirdly, focusing on the discourse that seeks to normalise prostitution as sex work, I examine how the creation of women's legal personhood with in this discourse takes place through an oscilliation between discursive orders on prostitution and trafficking, emphasizing some times different and conflicting ways of promoting women’s rights. One crucial question is how understandings of prostitution, when transposed to a context of trafficking, are expressed through a "judicial reasoning", and how these expressions might shed light upon the construction of women’s legal standing. The aim of the dissertation is to contribute to a comprehensive feminist theoretical understanding of the relation between, on the one hand, different positions on prostitution and trafficking within international law, and the discourses disputing its substance on the other.