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Abstract
In this article I analyze accounts from police and women’s activist documents from the turn of the twentieth century, which present narratives of sex trafficking in and from Galicia, an eastern borderland region of the Habsburg Empire. Both police and activist accounts underscore the image of innocent women forced into prostitution, although police accounts provide more variety and nuance regarding degrees of coercion and agency demonstrated by women. I examine what such narratives reveal about the role of crossing boundaries—an act central to both sex trafficking and efforts to maintain empire. In this context, I consider how the Habsburg authorities coped with and attempted to manage populations whose mobility appeared especially problematic. Although this research draws extensively from historical archives, my analysis is guided by perspectives from folklore studies and the anthropological concept of liminality.
Contributor Notes
Tracie L. Wilson is a research associate at the Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies at Martin Luther University in Halle (Germany). Previously she was a research fellow at Leipzig University and a postdoctoral fellow at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds a PhD in folklore and an MA in Russian and East European studies, both from Indiana University-Bloomington. Her research centers on gender in East Central Europe, including sex trafficking and migration in early twentieth-century Galicia and more recently discourse and practices connected to assisted reproductive technologies and cross-border reproductive care. E-mail: twilson351@gmail.com