The dissertation, entitled Sex Trafficking and the Reproduction of Europe: Identities, Integration, and the Politics of Protection, examines the European Union's evolving policies on the issue of sex trafficking. Its central argument is that those policies, and the representations they are built upon, fashion the identities of the European Union (EU), Europe, and migrant sex workers. To develop this argument, I provide first a critical evaluation of the concept of state identity in International Relations (IR) theory. I suggest that IR scholars' reliance upon a substantialist ontology of states has left them ill-equipped to theorize processes of statecraft. By developing a process-oriented approach, this study is able to recognize both the reliance of states upon performance for the establishment of their identities, and also the essential role that gender plays in making them intelligible as subjects.

The study then applies the performative theory of gendered state identity to a case study: the EU. Within two discourses of sex trafficking, the EU is observed performing in accord with masculine norms of protection. I argue that such performances are particularly productive within the issue of sex trafficking due to the threats that have been discursively attached to that issue: threats posed by migration, evolving sexual mores, and an uncertain relationship with the East. Sex trafficking, as a hyper-salient issue for European identity formation, is shown to possess a subtext of identity politics that has consistently influenced what has been taken to be the truth of the issue.

The final stage of the analysis consists of a consideration of EU policies that have been naturalized by the dominant representations of migrant sex workers. Of particular note is the EU's emphasis on paternal protection for rescued victims, justified as the natural response to the hyper-masculine criminals who traffic women. Such policies, understood as EU performances, are shown to reinforce the identities to which they are applied. They are made possible by the liminal identities of both the migrant sex workers involved and the countries from which they come. These liminal identities – being at once European and non-European – stimulate articulations that establish the meanings of European and non-European and to legitimize EU intervention on behalf of the “victims”. The result of this process, on the whole, is a more masculine, more stable, and more legitimate EU. (Full text of this dissertation may be available via the University of Florida Libraries web site. Please check http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/etd.html)