Based on fieldwork with pimps, human traffickers and sex workers in the industrial city of Gala?i in Eastern Romania, the talk will evolve around the steps leading up to the journey of the pair of pimp and sex worker, when they decide to take their business abroad to countries such as Italy and Germany.

The paper examines the preparations, which both the sex workers and the pimps make in Gala?i, in order for them to inhabit the ‘right’ bodies, which enable them to succeed in this line of transnational business. The paper zooms in on the sex workers, for whom inhabiting the ‘right’ body entails beautification processes involving particular clothes, makeup and nail-polish. The paper explores how the becoming of this particular kind of body intersects with other arenas in which the sex workers move as daughters, school friends and neighbours.

By examining these meticulous body techniques, the paper investigates the notions of the body and the perceptions and performances of aesthetics and femininity, which appear in the field of transnational pimping in a post-socialist landscape.

Trine Mygind Korsby recently defended her PhD at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen where she is currently a research assistant. She has carried out research in Romania, Italy and Denmark. Her research interests include pimping, human trafficking, sex work, criminal lives/networks, illicit economies, labour, morality and anthropological theories of the body. Other research interests include experiments in collaboration and concept-work.

Her PhD project explores pimping and human trafficking in Europe. The project is based on fieldwork in Romania and Italy with different groups involved in human trafficking, pimping and other illicit activities, and for several years she has followed and done fieldwork with a group of young, Romanian women that were trafficked into prostitution in Italy when they were minors. Her project contributes knowledge and nuances to the subject of human trafficking that is often wrapped in a gender stereotypical veneer.

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