This book examines the visual politics of the cinematic figure of the ‘sex slave’ from its origins in silent film to its iterations in blaxploitation cinema, European art cinema, Nollywood, and, in its most concentrated form, the Hollywood blockbuster thriller. Through close analysis of several film texts that is informed by feminist theory, visual studies, critical race studies, and the political economy of sex work, this book argues that the sex slave has long functioned as a disciplinary spectacle that simultaneously commodifies and punishes female flesh. The sex slave is used to ‘sell’ a libidinal fantasy of rescue, not of the trafficked woman or child, but of the very economic and social order that exploits them.

"Why are audiences seduced by the sex slavery narrative? Digging into the cinematic archeology of the figure of the sex slave, The Sex Slave in Cinema: An Inegalitarian Spectacle offers provocative answers, as it untangles the intersection between foreignness-migration and the phenomenon of sex slavery as hetero-gender violence. Aga Skrodzka looks back at early cinema and its silent spectacle of the Oriental slave, and moves through later examples of racialization, sex trafficking panics, and iconography to give us a feminist analysis that is riveting in its scope and dazzling in its intellectual energy." - Katarzyna Marciniak, Occidental College