Deconstructing the vulnerable Global South subject in the discourse of women trafficking in Brazil

Migration governance on human trafficking reflects gendered, neo‑colonial South–North constructs that repress mobility and sex work. The ideological stress on the intrinsic vulnerability of migrant women legitimises and depoliticises intervention, while strategically subtracting agency from social actors. Drawing on ethnographic research on trafficking in Central‑West Brazil, this article reframes vulnerability as a composite analytic field rather than a fixed condition. It shows how international and Brazilian institutional perspectives reproduce a disempowering, patriarchal conception of vulnerability in relation to migrant sex workers, while the ethnographic case of Ana – a Brazilian migrant sex worker identified as a trafficking victim – reveals vulnerability as a relational and ambivalent process, in which subjects are neither simply passive nor deficient. Bringing Butler’s and Fineman’s theorisations into conversation with post‑structuralist and postcolonial feminist accounts of subjectivity and power, alongside critical migration and development scholarship, the article advances an explicitly anti‑colonial reconceptualisation of vulnerability that links subject‑making, institutional practice and migration governance. Its original contribution lies in repositioning vulnerability as a site where structural constraint and self-making coexist, enabling a critique of neo-colonial victimising constructions within gendered migration regimes.