In a 2012 article for History of the Present, anthropologist Carol Vance detailed the “melodrama of anti-trafficking,” which has made the subject perfectly situated for Hollywood blockbusters, independent documentaries, off-Broadway musicals, and investigative journalism alike. For example, blockbusters such as Taken have broken box office records by portraying trafficking through the trope of white women and children kidnapped by sex traffickers and rescued by a rugged white male protagonist. Anti-trafficking has increasingly captivated the attention of the state, civil society, and the public, in part due to these dominant portrayals. Celebrities have not only been made a key part of the anti-trafficking mediascape through acting and producing these movies, but they also have made an industry out of their anti-trafficking activism, exemplifying what the late sex worker rights activist Carol Leigh has labeled the “anti-trafficking industrial complex.” Many notable celebrities have furthered their own careers or established their own philanthropic organizations and efforts through their anti-trafficking advocacy.

Samantha Majic’s book, Lights, Camera, Feminism?, builds upon existing critical anti-trafficking scholarship that documents the self-interests and harms of celebrity anti-trafficking activism to capture the wide variety of types, interests, and feminist ideologies of celebrity anti-trafficking work. Majic argues that celebrities should be understood as “multi-level political actors whose varied interests, actions, and issue representations are shaped and mediated by a range of personal and contextual factors” (p. 7). In analyzing major celebrities’ histories and activism, Majic highlights how celebrities reinforce and at times challenge dominant anti-trafficking narratives. This book contends that celebrities should be held to greater political accountability for their actions, given their considerable influence, and offers a number of paths toward celebrity accountability and collective action.

Majic brings an interdisciplinary approach to political science, drawing on Black studies, performance studies, and celebrity studies to thematically break down instances of celebrity activism in her case studies. In doing so, she highlights the feminist ideologies that challenge and reinforce race and gender hierarchies in celebrities’ engagements with anti-trafficking activism. The book combines a qualitative analysis that examines the distribution of representations of trafficking and its solutions in celebrity activism with media analysis that interprets celebrities’ political performances. Majic’s empirically rich research yields a thorough database of 561 unique engagements with anti-trafficking work by 282 celebrities over 17 years. In chapters 3–5, Majic’s three comparative analyses interrogate the complexities within celebrities’ engagements with anti-trafficking activism, particularly as they contend with systems of race, gender, and coloniality. Narratives play out differently based on celebrities’ own subjectivities and personal histories, which change how they align with anti-trafficking narratives.

Given the salience of white femininity to the melodrama of anti-trafficking, Majic centers celebrities’ engagement with structures of race and gender through comparing the activism of Ashley Judd and Jada Pinkett Smith in Chapter 3, “White Saviors and Activist Mothers.” Judd’s political performances often reinforce dominant anti-trafficking narratives, and her archetypal role as the white savior often operates in the Global South. In contrast, Smith more often complicates the dominant anti-trafficking narrative in ways shaped by both her subjectivity as a Black woman and her emphasis on familial love as part of her public persona in the Smith family. Despite Smith’s more diverse portrayals of the victims of trafficking, both celebrities still largely focus on interpersonal factors in trafficking, such as bad men and unstable families, rather than poor labor conditions, tightening borders, and growing wealth inequality.

While anti-trafficking scholars have long written about the various forms of feminism, namely carceral and militarized feminisms, that have emerged in trafficking’s wake, Majic also pairs this with an analysis of masculinity, which has been explored far less in critical anti-trafficking scholarship. Through a comparative analysis of the anti-trafficking activism of Ricky Martin and Ashton Kutcher, Chapter 4 provides an analysis of how two rare cases of “male celebrity feminists” reify and challenge hegemonic masculinity through their subjectivities and particular anti-trafficking focuses. Majic notes that Martin’s position as an ethnic and sexual minority challenged hegemonic masculinity and influenced his anti-trafficking activism, motivating his focus on supporting anti-trafficking initiatives in Puerto Rico, where he believed there was state neglect in identifying and prosecuting cases of trafficking. Kutcher, on the other hand, more closely resembles the archetypal white male rescuer in anti-trafficking. Majic argues that Kutcher’s focus on child victims and technological anti-trafficking tools distinguishes him from dominant women-led efforts in the anti-trafficking space while highlighting how technological tools might further gender inequality.

In the final case study of Mia Sorvino and Julie Ormond, Majic unravels the two actresses’ departures from common celebrity anti-trafficking activism in their more structurally intersectional feminist discourse, which Majic attributes to their affiliation with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Both Sorvino and Ormond more often recognized structural factors contributing to trafficking, such as poverty, with Sorvino additionally recognizing the harms that sex workers have experienced as a result of criminalization later in her activism work. Majic also documents their distinctive attention to labor trafficking, with Ormond playing an influential role in the passage of the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, an act which admittedly was largely symbolic in function. Across these various case studies, Majic continuously contends with the vast majority of celebrity engagements promoting market-based and carceral solutions, which ultimately limit their potential to incite meaningful change.

The book’s conclusion addresses the stakes of this project by demanding political accountability. In addition to the monetary and social power celebrities wield, their separation from the general public and the lack of a formal constituency make it difficult to hold them accountable for shortcomings in their activism. This further underlines Majic’s call for celebrities to be taken seriously and grounds her offerings of alternative visions for celebrity activism. Majic notes several potential reforms, including individuals boycotting celebrities’ work to express public disagreement, media organizations requiring celebrities to perform adequate research before public engagements, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) developing oversight tools to evaluate celebrities’ political engagements. However, she ultimately concludes that these reforms are no substitute for the collective action needed to address growing economic inequality, which produces both celebrities and situated vulnerability to trafficking. This need for greater collective action is emphasized several times in the book, and it exposes the critical limitations of celebrity activism. I found myself wanting more elaboration in these moments of analysis, including a clearer description of how the weight of celebrity activism should be understood in a broader political arc that aims for class revolution.

I had similar desires for more depth throughout the book in areas where Majic highlighted how celebrities both reified and challenged dominant representations of anti-trafficking. For one, Majic employs static definitions of dominant anti-trafficking narratives across the study period of 17 years—namely, she characterizes a focus on individual or cultural factors in trafficking as a reproduction of dominant narratives, and attention to structural factors as challenges to dominant narratives. Even as neoliberal and carceral feminist ideologies have dominated the mainstream discourse surrounding trafficking, dominant anti-trafficking discourse has still had to contend with its critics as a result of the sustained work of sex worker activists, other labor organizers, and their allies. Often co-opting critics’ language, this discourse has expanded in the past two decades to include emphasis on structural factors, collaboration with victims and marginalized communities, and other stances that Majic deems as challenges to dominant discourse. Major anti-trafficking actors have utilized this discourse but largely abstained from commitments to wealth redistribution, full decriminalization, and other foundational demands of organizers. While Majic acknowledges some change in public discourse over the study period in Chapter 5 through the increase in public support for decriminalization, a broader and more dynamic description of what constitutes dominant anti-trafficking narratives throughout the book might provide a more fruitful basis upon which to understand celebrities’ engagements.

I could also see how future work could take a broader view of how various parts of the anti-trafficking apparatus interact with each other and the significance of discourse to these interactions. For example, in Chapter 2, Majic contrasts the furthering of discourses of neoliberalism through the promotion of NGOs, such as The Ricky Martin Foundation, with Martin’s activism demanding increased state support to identify and intercept trafficking in Puerto Rico. But a broader view might situate these engagements as deeply imbricated when the state support demanded is largely carceral, whether overtly or due to the increasingly carceral nature of social services. Overall, while Majic’s analysis of celebrity engagements in relation to hegemonic representations of race, gender, and trafficking yields a more nuanced understanding of its variety than previously represented in critical anti-trafficking scholarship, it leaves unclear why engagements that challenge dominant representations and yet also further the anti-trafficking industrial complex are significant.

In its meticulous reading of celebrity anti-trafficking engagements, Lights, Camera, Feminism? offers critical anti-trafficking scholarship a clearer view of the possibilities of celebrity activism and how celebrities might be mobilized in a greater need for collective action.