Racialized Labor in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is known for its heavy-handed dialogues around the issues of rape, domestic violence, and murder. It’s use of New York City as its setting allows the Special Victims Unit to visit victims from all walks of life, creating an unusually high number of episodes showing areas or situations in New York that would otherwise be ignored on primetime television.1 In an episode entitled “Debt,” (Season 6, Episode 2) the focus is on a missing undocumented Chinese sex worker and her abandoned daughter. The episode later reveals an illegal prostitution ring of undocumented Chinese women.
Sex work is profession that is indeed racialized, and the forced labor of women of color (particularly undocumented women of color) as sex workers is one that cannot be ignored.2 The exclusion of Chinese women from late nineteenth-century America because of their presumed position as prostitutes has persisted to today. Chinese women are indeed allowed in America, but the expectation of East Asian women to be submissive or sexually available is an indication of the pervasiveness of this additional myth of racialized labor.
The topic of “illegality” is going to be brought up next week, but I think this episode of Law and Order: SVU shows that the issues of racialized labor and illegality, in pop culture or otherwise, intersect more often than we give them credit for. The women’s status as undocumented and “illegal” in America as well as their illegal labor puts them in the most precarious position - and yet, the storyline of the episode and each ensemble cast member does not stop to think about the precarious situation. There is no discussion of the systemic injustices - both in the context of America and in the global context of American-East Asian relations - that force many women into these positions, nor is there any solution provided to change or stop these systems. Law and Order: SVU’s propensity for schadenfreude only allows its ensemble cast to enter into these dire situations, arrest a few bad guys, and then wipe their hands clean of the whole effort. While I acknowledge Law and Order's efforts to include the stories of violence against the marginalized and underprivileged, the lack of commitment to these issues (as well as lionizing the police as an institution) and lack of deconstruction of the racialization of sex work/labor makes it less-than-favorable source in pop culture.

1. However, one must consider the fact that the stories of these neighborhoods or people do not seem important for primetime television unless they contain some element of tragedy. Television shows like Law and Order and Orange is the New Black only legitimize these stories if visited from an outsider’s point of view (cops and privileged white women, respectively).
2. Many of the racist fetishes that exist today hearken back to “archaic” racial dynamics and have lasting effects on the views of women of color in sexual contexts. One need only look at websites like creepywhiteguys.com or statistics of women of color victimized by human trafficking and domestic and sexual violence. It is telling that the main clients of this episode’s illegal prostitution ring are white men who look specifically for Chinese women to fulfill their sexual and relationship fantasies.