Sex Trade and the Subject: Globalization and the Commercial Sex Industry in Margaret Attwood’s Oryx and Crake Anonymous College

The sex industry is a significant market within the globalized capitalist system. Critic Jean L Pyle argues that ‘structural adjustment policies mandated by the International Money Fund’ are required of less economically developed countries as ‘a condition for loans’ (66-7). These structural adjustments usually relate to liberalizing policies which promote free market trade and soft borders. In his way, Pyle continues, the pressures placed on ‘have not’ nations by globalizing policies to provide employment, accumulate income and pay debtshave enabled and even accelerated the growth in the commercial sex industry by, “1) forcing women into these sectors because of economic need and limited alternatives and 2) pushing governments into actions that promote these sectors’ (66-72). In Margaret Attwood’s Oryx and Crake, a speculative fiction novel set in a dystopian future of technocratic gated communities and poverty stricken ‘Pleeblands’, there is a reflection of conditions formed by globalization. As a child Oryx is sold by her family from a poor village into the sex industry. She is exchanged across many hands and borders, profiting in one way or another from trading her body. She tells the protagonist, Jimmy/Snowman, that her...