Event overview
Screening of 'Samira' (2014) + panel discussion
This event will include a screening of the film ‘Samira’ (2014) and a panel discussion between:-
- Nicola Mai (film maker and ethnographer), Migration Studies, London Met
- Sara Farris, Currently ERC Marie Curie Fellow in Sociology, Goldsmiths who is studying the role of employment organisations in sub-contracting care work by migrants
- Les Back who has studied the experience of 'Fortress Europe' for a large EU research project.
Bev Skeggs will chair and time will be made available for discussion.
SAMIRA
Inspired by the work of Jean Rouch, Samira in an ethnofiction presenting the story of Karim, an Algerian migrant man selling sex as Samira at night in Marseille. Karim left Algeria as a young man as his breasts started developing as a result of taking hormones. It is thanks to his breasts and to his self-representation as a ‘transsexual’ that ten years later he was granted asylum in France as a transgender woman, Samira, risking her life if deported back to Algeria. However, at the age of 40, as his father is dying Karim surgically removes his breasts and marries a woman in order to get a new passport and to return to Algeria to assume his new role of the male head of the family.
The story of Karim is presented by juxtaposing the multiple versions and narrations of the self-emerging in strategic situations, relationships and settings: the ethnographic observation in the street and at Samira’s, the medical visit, the interview with the asylum case adjudicator, shopping in the city centre, sitting at a café next to the street market. Each situation highlights contradictory aspects of the history of Karim, proving that as subjectivities are intrinsically incoherent, the real privilege is not to have to be credible in relation to the biographical borders that are enforced by humanitarian rhetoric and institutions.
EMBORDERS
Samira is the first of the two installations resulting from the Emborders art-science project on biographic humanitarian borders: the discourses and performances of suffering and victimisation through which institutions certify the credibility of the claims of asylum seekers. Emborders, which will be completed at the Mediterranean Laboratory of Sociology (LAMES) of Aix-Marseille University by the end of 2015, addresses specifically the way people belonging to sexual minorities and victims of trafficking negotiate humanitarian protection. The project questions the effectiveness and scope of humanitarian initiatives targeting migrant sex workers and sexual minority asylum seekers. In order to get their rights recognised and avoid deportation migrant women, men and transgender people reassemble their bodies and perform their subjectivities according to standardised victimhood, vulnerability and gender/sex scripts. It’s only if they present their life histories according to stereotypical and northcentric repertoires of suffering and victimisation that very vulnerable migrant groups have a chance to avoid deportation, stigmatisation, persecution and death in their countries of origin.
NICOLA MAI
Nicola Mai is a sociologist, an ethnographer and a filmmaker working as Professor of Sociology and Migration Studies at London Metropolitan University and at the Mediterranean Laboratory of Sociology (LAMES) of Aix -Marseille University. His academic writing and films focus on the experiences of migrants selling sex and love in the globalized sex industry in order to live their lives. Through experimental ethno-fictions and original research findings Nicola Mai challenges the humanitarian politics of representation of the nexus between migration and sex work in terms of trafficking, while focusing on the ambivalent dynamics of exploitation and agency that are implicated.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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12 May 2015 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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