Samira, the first installation of Nicola Mai’s Emborders project | antiAtlas des frontières
▻http://www.antiatlas.net/samira-the-first-installation-of-nicola-mais-emborders-project
Karim is an Algerian migrant man selling sex as SAMIRA at night in Marseille. He left Algeria as a young man as her breasts started developing as a result of taking hormones and was granted asylum in France as a transgender woman. Twenty years later, as his father is dying and he is about to become the head of the family Samira surgically removes her breasts and marries a woman in order to get a new passport allowing him to return to Algeria to assume his new role.
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SAMIRA (Emborders 1) is the first of Emborders’ 4 installation/movies. It is being produced by IMeRA in co-operation with SATIS (Departement Sciences Arts et Techniques de l’image et du Son of the Aix-Marseille University). The Emborders filmmaking/research project questions the effectiveness and scope of sexual humanitarian initiatives protecting, controlling and deporting migrants working in the sex industry and sexual minority asylum seekers. In order to get their rights recognised and avoid deportation migrants targeted by sexual humanitarianism reassemble their bodies and perform their subjectivities according to standardised victimhood, vulnerability and gender/sex scripts. In the process only a minority of migrants targeted by anti-trafficking interventions and applying for asylum obtain protection, refugee status and the associated rights. The vast majority are treated as collateral damage and become either irregularly resident in immigration countries or forcefully deported against their will and in often dangerous circumstances to their countries of origin.
