Nicola Mai
Nicola Mai is a sociologist, an ethnographer and a filmmaker working as Professor of Criminology at the University of Leicester (UK).
Address: www.nicolamai.org
Address: www.nicolamai.org
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Videos by Nicola Mai
CAER is available on demand here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/caercaughten
CAER is an experimental and collaborative documentary combining fiction (ethnofiction) and observational nonfiction methods to include people whose lives are portrayed and who are directly concerned in all phases of its production.
The documentary is the result of the collaboration between Nicola Mai and the TRANSgrediendo Intercultural Collective, a grassroots nonprofit organization defending the rights of transgender Latina migrant women in Queens, New York City.
CAER is also a tribute to the work and legacy of Lorena Borjas, the mother of these Latin transgender women living in Queens, who was one of the first victims of COVID-19 in New York in March 2020.
The story and the roles in the film were written and played by members of the TRANSgrediendo Intercultural Collective who were also involved in the editing of the film.
Books by Nicola Mai
Using a bold blend of personal narrative and autoethnography, Mai provides intimate portrayals of sex workers from sites including the Balkans, the Maghreb, and West Africa who decided to sell sex as the means to achieve a better life. Mai explores the contrast between how migrants understand themselves and their work and how humanitarian and governmental agencies conceal their stories, often unwittingly, by addressing them all as helpless victims. The culmination of two decades of research, Mobile Orientations sheds new light on the desires and ambitions of migrant sex workers across the world.
Papers by Nicola Mai
CAER is available on demand here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/caercaughten
CAER is an experimental and collaborative documentary combining fiction (ethnofiction) and observational nonfiction methods to include people whose lives are portrayed and who are directly concerned in all phases of its production.
The documentary is the result of the collaboration between Nicola Mai and the TRANSgrediendo Intercultural Collective, a grassroots nonprofit organization defending the rights of transgender Latina migrant women in Queens, New York City.
CAER is also a tribute to the work and legacy of Lorena Borjas, the mother of these Latin transgender women living in Queens, who was one of the first victims of COVID-19 in New York in March 2020.
The story and the roles in the film were written and played by members of the TRANSgrediendo Intercultural Collective who were also involved in the editing of the film.
Using a bold blend of personal narrative and autoethnography, Mai provides intimate portrayals of sex workers from sites including the Balkans, the Maghreb, and West Africa who decided to sell sex as the means to achieve a better life. Mai explores the contrast between how migrants understand themselves and their work and how humanitarian and governmental agencies conceal their stories, often unwittingly, by addressing them all as helpless victims. The culmination of two decades of research, Mobile Orientations sheds new light on the desires and ambitions of migrant sex workers across the world.
Samira is a 28 minutes two-screen art-science installation presenting an ethnographic account of the life history of Karim, an Algerian migrant man selling sex as a travesti at night in Marseille. Karim left Algeria as a young man as his breasts started developing as a result of taking hormones. He was granted asylum in France as a transgender woman, Samira. 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.
The role of Karim is played by Karl Sarafidis
EMBORDERS
Samira is part of the Emborders art science project questioning 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. 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. Between 2014 and 2015 the Emborders project will explore these dynamics through 3 more ethno-fictional installations, which will also be edited in the form of a one-screen movie, on the life and migration trajectories of sexual minority migrants, asylum seekers and refugees in Marseille, Paris and London.
NICOLA MAI
Nick Mai is an ethnographer and filmmaker working as Professor of Sociology Migration Studies at London Metropolitan University. His main research interest is the negotiation of gender, sexuality and subjectivity through the migration process, with particular reference to the globalised sex industry as a contested and ambivalent space of control and autonomy. In his academic work and films, Nick problematises prevailing understandings of the global sex trade as characterised by exploitation and victimisation, by showing the complexity of the subjective investments of the people involved.