Nicola Mai
Research project
Embodied cosmopolitisms : migration, gender and sexuality in the global sex trade.
Project summary
While at Iméra, I will engage in two main tasks. Firstly, I will work on my book on ‘Moving Orientations: gender, sexuality and migration in neoliberal times’. The book will bring together and further develop the findings of my research on issues such as: independent child migration; the involvement of migrants in the global sex industry; the relation between migration, sex work and trafficking; and the interplay between tourism and the sex industry.
Secondly, I will make an experimental documentary film about the humanitarian governance of migrants who are potentially vulnerable to exploitation and abuse in relation to the sexual domain. The film will be based on original ethnographic and participative research, which I will undertake in Marseille during my residential fellowship. It will draw on interviews with migrants working in the sex industry and with ‘homosexual’ (non-heteronormative) migrants living and working in Marseille, Paris and London.
Alongside these two main activities, while at Iméra I will continue to co-operate with Cedric Parizot in the context of the project ‘The Transformation of Borders in the 21th Century’. I will also organize a one-day interdisciplinary art/science workshop on humanitarian forms of governance of migrants in relation to the sexual domain.
