She was wearing a frock and full make-up, but claimed to be a real man like her father. We were both standing against the wall on the corner where he usually sold sex, chatting. I am a real Algerian man, just like my father. In my family, a man is a man; a woman is a woman.
You will never see me go with a man when I am Karim! I am not like those whores over there, you know? By then, I had already decided that Samira was going to be the protagonist of the first ethnofiction of Emborders, an art-science project on the effectiveness and scope of humanitarian initiatives targeting migrant sex workers and sexual minority asylum seekers. Emborders combines ethnographic observations and filmmaking in order to analyze and represent the forms of subjectivation and agency produced by humanitarian biographical borders.
The convergence between the intensification and the diversification of globalized migrant flows, the implementation of restrictive migration policies and the onset of humanitarian forms of governance has invested social protection of vulnerable migrant groups with new functions of control Fassin, They also reflect real policy-making and moral issues and highlight the emergence of alarm-generated forms of bordering and affective governance.
Countries in the global north celebrate the acceptance of sexual diversity, while the fight against trafficking in the sex industry is an essential feature of their asserted democratic superiority to the rest of the world. However, their asylum system fails to recognize that people feel persecuted not only by economic inequalities, but also by socio-political circumstances. In turn, anti-trafficking initiatives tend not to recognize that, by working in the sex industry, many migrants counter the increased vulnerability and exploitability they meet in their working lives.
Support for victims of trafficking is dependent on the imposition of a standardized victimhood story about their ambivalent understandings of agency and exploitation.
