Room G17, Nuffield building (R9 on the campus map)

Join us for this fascinating event to explore the complex issues faced by LGBT Asylum Seekers from two different perspectives. Nicola Mai and Clare Summerskill will each talk about recent projects, with a drinks reception in between.

Assembling 'Samira': understanding sexual humanitarianism through experimental ethnofictional filmmaking.

Samira is a 27 minutes two-screen ethnofictional installation presenting the life history of Karim, an Algerian migrant man selling sex as a transvestite 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.

Samira is part of the Emborders art-science project questioning 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 re-present their life histories and perform their subjectivities according to stereotypically sex-gendered canons of victimhood and humanitarian repertoires.

Trailer of Samira: https://vimeo.com/84704860

Nicola Mai is a sociologist, an ethnographer and a filmmaker working as Professor of Sociology and Migration Studies at Kingston University London. His academic writing and films focus on the experiences and representations of migrants working in the global sex industry. Through experimental documentaries and original research findings, Nicola challenges prevailing humanitarian representations of the relationship between migration and sex work in terms of trafficking, while analyzing sex workers' complex experiences and understandings of exploitation and agency.

Rights of Passage

Rights of Passage is a play by Clare Summerskill, created from interviews with LGBT asylum seekers in the UK. This production toured to theatres nationally earlier this year over a six week period, and was met with critical acclaim and a huge amount of interest in the subject matter that it addressed.

In this presentational talk, Clare will discuss issues which the play addresses, including the situation of LGBT rights internationally, legal criteria which allow LGBT people who are persecuted in their home country to seek asylum in other nations, and Home Office interview questioning methods which ask people to ‘prove’ that they are gay. She will read extracts from the play highlighting some of these matters, and she will also present a selection of character monologues.

Clare Summerskill is a playwright, a singer-songwriter and a lesbian comedienne. Clare regularly performs her own one-woman comedy shows and tours them to theatres internationally. She also has written and produced several plays and films in the verbatim theatre style, where the script is created entirely from interviews. Her published works include Hearing Voices, a play based on service users’ experiences of the mental health system, Rights of Passage, which addresses issues around LGBT asylum seekers, and Gateway to Heaven – Fifty Years of Lesbian and Gay Oral History. She is currently working on her doctorate on verbatim theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London.

#UoBLGBTHM

LGBT History Month - LGBT Asylum Seekers