ABSTRACT
In order to analyze the way in which gender and migration function when connected to issues of sexuality and movement, it is important to illustrate how power relations define these issues as a specific challenge within the complexity of subject movements across social networks. In Europe, scholarship on the sexuality of migration has recently emerged, thanks to the publication of reports (Fleeing Homophobia 2013, EU Agency for Fundamental Rights 2017) that stress the limits of the regulations under which LGBTQ migrants receive asylum (Gartner, 2015). In Mobile Orientations (2018), Nicola Mai explores the connection between sex work, trafficking, and the discourse of humanitarian protection problematically deployed onto migrant sex workers. Gender and sexuality, he argues, have become staples of a Global North rhetoric of sexual humanitarianism, legitimizing surveillance of migrant workers. While casting migrants as vulnerable individuals in need of rescue, such rhetoric sustains governments as heroes granting protection, while “neglecting the complexity of the libidinal, socioeconomic, and intersubjective dynamics” of migrant sex work. Cinema has been complicit with sexual humanitarianism producing a wave of “new global sentimentality” that erases migrants’ agency and self-representation. Those are key to the testimony of Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque, a self-identified transsexual who left Brazil to be a sex worker in Madrid and Milan, and living as a woman. In Princesa, its cinematic adaptation, Fernanda/Princesa meets Gianni, a married man, dissatisfied with his marriage. She considers building a life with him and undergo hormonal cure for sexual reassignment. But she rejects this prospect as she finds out his wife is pregnant. She instead reorients her life choosing a new home with the family of sex workers. Building on Mai’s critique of sexual humanitarianism and new global sentimentality, I discuss how Goldman’s representation already questions sexual humanitarianism by foregrounding Fernanda’s agency and ability to reground herself. My talk is divided into three parts: I first introduce recent critiques of politics of LGBTQ migrant “screening,” I then contextualize Goldman’s depiction of Fernanda’s experience, and I finally link Fernanda’s “reorientation” with more current politics of asylum for queer migrants, which the film prefigures.
