NORMAL in discussion

Abstract

Click here to see the trailer of Nick Mai's third film of his sex work trilogy: NORMAL.

NORMAL is made of the combined interviews with four young migrants, who are impersonated by actors. The similarities and differences between the characters' life trajectories are explored by focusing on their contradictory aspirations to lead a NORMAL life.

The film is also a reflection on the inherently fictional nature of any narration of the self, particularly when this happens in relation to experiences which are stigmatized as non-NORMAL.

The four characters explain how they came to see their involvement in the sex industry as NORMAL and how their notion of normality evolved with their life experiences. At the same time, their life trajectories do not conform to the victim/villain stereotypical opposition which dominates current debates about sex.

A film screening of NORMAL will be introduced by Nick, followed by a discussion amongst the group.

Biography

Nick Mai is Reader in Migration Studies at London Metropolitan Unviersity.  He is co-author of Out of Albania (2008) and Exploding the Migration Myths. Analysis and Recommendations for the European Union, the UK and Albania (2003).

Nick's main research area is on the relationship between migration and the emergence of different forms of cosmopolitan and essentialist consciousness and identities, which he addressed through different and interrelated research strands. These include:

• the interplay between media consumption and the imagination/enactment of migration, which was the topic of his earlier doctoral work on the role of Italian media in attracting Albanian migrants to Italy;
• the relation between migration, social exclusion and the emergence of migratory and diasporic individual and collective identities, which was the topic of his post-doctoral research at Sussex;
• the mobility of migrant minors and young people from Eastern Europe and North Africa within the EU, their strategies of survival and the associated risks and opportunities, including issues of exploitation and the engagement in illegal activities;
• youth radicalisation and the role of secular and religious ideologies in legitimising politically motivated violence, which was the topic of an ESF-funded exploratory workshop he organised at ISET on 26/27 June 2008;
• initiatives of social intervention addressing migrant groups which are constructed as vulnerable by policies as well as by academic and public debates;
• the negotiation of gender, sexuality and subjectivity through the migration process, with particular reference to international (female and male) sex work as a contested and ambivalent space of control and autonomy.