Foreign Bodies: Gendering Transnational Migration In Contemporary Italy and Ireland
09.17.2009| 4:00 – 5:30 PM | 691 Barrows Hall
Made in Chitaly
Dr. Laura Fantone, Beatrice Bain Research Group
The symbolic and material economies of Italy shaped a specific space around the figure of the East Asian immigrant, especially living in central Italy . Drawing from recent data about Italy and sociological analysis of economic and cultural integration patterns, I analyze opportunities, limits and racial policies operating in contemporary Italy regarding East Asian women and their families. Such ideas draw upon old fear and ignorance as well as new perceptions of global capitalism and the connections between Chinese and Italian mafias.
‘Opening Doors’: The Domestic Worker’s Support Group and Performing Migrant Women’s Labor in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland
Charlotte McIver, Performance Studies
This paper examines art practice as a mode of intercultural engagement and anti-racist work in Ireland through the “Opening Doors” project, which combined work on a quilt showing the experience of domestic workers in Ireland, a collaborative photography project depicting scenes from domestic work with artist Susan Gogan, and independent photography captured by the women. How should art practice in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland be situated as part of the “process” of social and structural change that works to get to the “root causes of poverty, inequality, and exclusion” ? How does the practice of controlling “representation” and “staging images” of labor as “art” open up performance and arts practice as modes of resistance for migrant communities in Ireland today, while also indexing the power relations that give them access to these avenues? Do art and activism have to be mutually exclusive in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland today, or can they ever work together separate from the discipline of the “Irish racist state”?
Co-sponsored by the Beatrice Bain Research Group.
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