Sex work, resistance, human trafficking, social stigma
Kurzbeschreibung
This research deals with the practices of resistance employed by women working in the sex trade of Tapachula, the main city on Mexico’s southern border. By analyzing the life stories of these women, I show that what we refer to as prostitution is not a fixed and homogeneous field populated by victim-subjects, but a complex web of power relations in which sex workers, despite the constraints placed on them, retain their capacity for action and manage to find spaces, even if fleeting ones, which allow them to protect their interests and identities.
My present dissertation project looks at gay and lesbian transnational and transatlantic cultural communication networks from the 1970s to the mid-late 1990s and focuses on the pink triangle as a marker of identity in LGBTQI+ activist circles. I focus on new trends of Intellectual History and traces the Visual Conceptual History of the pink triangle as a multi-layered symbol and multi-temporal aesthetic of a presumed international queer subculture. Doing so, I also explore the exclusion of identities connected to the presupposed universality of the story of the “men with the pink triangle”. Consequently, following the work of queer scholars like Heather Love, I use the pink triangle’s early key moments in the FRG and the USA as a case study for an analysis of the entanglement of queer utopias, collective memory, cultural trauma and a certain longing for the past. So doing I try to combine the psychic complexity of shame, well-known narratives of pride and their connection to homonormative discourses, and homo- and neo-nationalism.
In unterschiedlichen soziologischen Gegenwartsdiagnosen und Kulturtheorien finden sich mehr oder weniger explizite Hinweise auf die Annahme, dass das Emotionale als handlungsgenerierendes- und legitimierendes Prinzip von Akteuren in den letzten Jahrzehnten an Bedeutung gewonnen hat. Dieser Fülle von verschiedenen theoretischen Annahmen auf der einen Seite stehen bis dato jedoch wenig tragfähige empirische Untersuchungen auf der anderen Seite entgegen. Das Dissertationsprojekt nähert sich dieser empirischen Lücke aus einer wissens-und kultursoziologischen Perspektive, die Emotionen als relevanten Teil einer diskursiv und handlungspraktisch konstruierten Wirklichkeit in den Blick nimmt. Dabei werden historische Verläufe von Diskursen in den Ratgeberseiten der Jugendzeitschrift BRAVO rekonstruiert, die verhandeln, wie Subjekte Emotionen wahrnehmen, ausdrücken und/oder steuern sollen, um ihre sozialen Beziehungen zu regulieren.
The PhD research explores the relationship between cultural production and social change in Japan. In particular, she is focusing on the rise of young Japanese female photographers during the 1990s, and their interactions with wider social and economic changes during this period.
