‘Living Liminality’: everyday experiences of asylum seekers in the ‘Direct Provision’ system in Ireland

Mechanisms to exclude people seen as ‘other’ which were once considered exceptional have now become normal. Global patterns of increased state security lead to people on the move or seeking protection being detained, dispersed and deported, their lives treated as ‘waste’ or ‘reject’. The Irish ‘Direct Provision’ system is part of an increasing network of liminal, or threshold, spaces, situated between and within borders, in which such people are detained or forced to wait in often inhumane conditions and often for years at a time. Based on ethnographic participatory photographic research, this article explores the ways in which imposed liminality plays out in people’s everyday lives in ‘Direct Provision’. The article looks at how liminality is lived in spatial and temporal terms and develops the idea of ‘ontological liminality’, a means of expressing the ways in which a chronic sense of fear, insecurity, invisibility and a highly controlled existence are lived and internalized; it also shows the ways in which people negotiate this imposed liminality through everyday practices, creating various forms of attachment, engagement and belonging. Exploring the concept of liminality in this context holds broader implications not only for understanding experiences of people waiting or held in the increasing number of refugee camps, border zones and detention centres in and beyond Europe, but also provides insight into the architectures of exclusion created by states to contain or exclude the ‘other’.     

Unpacking the landscape of female sex tourism in Kenya: a film analysis of Paradise: Love

This article examines Paradise: Love (2012, Dir. Ulrich Seidl), a compelling filmic account of the problematics of race, ethnicity, gender, and nation that organize contemporary accounts of female sex tourism. The storyline and visual imagery of the film positions Kenya – and a Eurocentric, homogenized, and reductive (mis)understanding of parts of ‘Africa’ – as an imagined site of racial and sexual adventure for older white Western women seeking intimate relationships with a category of local black men, many of whom enter into these sexual relationships in order to supplement personal and family economic shortfalls. This economy of intimate exchange is positioned as a trade of these black Kenyan men’s desire for money, local status, and the potential to travel to the West, for white Western women’s desire for sexual fulfillment from young black men’s bodies and their assumed sexual prowess. Deconstructing the discourses of female sex tourism through Paradise: Love centres the visual and representational components of processes of racialization and sexualization, wherein beach boys and white Western women gaze upon and ‘Other’ each other through essentialist and fetishized understandings of racial and sexual difference. In focusing on the power dynamics of female sex tourism in particular, the film plays up the shock value of women sexually exploiting men, pushing viewers to question: who counts as a sex tourist? Ultimately, this article seeks to enrich and extend scholarship that troubles intersecting power structures that shape and inform transnational inter-racial intimacies within economies of eroticized exchange.