Abstract
In her Geobodies video essay projects—Performing the Border, about the feminization of labor in Ciudad Juarez on the U.S.–Mexico border; Remote Sensing, about transnational sex labor markets; and Sahara Chronicle, about labor migration in Africa and Europe—Ursula Biemann challenges the ways in which transnational labor migrations are apprehended in separate disciplines, social sciences, art, and mass media. Biemann's contribution to the global labor discourse lies in the striking extradisciplinarity of her projects and the attention she brings to the very “work” of discourse that accounts for the diverse conditions under which human bodies travel and labor worldwide. Her video projects show not only that human labor, flows of capital, policy issues, and geographic circumstances are all interrelated and interdependent, but that disciplinary, representational codes which obscure their own subjectivities and biases, effectively wipe out entire regions, populations, and forms of labor from collective consciousness. In her experiments in video and text, Biemann recovers the work of gendered and/or non‐Western subjects, illuminating how marginalized transnational laborers transform the social and material spaces they inhabit despite great political and economic odds. Moreover, Biemann recognizes the significance of often ignored kinds of labor–domestic, sexual, illegal, artistic. Finally, she demonstrates that aesthetic theory (and practice) can play a vital role as a labor discourse that produces new topographies of transnational labor.
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