Tracing Women's Routes in a Transnational Scenario

Abstract

This essay analyzes the video essays of Ursula Biemann, which focus on the relations between globalized production processes, the exploitation of women's bodies, and the sexualization of female labor. Showing the interrelation of the flows of transnational economies and information and communication technologies (ICTs) with the performances of gender and space, these video essays work as feminist cartographies. Deploying the video essay format, Biemann creates figurations to delineate an alternative system of navigation. Visual language and visualization technologies become a political instrument to counter women's invisibility behind the displacing and abstracting effects of technoscapes.

Keywords:

• Ursula Biemann
• video essay
• ICTs
• transnational feminism
• feminist cartography
• visualization technologies

Notes

1. For various feminist discussions of spatiality and mapping, see Grosz (1995), Kirby (1996), McDowell (1996), Mohanty (2003) Nast and Kobayashi (1996), Pavlovskaya (2007), Rose (1995), Sandoval (2000), and Stanford Friedman (1998).

2. On the grounding of metaphors, see Smith and Katz (1993).

3. Nonetheless, the exploitative dynamics of the global sex industry cannot be ignored (see, for example, Hughes 1999).

4. Van Alphen explains the difference as follows: “‘Imagined’ is not the same as ‘imaginary.’ Imagined places are not fairytale places, they are not just fantasy. In one way or another imagined places do have a connection with a place that exists geographically. However … a place is somewhere ‘out there’ in the world, whereas an imaged place is an act of the imagination, with a subject responsible for performing this act in relation to a place” (2002, p. 56).

5. See also Le-Phat Ho (2008), Pavlovskaya (2007), Propen (2006), Schuurman and Pratt (2002), and Sui (2004).