The Traffic in Women and Contemporary European Cinema

3 units

What binds society together? One of the most influential answers to this question was offered by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. He argued that the fabric of a society is formed by a network of exchanges among kinship groups, which circulate three kinds of objects: economic goods, linguistic signs, and women. In this course, we will inquire into the place of women in this argument. We will trace rudiments of the traditional marriage system (a father figure still gives away the bride in the marriage ceremony), its range of displacements in a global economy (transnational wives, nannies and domestic servants), the role of new media in the formation of new systems of trafficking (internet brides), and the place of the debate on gay marriage within the larger conversation. We will read texts by Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gayle Rubin, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild; and we will watch a number of films that dramatize the traffic in women in the context of contemporary Europe: Coline Serreau's Chaos, Lukas Moodisson's Lilja 4-ever, Cristian Mungiu's Occident, Nilita Vachani's When Mother Comes Home for Christmas, Fatih Akin's Head-on, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Silence of Lorna.