ABSTRACT

Drawing on border thinking, postcolonial and transnational feminisms, and queer theory, Gender, Sexuality and Identities of the Borderlands brings an intersectional feminist and queer lens to understandings of borderlands, liminality, and lives lived at the margins of socio-cultural and sexual normativities.

Bringing together new and contemporary interdisciplinary research from across diverse global contexts, this collection explores the lived experiences of what Gloria Anzaldúa might have called ‘threshold people’, people who live among and in-between different worlds. While it is often challenging, difficult, and even dangerous, inhabiting marginal spaces, living at the borders of socio-cultural, religious, sexual, ethnic, or gendered norms can create possibilities for developing unique ways of seeing and understanding the worlds within which we live.

This collection casts a spotlight on the margins, those ‘queer spaces’ in literary, cinematic, and cultural borderlands; postcolonial and transnational feminist perspectives on movement and migration; and critical analyses of liminal lives within and between socio-cultural borders. Each chapter within this unique book brings a critical insight into diverse global human experiences in the 21st Century.

chapter Chapter 1|11 pages

Framing the margins

Gender, sexuality, and identities of the borderlands

section Section I|43 pages

Identities in the borderlands

chapter Chapter 2|14 pages

Queering spaces and borders

Resignifying a third space in Angelina Maccarone’s Fremde Haut (Unveiled) (2005) and Sébastien Lifshitz’s Wild Side (2004)

chapter Chapter 3|14 pages

Celebrating one’s natural tendencies

Essex Hemphill’s ‘borderland’ in Ceremonies

chapter Chapter 4|13 pages

Bordering life

South African necropolitics and LGBTI migrants

section Section II|31 pages

Travelling through borderlands

chapter Chapter 5|15 pages

(Re)training the Western eye

European equalities research in transnational feminist perspective

chapter Chapter 6|14 pages

Bordered imaginations

The politics of reading and receptions of ‘third world’ women’s literary texts in transnational spheres

section Section III|97 pages

Living in the borderlands

chapter Chapter 7|13 pages

Female (ex)-combatants in Colombia

Inhabiting ideological, geographic, and embodied borderlands

chapter Chapter 8|19 pages

Borderlands of (in)security

The subject position of ethnic minority women in Myanmar

chapter Chapter 9|16 pages

Navigating the borderlands

Adult survivors’ experiences of child sexual exploitation

chapter Chapter 10|16 pages

Living on the borders

Women, Haiti, and the restavèk system of child slavery

chapter Chapter 11|12 pages

Wives as doorways of citizenship

Indo-Bangladesh enclaves and the repositioning of gender relations

section Section IV|32 pages

Arriving home

chapter Chapter 13|17 pages

A place to call “home”

Home and belonging amongst lesbians and feminists in Greece

chapter Chapter 14|13 pages

Homeplaces