ABSTRACT
Analytics of the margins Being at the margin means to be situated on the other side of a border, while someone else is on the ‘inside’ somewhere more towards the ‘centre’. Borders render the margins at the same time possible and visible, tangible and effective, embodied and felt. They are heterogeneous in their nature and forms but they bear the same message: one of expulsion enacted by multiple ‘centres’ to preserve their own authority and standing (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013; Sassen, 2014). To say that the practice of bordering – of delineating what is right and what is wrong, what is in and what is out – produces margins, means essentially to state that through bordering specific spaces and people are produced as well: whether of the Mediterranean frontier and the migrants with their boats; a maquiladora and the exploited workers on their factory line; a xenophobic politics on gender and the stigmatized body of the queer; definitions of what is to be mentally healthy, a clinic and its ‘mad’, and so on. Not that these people and spaces did not exist before the powerful oeuvre of border making. But it is only through that oeuvre, which usually comprises more than one border and more than one margin, that their representation as marginalized with the attendant struggles and unbalanced power relations become visible, possible, and take place.
