ABSTRACT
This chapter studies testimonies of women who have been trafficked and engaged in labour migration across India and Bangladesh borders and the U.S.–Latin American borders to validate bordered subjectivity as a tool to critique the abrasive functioning of the present-day nation-state and its system of surveillance. The narratives of these women insistently posit borders as ambiguous, as spaces where identities are constantly negotiated rather than as a strict divide controlled by militarization and neo-liberal state apparatus. Remarkably a sense of bifurcated consciousness surfaces in the simultaneity of their experiences, in their modes of re-inflecting identity, personal as well as social. The chapter explores the nature of this gendered subjectivity and what implication it holds when pitted against the official discourse of the nation-state.
