Framing the margins

This introductory chapter provides a framing for the following fascinating interdisciplinary narratives on how we understand, cross, challenge and inhabit the social, cultural, political, and epistemic borders and margins that we encounter. Drawing most notably on the ground breaking legacy of Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera, bell hooks’ (1981, 1984, 1990, 1994) black feminist theory and ‘Outlaw Culture’, and the acknowledged ‘queen of queer’, Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993, 1997, 2004a, 2004b) substantial body of work that has helped us to ‘queer’ our ways of seeing, ‘Gender, sexuality and identities of borderlands: queering the margins’ ¹ brings a gender analysis to current ‘transgressive’, ‘border’ and ‘queer’ thinking. The chapters throughout this volume apply an intersectional feminist lens to understandings of borderlands, liminality and lives lived at the margins of socio-cultural and sexual normativities. Bringing together new and contemporary research from across diverse global contexts the chapters in this volume explore the lived experiences of what Anzaldúa might have called ‘threshold people’, people who live among and in-between different worlds. While it is often challenging, difficult, and even dangerous to inhabit 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. Garnering these ‘perspective from the cracks’ can make possible the creation of ‘holistic, relational theories and tactics’ which can enable us ‘to reconceive or in other ways transform the various worlds’ we inhabit (Keating, 2005, p. 2). By focusing on lives lived in and of the margins, this collection brings us critical insights into diverse global human experiences in the 21st century.