ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the structural relationship between borders and intimacy by examining how border violence is enacted, obscured and legitimated through normative intimacy and appeals to ‘family’, as a socio-sexual and racialised order. In doing so, it stresses the need to pay attention to both the colonial histories that underpin the contemporary policing of intimacy through border regimes, and treat colonialism as more than a sum of historical experiences or legacies of representation; instead as a material structure which continues to produce racialised violence, dispossession and socio-economic inequality. To do this, the chapter engages material analytics of race to place the regulation of interracialised intimacy as part of wider material forces of violence and inequality that sustain a racialised (global) socio-economic order. It explores histories of bordering across the British Empire into the present day, to demonstrate how the relationship between borders and intimacy (as ‘family’) should be read as part of broader patterns of ‘colonial dispossession’.
