Gender, Sexuality and Identities of the Borderlands

Queering the Margins

Suzanne Clisby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367519551
• eBook ISBN: 9780429877476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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 1
Framing the margins

Gender, sexuality, and identities of the borderlands

Suzanne Clisby

Introduction

This chapter provides a frame for the collection, a collection that represents a truly international collaboration, bringing together researchers, academics, and activists from across the world to interrogate cutting edge intersections of ‘transgressive’ gender, sexualities, and identities in the margins and across borderlands. 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. As Nail (2016) notes, societies and states are themselves the products of bordering, and, he argues, we need to bring a critical liminology to analyses of contemporary border politics. This can be especially prescient in the context of what Jones (2016) observes is a world which is increasingly focused on limiting free movement of people. It is not without irony, that we might note the vast amounts of resources that are being spent on border security to control and restrict human migration at a time when, in other contexts, we valorise our increasing global interconnectedness.

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 they live. For Agier (2016), people inhabiting these border conditions have become a new kind of subject, the border dweller, some of whom might be perceived as living in a cosmopolitan condition. However, many, if not most, people – and likely the majority of research participants in this volume – who occupy marginal tropes would be unlikely to feel they have the privileged status or opportunities accorded to cosmopolitan subjects. Nevertheless, as Keating (2005, p. 2) has suggested, this ‘perspective from the cracks’ can make possible the creation of ‘holistic, relational theories and tactics’ that can enable us ‘to reconceive or in other ways transform the various worlds’ we inhabit.

Throughout this volume authors apply theoretical frameworks of intersectionality, ‘margin’ and ‘borderlands’ as articulated perhaps most notably by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1994, 2019), bell hooks (1984, 1990, 1994) and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987). Kimberlé Crenshaw initially developed the concept of intersectionality in the late 1980s but her analyses came together perhaps most notably, at least initially, in Mapping the Margins in 1994. For Crenshaw, intersectionality is a vital, a critical lens through which to understand and articulate where power emerges, collides, and intersects. The key point of intersectional analyses is that our identities are not separate and cannot be understood as anything but interconnected and intersecting. Our genders, sexualities, abilities, ‘race’ and ethnicities and so on are not independent of our other multiple positionalities and points in our life-course and as such, they cannot be independently experienced or interrogated.

We understand marginality in line with hooks, for whom marginality does not simply represent a ‘site of deprivation’ but simultaneously a ‘site of radical possibility, a space for resistance’ that ‘offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds’ (hooks, 1990, p. 341). For Anzaldúa (1987) the marginal standpoints of Latino Americans – of herself as lesbian, feminist, Chicana, and female living in the US – fostered a new consciousness, one she called the ‘new mestiza’. This ‘new mestiza’ was able to develop a perspective unique to people inhabiting multiple and often conflicting worlds and cultures, watching the world from the ‘borderlands’. This ‘border’ consciousness, she argued, is characterised by a tolerance for ambiguity, drawing strength from the ability to see things from multiple perspectives.

Thus, by focusing on lives lived in and of the margins, this collection brings a critical insight into global human experiences in the 21st century. Combining interdisciplinary expertise with original research we consider ‘queering spaces’ in diverse contexts. Whether thinking through literary and cultural borderlands or exploring postcolonial feminist perspectives on identity, movement and migration, each chapter brings a critical, contemporary and ‘queer’ analysis of liminal lives within and between socio-cultural borders. Following in the eminent footsteps of Judith Butler (see, for example, 1990, 1993, 1997, 2004a, 2004b) here we understand ‘queering’ as praxis, both a practice and a method that enables us to challenge and subvert normative understandings and representations of gender, sexualities, and identities.

Through ‘queering’ the scene, by looking at what is happening at the borders, for those people who inhabit the margins and edges of our social worlds, we are better able to expose systems of oppression in global contexts and destabilise identity politics. Queering our vision ‘opens up a theoretical space to explain how something that may, at one point, be unrecognizable can become woven into communal understanding’ (Lennon and Alsop, 2020, p. 160). Over the past couple of decades queer theory has broadened its gaze, from its initial focus on non-normative sexuality to a more encompassing analytical destabilisation and subversion of all categories of identity (Lennon and Alsop, 2020, p. 161). In line with Kath Browne (2006, pp. 885–886) we locate queer in the ‘radical requirement to question normativities and orthodoxies, in part by rendering categories of sexualities, genders and spaces fluid’. Queer is, then, more than a shorthand for sexual dissidence, it demands that we recognise more than the fluidity of identities, rather, as Elder (1999, p. 89 cited in Browne, 2006, p. 886) argues queer seeks to ‘reveal the inconsistencies of social boundaries and their discourse’.

As we talk about queering the margins, we also consider ‘transgression’ and here we think about the transgressive as ‘symbolic inversions’ that serve to ‘highlight contradictions in cultural codes’ (Donnan and Magowan, 2009, p. 6). However, we are minded to remember that, as Bataille (1986) has argued, transgression is not only about breaking the normative rules of play, but also, conversely, about their completion. From this perspective we can see that every rule contains the possibility of violation, a counteract to the norm itself, and as such, the act of transgressing those rules also serves to illustrate and even substantiate their existence.

Whether through explorations of necropolitics in South Africa, the marginal lives of restavék children living in slavery in Haiti, female guerrillas destabilizing normative femininity in Colombia, female construction workers as ‘border bodies’ queering male space in Bangladesh, or feminist lesbian women challenging imaginings of home in Athens, each chapter in this volume provides the reader with sensitive and nuanced insights into human experiences across the world. We hope through this collection we spark more conversations that enable people to articulate and push their thinking about what it means to be human, to live differently, to challenge norms and expose the prejudices and artifices of society. Moreover, we hope reading these chapters facilitates the creation of some space for people to themselves occupy those margins and transgress the multiple identity borders that we face in our gendered lives.

Volume structure and chapter summaries

Combining international expertise from transnational feminisms, literary studies, sociology, anthropology, queer, and gender analyses the volume takes the reader on a journey through borderlands in, broadly, four different kinds of ways. In Chapters 2–4, we explore identities in the borderlands, considering people’s lived experiences of their marginalised sexuality, ethnicity, or citizenship. In Chapters 5 and 6 we consider processes and experiences of travelling through epistemic and material borderlands, focusing on identity, gender, and nationhood. Here we particularly explore such ‘border’ experiences epistemologically, linguistically, culturally, and emotionally, challenging nationalisms, and drawing on postcolonial transnational feminism. Chapters 7 through 13 are broadly themed around living in and inhabiting socio-cultural and political borderlands as we take a voyage through Colombia, Haiti, Britain, India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. In the final section, Chapters 13 and 14 bring the reader ‘home’, considering what home means and for whom in our often-idealised imaginaries.

The first part of the volume, identities in the borderlands, begins with Asuncion Aragon’s exploration of the ways through which non-heteronormative people challenge sexual geographies by resignifying the taken for granted concept of a heterosexual space. Through her queer cinematic analysis of two European films, Angelina Maccarone’s Fremde Haut (Unveiled) (2005) and Sébastien Lifshitz’s Wild Side (2004), Aragon’s concern is that much of the literature written on the analysis of queer geographies focuses mainly on white lesbian and gay people, and has a tendency to overlook the lives and unliveable spaces of non-white or transgender people. As she argues, an analysis of the disruption of heterosexual space must also consider how class, gender and race operate simultaneously to exclude the discourses of those living on the borders and margins of power.

Her chapter explores how the ‘reterritorialisation and occupation of hegemonic space’ questions the fixed and uncontested geography of normativity. As Aragon states, there has hitherto been a paucity of analyses of migration that consider sexual identities and dimensions of migrant lives and loves, and where sexuality is mentioned, there is a tendency towards an assumption of heterosexuality. She thus welcomes the recent emergence of new methodological approaches and critical analysis on the sexualities of diasporic subjects that have broadened our understandings of migration. Queer migration studies provides ‘a simultaneous critique of heterosexuality and the national form while exploding the binary between nation and diaspora, heterosexuality and homosexuality, origin and copy’ (Gopinath, 2005, p. 11, cited in Aragon, chapter 2 of this volume). An intersectional analysis of migration and sexualities thus reveals both that not all forms of spatial mobility are equally accepted and citizenship is normative and not universally endowed. As she articulates, if we follow this heteronormative framework to its logical conclusion we find that the right to space is ‘even more unavailable to queer citizens who are de jure citizens of the nation-state but who do not adhere to heteronormative laws’. Ultimately, Aragon concludes that in similar ways as ‘the queer body subverts the naturalised heteronormative space and the binary of gender borders, so the migrant body reconfigures the concept of citizenship and national borders’.

In Chapter 3, Emilio Amideo focuses on the ways in which African American poet and gay rights activist, Essex Hemphill, inhabited in both his life and career, a figurative borderland. As Amideo argues, being ‘Black and gay in a white supremacist heteronormative society, then affected by AIDS, Hemphill experienced on his own skin the pathologising discourse’, one that not only revolved around his ill-health, ‘but that also developed historically around black and gay bodies’. For Amideo, Essex Hemphill occupied multiple borderlands, symbolically disrupting the dichotomies of life and death, present and future, private and public. Hemphill, as Amideo argues, ‘queers heteronormative institutional practices’ and in so doing reveals to us an ‘alternative (re)productive, life-creating potential of queer desire’, a discourse that challenges attempts to invalidate queer desire by ‘representing it only as tending toward self-annihilation’.

In chapter 4 Matthew Beetar’s identities in and of the borderlands are those of LGBTQI migrants in South Africa. Focusing on intersections of sexuality and national prejudices, Beetar draws on historical and contemporary politics, attitudes, and structures to understand everyday life for LGBTQI African migrants living in South Africa. His research with beyond-heterosexual migrants highlights both the structural and social prejudices experienced by these ‘threatening’ non-normative marginalised bodies. LGBTI migrants in South Africa who occupy an epistemic state-sanctioned ‘state of living death’ fundamentally challenge the national imaginary of a reliance on the state. As Beetar argues, ‘their experiences speak to physical, actual, lived life beyond and across borders of sexuality and geography’. Through ‘their everyday navigation of life, as both queers and migrants’, we are able to see how these peoples’ lives are simultaneously local and transcontinental. Beetar concludes by asserting that ‘the spaces created by the exclusionary effects of nationalism’ also creates a ‘possibility for actively forging transcontinental life’.

The second theme of the volume considers how we might travel through borderlands. It begins with Chapter 5, which invites us on a journey through epistemic borders of knowledge. Here Athena-Maria Enderstein brings a transnational feminist perspective to European equalities discourse. Through her research with gender equality trainers working across Europe, Enderstein interrogates hegemonic narratives of Western feminism and calls for a transnational feminism that both privileges relational understandings of systems of power and recognises reciprocity between local and global in knowledge building. In her discussion of shifting positionalities, dis/locations and cultural borders navigated by these trainers, she sees epistemic hierarchies of Eurocentric knowledge being fragmented through a foregrounding of relationality within diversity. The stories of the trainers reveal the ways through which dominant knowledges can be challenged and reformulated through transnational exchange. Enderstein advocates for ‘more inclusive and critical meta-geographies of gender expertise, which facilitate reflexivity and the recognition of the paradoxes of equality work’. Through the application of a transnational feminist lens to European equality work she has been able to illustrate the significance of reciprocity and exchange and ‘how individual trajectories and actions relate to, and are constitutive of, a global circulation of gender knowledge’.

For Asma Abdi the focus of her borderland journey is on the politics of reading and reception of ‘third world’ women’s literary texts in transnational spheres. In Chapter 6 she argues that postcolonial, transnational, black, and intersectional feminists have brought to public consciousness our need to pay more attention to the voices of marginalised or ‘othered’ women writers. The resultant growth in inclusion of women...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Framing the margins: gender, sexuality, and identities of the borderlands
• SECTION I Identities in the borderlands
• SECTION II Travelling through borderlands
• SECTION III Living in the borderlands
• SECTION IV Arriving home
• Index