The Sexual Politics of Border Control

Billy Holzberg, Anouk Madörin, Michelle Pfeifer, Billy Holzberg, Anouk Madörin, Michelle Pfeifer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000547856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

The Sexual Politics of Border Control conceptualises sexuality as a method of bordering and uncovers how sexuality operates as a key site for the containment, capture and regulation of movement. By bringing together queer scholarship on borders and migration with the rich archive of feminist, Black, Indigenous and critical border perspectives, it highlights how the heteronormativity of the border intersects with the larger dynamics of racial capitalism, imperialism and settler colonialism; reproductive inequalities; and the containment of contagion, disease and virality.

Transnational in focus, this book includes contributions from and about different geopolitical contexts including histories of HIV in Turkey; the politics of reproduction in Palestine/Israel; settler colonialism and anti-Blackness in the United States; the sexual geographies of the Balkan and Southern Europe; the intimate politics of marriage migration between Vietnam and Canada; and sex work in Australia, the United States, France and New Zealand. This collection constitutes a key intervention in the study of border and migration that highlights the crucial role that sexual politics play in the reproduction and contestation of national border regimes.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

The sexual politics of border control: an introduction

Billy Holzberg

, Anouk Madörin and Michelle Pfeifer

Abstract

In this introductory article to the special issue, we ask what role sexuality plays in the reproduction and contestation of border regimes and think sexuality towards its various entanglements with border control. As borders have been understood as a method for reproducing racialized distinctions, we argue that sexuality is also a method of bordering and illustrate how sexuality works as a key strategy for the capture, containment and regulation of mobility and movement. Taking a transnational approach, we bring together queer scholarship on borders and migration with the rich archive of feminist, Black, Indigenous and critical border perspectives to suggest that these strategies need to be understood in close relation to the (I) intersecting dynamics of colonial histories of racialization, (II) national regimes of reproductive control and (III) the containment of contagion, disease and sexual deviance.

Thinking sexuality and borders

This special issue emerges out of a political moment in which we are witnessing the intensification of racialized border regimes and the surge of sexual and gendered nationalisms across the globe. This situation is exemplified, and further augmented, by the global circulation of SARS-CoV-2 and the intensification of border protections that rely on the household, the heteronormative nuclear family and gendered divisions of labour to safeguard the national body from contagion (Grewal et al. 2020). States tackle the pandemic through national frameworks despite warnings from the World Health Organization (2020) that generalized border controls do little to control the virus and might even accelerate its spread. This reaction highlights how the intensification of border regimes and racialised systems of segregation define our political present in which national protectionism has emerged as the preeminent strategy for dealing with wider economic, political and environmental destitution.

In 1984, Gayle Rubin (2013, 100) wrote that “it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality.” In “Thinking Sex,” Rubin shows that while for some sexuality may seem an unimportant topic, “a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear annihilation,” the abjection of sexual behaviours, discourses and subjectivities deemed abnormal and unhealthy is more than collateral for political projects. It is, rather often, its fundamental logic and ultimate objective. While Rubin’s focus lies on the stratification of sexuality and the ways in which erotic life is renegotiated into sex laws and mores, her insistence to recognize the centrality of sex to wider politics also is of value today as we see the corroboration of border regimes through sexual politics across a range of geopolitical contexts marked by racial capitalism and the legacies of colonialism.

Taking cue from Rubin, in this special issue we think sexuality towards its various entanglements with contemporary border regimes. We ask what role sexuality plays in the (re-)production and contestation of border regimes and scrutinize the sexual politics of border control from a transnational perspective. Rather than grounding our questions on identities, disciplines or particular geographies, we hone in on border and sexuality as analytics and conceptualize sexuality as a central frame through which cross-border movements are captured, framed and contained. In doing so, we build upon the work of Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1999) who parsed out the relationship between heteronormativity and the stretching of the border into various borderlands, subjectivities and temporalities. For Anzaldúa, sexual identities, behaviours and discourses are not given but shaped within borderlands; thereby constituting the border not as a simple divide but a cultural terrain that disciplines and produces the queer, the troublesome and the confines of the normative. Queer scholarship on migration and borders has further highlighted the centrality of sexuality in migration and border regimes (Manalansan IV 2006; Luibhéid 2008; Lewis and Naples 2014). Building upon those insights, this special issue brings together queer scholarship on borders and migration with the rich archive of feminist, Black, Indigenous and critical border perspectives that highlight how the heteronormativity of the border intersects with the larger dynamics of racial capitalism, imperialism and settler colonialism, reproductive inequalities and the containment of contagion, disease and virality.

This special issue illustrates that sexuality undergirds the formation of national boundaries, citizenship and geopolitical borders in ways that secure racial hierarchies, capital accumulation and Western hegemonies. Borders have been understood as a method for reproducing racialized distinctions of belonging, humanity, deservingness, labour, life and death (Tadiar 2008; Ticktin 2008; Neilson and Mezzadra 2013; Genova 2017; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2019). We argue that sexuality is also a method of bordering. By this, we mean that the investment in the regulation and control of sexuality is a key strategy for the violent capture, containment and regulation of mobility and movement – and posit that this constitutive connection between bordering and sexuality demands more scholarly and political attention. Simultaneously, the border becomes understood, organized and contested through sexuality and sexual discourse. As such, our intervention sheds light on the centrality of intimacy and desire in the struggle against state violence. It is not least the desire for different sexual futures (Muñoz 2009; Rodriguez 2014) that can shape our political horizons today.

A transnational conversation

The special issue emerges out of the “Sexuality and Borders Symposium” convened in the spring of 2019 at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Our goal was to bring together researchers from a wide array of disciplines and fields under the signs of sexuality and borders. We wanted to achieve this by leaving the terrain conceptually open to see what connections would be made in response to our call. The high volume of incisive submissions exceeded our expectations and the generative discussions at the conference took us from questions of sex work and borders, marriage migration, assistive reproduction technologies and queer asylum to debates around sexual border panics, contagion, anti-Blackness, settler colonialism and transnational kinship. This special issue brings together some of the contributions from the conference to continue these discussions beyond the spatial and temporal limits of the original conference.

There are many ways to sketch the trajectory of this project. Not least important was the sociality that brought the three of us, co-editors of this issue, together and the conversations that shaped this project. The ties of our queer friendship were always interwoven with knowledge production and our political commitments. In this way, the special issue is also an expression of the desire for collaboration against the individuation of research and writing and the necessity to think, write and argue together for more just futures. Working on the cultural politics of border control and the coloniality of surveillance technologies in Germany and Europe, all three of us encountered sexuality as a crucial parameter in our own work. From the moral panics around racialised “sex offenders” constructed as a threat to the nation that emerged after New Year’s Eve in Cologne in 2015 (Holzberg and Raghavan 2020) to the colonial and slavocratic gaze of surveillance technologies (Madörin 2020) and the queer politics of refugee hunger strikes (Pfeifer 2018), sexuality figured as a prominent, if not always clearly articulated, force in the way borders are secured and contested in our own research context of German nationalism and the EUropean border regime.

A central aim of the conference and this special issue is to connect these insights and conversations to other geopolitical contexts and epistemological locations. Thinking sexuality and borders transnationally, this special issue starts with but extends beyond the EUropean context and includes contributions from and about different locales including histories of HIV in Turkey, the politics of reproduction in Palestine/Israel, settler colonialism and anti-Blackness in the United States, the sexual geographies of the Balkan and Southern Europe, the intimate politics of marriage migration between Vietnam and Canada and sex work in Australia, France, New Zealand and the United States. We acknowledge that this approach, while allowing for thinking sexuality transnationally and across a number of geopolitical contexts, also risks imposing a Eurocentric framework on other locales. Practicing a feminist politics of location remains in constructive tension with articulating a transnational conceptual language of sexuality and borders throughout this special issue.

Bringing different sites and locales together, this special issue is dedicated to developing a refined vocabulary for analysing the entanglement of sexual and border politics. Borrowing from transnational sexuality studies, we focus on the enactment and circulation of sexual discourses, practices and subjectivities in and across national contexts and analyse sexuality as a key site for the enactment of global hegemonies and national politics (Grewal and Kaplan 2001; Kim-Puri 2005; Hemmings 2007; Tudor 2017). As Alyosxa Tudor (2017, 20) reminds us, a transnational approach to the study of sexuality also has to focus on “analysing privilegings, contradictions and ambivalences in gendering, racialising and nationalising ascriptions of (non)belonging”. The special issue takes the histories of European colonialism, imperialism and racial capitalism as a starting point to trace and understand the manifold geopolitical inscriptions of national borders through registers of the sexual. Based on the contributions for this issue as well as the insights derived from the conference, we suggest that these inscriptions are most evident and need to be understood in close relation to the (I) intersecting dynamics of colonial histories of racialization, (II) national regimes of reproductive control and (III) the containment of contagion, disease and sexual deviance.

Colonial histories of racialization

What emerges centrally from our conference and the contributions to this special issue is that the sexual politics of border cont...