1st Edition
Gender, Sexuality and Identities of the Borderlands Queering the Margins
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.
1. Framing the Margins: Gender, Sexuality and Identities of the Borderlands
Suzanne Clisby
Section I: Identities in the Borderlands
2. Queering Spaces and Borders Resignifying a Third Space in Angelina Maccarone’s Fremde Haut (Unveiled) (2005) and Sébastien Lifshitz’s Wild Side (2004)
Asuncion Aragon
3. Celebrating One’s Natural Tendencies: Essex Hemphill’s ‘Borderland’ in ‘Ceremonies’
Emilio Amideo
4. Bordering Life: South African Necropolitics and LGBTI Migrants
Matthew Beetar
Section II: Travelling Through Borderlands
5. (Re)Training the Western Eye: European Equalities Research in Transnational Feminist Perspective
Athena-Maria Enderstein
6. Bordered Imaginations: The Politics of Reading and Receptions of ‘Third World’ Women’s Literary Texts in Transnational Spheres
Asma Abdi
Section III: Living in the Borderlands
7. Female (ex)-Combatants in Colombia: Inhabiting Ideological, Geographic and Embodied Borderlands
Yoana F. Nieto Valdivieso
8. Borderlands of (In)Security: The Subject Position of Ethnic Minority Women in Myanmar
Elena Di Padova
9. Navigating the Borderlands: Adult Survivors’ Experiences of Child Sexual Exploitation
Theresa Redmond
10. Living on the Borders: Women, Haiti and the Restavèk System of Child Slavery
Fiona de Hoog Cius
11. Wives as Doorways of Citizenship: Indo-Bangladesh Enclaves and the Repositioning of Gender Relations
Arpita Chakraborty
12. Women Queering the Margins of Male Space? Female Construction Workers as ‘Border Bodies’ in Bangladesh
Tanzina Choudhury and Suzanne Clisby
Section IV: Arriving Home
13. A Place to Call "Home": Home and Belonging amongst Lesbians and Feminists in Greece
Diana Manesi
14. Homeplaces
Kathleen Lennon
Biography
Suzanne Clisby is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on gender, anthropology, and development in both UK and international contexts. Recent publications include Gendering Women: Identity and Mental Wellbeing Through the Lifecourse (2016).
