Feminism and/in Critical Border Studies

The aim of the session is to explore current research within feminist critical border studies and to discuss the possible potentials and challenges that such research entails for both gender studies and critical border studies more widely.

Feminist debates on intersectionality and on the exclusions or inclusions produced by our theoretical and methodological choices are an integral part of the field of gender studies. Here, we want to put forward how a critical attention to borders, nationhood, and migration control can contribute to such a challenge of taken for granted boundaries in gender studies, not least the boundaries of study design and analytical frameworks, for example by not taking national contexts, borders and citizenship for granted. Attending to borders and bordering processes is thus a potential way of challenging implicit methodological nationalism within gender studies.

Queer, feminist and intersectional perspectives are also central to the field of critical border studies in several ways. Critical exploration and deconstruction of dichotomies such as private/political, men/women, formal/informal, citizen/non-citizen are key to thinking against and across borders.

Feminist theoretical perspectives contribute to articulate the political in those phenomena that are legitimised through naturalisation and depoliticisation – in this case phenomena like borders, migration control and deportation. Understandings of social justice movements as key locations for knowledge production are also important for the study of bordering processes.

There is thus a range of ways in which these fields and perspectives contribute to and develop each other and in this session we welcome papers based on research that broadly speaking relates to the above. More specifically, we invite contributions addressing approaches and themes such as (but of course not limited to):

borders as political processes, as everyday processes and as sites of resistance and contestations
border control, migration policy and everyday forms of bordering
the ways in which bordering takes place within welfare institutions, the labour market and education
migration rights movements and migrants’ rights-claims
race, gender and sexuality as constituted through bordering processes
queer and trans epistemological approaches to borders
border controls as part of nationalist and racist political projects
challenges of bordering categorisations, such as citizen/non-citizen; refugee/migrant, etc.

Disa Helander1 and Maja Sager2

1Doktorand, Doktorand, Umeå Centrum För Genusstudier, Umeå Universitet

2Phd, Lektor, Genusvetenskapliga Institutionen, Lunds Universitet