The six contributions to this forum on feminist border theory offer different perspectives on the relations between gender, borders, power, identity, difference and solidarity. The authors use feminist theory to illustrate and analyze gendered border politics, violent border struggles, and practices of bordering at and beyond national borders. They illustrate their arguments using examples from the US-Mexican border and Italian borders, referring to domestic workers’ movements, racist politics of division and family separations. Furthermore, they show as well how bordered identities, Neplanta activism and coalitions across differences in border(land) spaces can lead to new forms of solidarity, identity and resistance.
The UniGR-Center for Border Studies Border Textures working group was set up in 2015 to pursue and further develop the cultural orientation of Border Studies in the Greater Region. This research orientation focuses on the symbolic-social dimension of borders, which it addresses from both high and popular cultural angles and everyday cultural angles. To do this the working group has developed the Border Textures approach, which, as a methodology and heuristic, addresses the practises and discourses around borders with their actors, media, materialisations, effects, places and the complex interactions between them. The approach forms an instrument for analysis and refection that helps to understand the social and cultural workings and mechanisms of border (de)stabilisation.
There is significant renewed interest for borders. Empirical observation has shown that border stabilisations and destabilisations are multifaceted and are therefore increasingly perceived as complex processes. With this publication project, the 20 authors critically and productively address the concept of “border textures” in order to produce an analysis and reflection instrument likely to strengthen the complex research on borders from all angles.
One cannot consider the border, the primary focus of border studies, as a mere limit or link; it should be considered more in depth and analysed in the light of its ontological multidimensionality. To do this, Christophe Sohn uses the assemblage concept inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and applies it to the border, which allows one to understand its multiple and changing character, its varied meanings as well as the practices and power relationships pertaining to borders.
Borders introduce a division into the world. According to the author, this definition has four consequences for a theory of the border: (1) the border is in between, (2) the border is in motion, (3) the border is a process of circulation, (4) the border is not reducible to space. Based on these four consequences he outlines a methodology, or a « critical limology » as he phrases it.
Border as Method claims that contemporary globalization has not led to the diminution of borders but to their proliferation, linking this proliferation of borders with the intensification of competition within global labor markets. Focusing on border struggles across various geographical scales, and combining theory with a number of case studies drawn from various parts of the world, the authors approach the border not only as a research object but also as an epistemic framework, which enables new perspectives on the practices of border-making and the maintenance of borders as essential tools for the production of labor power as a commodity.
