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The Introduction to the collection of studies in Borders of Desire outlines and theorises the book’s approach to borders as being productive of desire. Instead of focusing on the ways in which borders obstruct, the volume asks what desires, particularly those around gender and sexuality, are produced by the very presence of borders. The Introduction presents the book’s performative approach, which emphasises not what borders are, but what borders do – and in this case, what desires they produce. It further introduces the agentic approach to desire drawing on Michel Foucault’s and Judith Butler’s theorisations of subjectivation, desire and resistance. The Introduction then explores the structuring themes of the volume’s chapters, highlighting aspects of fantasy, personal escape and transformation related to border-crossing; ethnosexualised borders which create desires for exoticised others; and political desires for certain pasts and futures marked by borders that may also provoke a desire to resist normative orders of gender and sexuality associated with border-related differences. The Introduction highlights the ways in which the chapters speak to these themes and to each other, showing how borders can trigger new desires expressed as aspirations, resentment, actions or movements. In laying out this approach, the Introduction also sets this book apart from most other studies that take borders for granted and desire as something that precedes the presence of a border. Instead, the Introduction stresses how gendered and sexualised desires are built through various configurations of imagination and bordering practices through which individuals are constantly called to be desiring subjects.
This chapter investigates how desire is relevant for our understanding of transnational prostitution. The context is migration for and through prostitution across what used to be the Nordic–Soviet divide, across borders which during the last decades have changed their meaning and materiality profoundly. The chapter investigates the desires attached to the border, building on research among women from Eastern and Southeastern Europe who in the mid-2000s travelled back and forth between Norway, their country of origin and other countries on a regular basis, engaging in commercial sex in some or all of these places. The research demonstrates that desire for a different life than what could be realised by only ‘staying at home’ made mobility attractive and that the ethnosexual desire of Nordic men made it possible for the women to attain what they desired. In this scenario, what lies beyond the border is imbued with value and desirable objects for both sellers and buyers of sex, and the existence of the border plays a part in this. While desire is a feeling experienced on a deeply personal level, the desire for things and experiences that can only be accessed elsewhere, and the possibility of having one’s desires met, speaks to geopolitical, cultural and economic relations and changes. Borders are not only an organising principle, but also something that gains meaning and materiality through people’s desires and how they act upon them.
This chapter examines the ways in which women who have migrated from post-socialist countries to Italy and Finland narrate their reasons for migrating. Drawing on two different ethnographic research projects conducted in two different settings, the chapter analyses how migration can be a strategy for escaping certain gender relations or an attempt to take full advantage of other configurations of them. We explore the different dimensions of desire by looking at the continuum from sex to love as ways to ensure a better future and how this continuum sits in the post-socialist gender orders and their renegotiation in these migratory contexts. Moreover, we argue that mainstream migration literature needs to reconsider the idea of the migrant as an economically rational individual by taking into account the importance of desire as a driver of migration and as a key force which shapes gendered migratory mobilities.
This chapter examines the productive aspect of borders in the realm of the border hotel-casinos and beauty consumption practices in the Balkan region. For the regular gamers visiting the casinos on the Macedonian side of the border, the gaming universe opens up a possibility for trespassing on the rigid class boundaries that lock people into seemingly fixed subject positions determined by their rural background in northern Greece. Financial superiority entitles gamers to demand special treatment by the hotel-casino employees. Thus the desire to gamble becomes more than an addiction: it is an escape from the everyday, as crossing a border to gamble involves a creation of another reality and allowing the gamers to create their new selves. For the urban consumers from Thessaloniki, the border also offers the possibility of maintaining beauty practices such as cosmetic and hair-dressing services that are too expensive and unaffordable in Greece. The proximity of the border and the possibility to visit beauty parlours in Gevgelija enables these women to reinstate their sense of femininity and middle-class position; crossing the border makes them feel like women, which raises the question of the effect of the border on the notion of gender. Arguably, the crossing of a border affects the way desires intersect with other consumer aspects such as acquiring the luxury, comfort or status markers necessary for maintaining certain ethnically and class-marked modes of being a `real` woman.
In 2004, the remains of two First World War US soldiers from France were delivered to the US Government for identification and burial. One set of remains was identified and buried, and the other went into a cold-case status. In 2019, the second individual was identified using multiple lines of evidence. The possible individuals that could be associated with the remains were reduced based on material evidence recovered with the remains and the spatiotemporal historical context of the remains. The First World War personnel records then offered sufficient biometric criteria to narrow the possible individuals associated with the second recovered individual to one person, Pfc. Charles McAllister. A family reference DNA sample from a direct matrilineal descendant of the individual added statistical weight to the identification, although the mtDNA was not a decisive or necessary factor in the identification. Due to bureaucratic reasons, the legal identification of Pfc. Charles McAllister is still pending.
The extremely high death rates in northern Italy during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic called for exceptional rules and suspension of funeral practices and burial rites. Additionally, forms of collective burial, typical of a wartime scenario, and mechanical methods and timing were reintroduced into the handling of corpses. Although several academic studies have highlighted how the absence of funeral ceremonies and ‘dignified burials’ has caused prolonged and deep suffering for the mourners and for many of the caregivers and health workers, few have so far focused on funeral workers. This article focuses on the intimate, emotional and ethical experiences of a group of funeral workers in northern Italy who handled COVID corpses and had to take the place of the mourners at the time of burial. Through an anthropological analysis of their oral memories, this work attempts to analyse their expressions of discomfort, frustration, fear and suffering.
Since the sixteenth century, artistic anatomy – a branch of medical science subordinated to the Fine Arts – has understood itself as a comparative investigation halfway between forensic dissection and the analysis of classical art and live bodies. Its teaching was first instituted in Italy by the 1802 curriculum of the national Fine Arts academies, but underwent a drastic transformation at the turn of the century, as the rise of photography brought about both a new aesthetics of vision and an increase in the precision of iconographic documentation. In this article I will attempt to provide a history of the teaching of this discipline at the close of the nineteenth century within the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, with a focus on its ties to contemporary French practices. Drawing on archival materials including lesson plans, letters and notes from the classes of the three medical doctors who subsequently held the chair (Gaetano Strambio, Alessandro Lanzillotti-Buonsanti and Carlo Biaggi), I will argue that the deep connections between their teaching of the discipline and their work at the city hospital reveal a hybrid approach, with the modern drive towards live-body study unable to wholly supplant the central role still granted to corpses in the grammar of the visual arts.
Osteological collections are key sources of information in providing crucial insight into the lifestyles of past populations. In this article, we conduct an osteobiographical assessment of the human remains of fourteen Selk'nam individuals, which are now housed in the Department of Anthropology, Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria. The aim is to bring these individuals closer to their communities of origin by using non-invasive methods aimed at rebuilding their biological profiles (i.e., age-at-death, biological sex and health status), adding to these with results from provenance research. This way, the human remains were assigned a new identity closer to their original one, through a process that we call ‘re-individualisation’. This is especially significant since it must be assumed that the individuals were exhumed against their cultural belief system. We conclude that building strong and long-lasting collaborations between Indigenous representatives and biological anthropologists has a pivotal role in research for reappraising Indigenous history.