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- Author: Elissa Helms x
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Borders of Desire takes a novel approach to the study of borders: rather than seeing them only as obstacles to the fulfilment of human desires, this collection focuses on how borders can also be productive of desire. Based on long-term ethnographic engagement with sites along the eastern borders of Europe, particularly in the Baltics and the Balkans, the studies in this volume illuminate how gendered and sexualized desires are generated by the existence of borders and how they are imagined. The book takes a performative approach, emphasizing not what borders are, but what borders do – and in this case, what they produce. Borders are thus treated less as artefacts of desires and more as sources of desire: a border’s existence, which marks a difference between here and there, can trigger imaginations about what might be on the other side, creating new desires expressed as aspirations, resentments, and actions including physical movements across borders for pleasure or work, while also as enactments of political ideals or resistance. As the chapters show, sometimes these desires spring from orientalising imaginaries of the other, sometimes from economically inspired fantasies of a different life, and sometimes from ethnosexual projections or reimaginings of political pasts and futures. Taken as a whole, Borders of Desire offers new perspectives on the work borders do, as well as on the gendered and sexed lives of those in and from the eastern borders of Europe, and the persistent East/West symbolic divide that continues to permeate European political and social life.
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.