Queering Borders

In recent years, migration has moved to the forefront of national and global debates, intensifying discussions about borders, security, identity and citizenship. In this volume we ask how language and sexuality impact these discussions: how do sexuality and language contribute toward the construction and maintenance of varying scales of borders? How do sexuality and language figure in border crossings across time, space, embodied differences, and culture? The contributors to this volume, all anthropologists, demonstrate how anthropological theories, concepts and methods uniquely address the operations of sexuality and language in the making, unmaking and remaking of these borders. In this volume, terminology, discourse, language choice, and other forms of linguistic practice are at the forefront of research on transnational queer im/migrant populations, allowing us to better understand how language shapes and is shaped by queer peoples’ movements across borders. Originally published in Journal of Language and Sexuality Vol. 3:1 (2014).

"You will never know how it feels to have brown skin and a Mexican name. You will never know what it is like to watch your mother struggle with white words." In this collection of prose pieces, author and scholar Emma Pérez explores the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality. A Chicanx queer lesbian "who honors my mother and her plight within patriarchal institutions" that limit women's choices and opportunities, Pérez writes about issues-including sexual politics and power relations between Anglo and Hispanic men-that have impacted her Tejano family for generations. A historian by training, her work aims to decolonize the Southwest by uncovering voices from the past that validate multiple experiences.Essays reveal the influence of Gloria Anzaldúa's scholarship; recount the controversy surrounding artist Alma López's digital print, "Our Lady," in which the Virgin of Guadalupe appears in a provocative bikini; and evaluate interviews with 25 LGBTQ people in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez area to expose life on the border as a queer of color. This collection also includes short fiction and an epistolary love poem to the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or in this case, Sor Juanx. Bringing together the work of a noted Chicanx writer and academic, this volume reinforces the body of work by LGBTQ people of color dealing with racism and sexism, conquest and colonization, power and privilege, all with a particular emphasis on the Southwest borderlands.

“You will never know how it feels to have brown skin and a Mexican name. You will never know what it is like to watch your mother struggle with white words.” In this collection of prose pieces, author and scholar Emma Perez explores the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality. A Chicanx queer lesbian “who honors my mother and her plight within patriarchal institutions” that limit women’s choices and opportunities, Perez writes about issues—including sexual politics and power relations between Anglo and Hispanic men—that have impacted her Tejano family for generations. A historian by training, her work aims to decolonize the Southwest by uncovering voices from the past that validate multiple experiences. Essays reveal the influence of Gloria Anzaldua’s scholarship; recount the controversy surrounding artist Alma Lopez’s digital print, “Our Lady,” in which the Virgin of Guadalupe appears in a provocative bikini; and evaluate interviews with 25 LGBTQ people in the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez area to expose life on the border as a queer of color. This collection also includes short fiction and an epistolary love poem to the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, or in this case, Sor Juanx. Bringing together the work of a noted Chicanx writer and academic, this volume reinforces the body of work by LGBTQ people of color dealing with racism and sexism, conquest and colonization, power and privilege, all with a particular emphasis on the Southwest borderlands.

This book examines the current state of the field of mathematics pre-service teacher education through the theme of borders. Borders are ubiquitous; they can be used to define, classify, organize, make sense of, and/or group. There are many ways that the concept of a border illuminates the field of mathematics pre-service teacher education. Consequently, there are a multitude of responses to these borders: researchers and practitioners question, challenge, cross, blur, and erase them. Chapters include the following topics: explorations of mathematics across topics (e.g., geometry, algebra, probability) and with other disciplines (e.g., science, the arts, social sciences); challenging gender, cultural, and racial borders; exploring the structure and curriculum of teacher education programs; spaces inhabited by teacher education programs (e.g., university, community); and international collaborations and programs to promote cross-cultural sharing and learning. The book targets a readership of researchers and graduate students in integrated education studies, teacher education, practitioners of mathematics education, curriculum developers, and educational administrators and policy makers. ​

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.

This ground-breaking collection reflects the growing momentum of interest in the international legal community in meshing the insights of queer legal theory with those critical theories that have a much longer genealogy – notably postcolonial and feminist analyses. Beyond the push in the human rights field to ensure respect for the rights of people with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, queer legal theory provides a means to examine the structural assumptions and conceptual architecture that underpin the normative framework and operation of international law, highlighting bias and blind spots and offering fresh perspectives and practical innovations. The contributors to the book use queer legal theory to critically analyse the basic tenets and operations of international law, with many surprising, thought-provoking and instructive results. The volume will be of interest to many scholars, students and researchers in international law, international relations, cultural studies, gender studies, queer studies and postcolonial studies.

This book introduces readers to the cultural imaginings of borders: the in-between spaces in which transnationalism collides with geopolitical cooperation and contestation. Recent debates about the "refugee crisis" and the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic have politicized culture at and of borders like never before. Border culture is no longer culture at the margins but rather culture at the heart of geopolitics, flows, and experience of the transnational world. Increasingly, culture and borders are everywhere yet nowhere. In border spaces, national narratives and counter-narratives are tested and evaluated, coming up against transnational culture. This book provides an extensive and critical vision of border culture on the move, drawing on numerous examples worldwide and a growing international literature across border and cultural studies. It shows how border culture develops in the human imagination and manifests in human constructs of "nation" and "state", as well as in transnationalism. By analyzing this new and expanding cultural geography of border landscapes, the book shows the way to a fresh, broader dialogue. Exploring the nature and meaning of the intersection of border and culture, this book will be an essential read for students and researchers across border studies, geopolitics, geography, and cultural studies.

This book analyses various forms of liminality and transgression in different geographies and demonstrates how and why various physical and symbolic boundaries create liminality and transgression. Its focus is on comprehending the ways in which these borders and boundaries generate liminality and transgression rather than viewing them solely as issues. It provides case studies from the past and present, allowing readers to connect subjects, periods, and geographies. It consists of theoretical and empirical chapters that demonstrate how borders and liminality are interconnected. The book also benefits from the power of several visual essays by artists to complete the theoretical and empirical chapters which demonstrate different forms of liminality without need of much words. The book will be of interest to researchers and students working in the fields of urban and rural studies, urban sociology, cities and communities, urban and regional planning, urban anthropology, political science, migration studies, human geography, cultural geography, urban anthropology, and visual arts.