The sexual politics of border control: an introduction

ABSTRACT

In this introductory article to the special issue, we ask what role sexuality plays in the reproduction and contestation of border regimes and think sexuality towards its various entanglements with border control. As borders have been understood as a method for reproducing racialized distinctions, we argue that sexuality is also a method of bordering and illustrate how sexuality works as a key strategy for the capture, containment and regulation of mobility and movement. Taking a transnational approach, we bring together queer scholarship on borders and migration with the rich archive of feminist, Black, Indigenous and critical border perspectives to suggest that these strategies need to be understood in close relation to the (I) intersecting dynamics of colonial histories of racialization, (II) national regimes of reproductive control and (III) the containment of contagion, disease and sexual deviance.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexuality
• borders
• transnational
• migration
• race
• (post)coloniality

Thinking sexuality and borders

This special issue emerges out of a political moment in which we are witnessing the intensification of racialized border regimes and the surge of sexual and gendered nationalisms across the globe. This situation is exemplified, and further augmented, by the global circulation of SARS-CoV-2 and the intensification of border protections that rely on the household, the heteronormative nuclear family and gendered divisions of labour to safeguard the national body from contagion (Grewal et al. 2020). States tackle the pandemic through national frameworks despite warnings from the World Health Organization (2020) that generalized border controls do little to control the virus and might even accelerate its spread. This reaction highlights how the intensification of border regimes and racialised systems of segregation define our political present in which national protectionism has emerged as the preeminent strategy for dealing with wider economic, political and environmental destitution.

In 1984, Gayle Rubin (2013, 100) wrote that “it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality.” In “Thinking Sex,” Rubin shows that while for some sexuality may seem an unimportant topic, “a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear annihilation,” the abjection of sexual behaviours, discourses and subjectivities deemed abnormal and unhealthy is more than collateral for political projects. It is, rather often, its fundamental logic and ultimate objective. While Rubin’s focus lies on the stratification of sexuality and the ways in which erotic life is renegotiated into sex laws and mores, her insistence to recognize the centrality of sex to wider politics also is of value today as we see the corroboration of border regimes through sexual politics across a range of geopolitical contexts marked by racial capitalism and the legacies of colonialism.

Taking cue from Rubin, in this special issue we think sexuality towards its various entanglements with contemporary border regimes. We ask what role sexuality plays in the (re-)production and contestation of border regimes and scrutinize the sexual politics of border control from a transnational perspective. Rather than grounding our questions on identities, disciplines or particular geographies, we hone in on border and sexuality as analytics and conceptualize sexuality as a central frame through which cross-border movements are captured, framed and contained. In doing so, we build upon the work of Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1999) who parsed out the relationship between heteronormativity and the stretching of the border into various borderlands, subjectivities and temporalities. For Anzaldúa, sexual identities, behaviours and discourses are not given but shaped within borderlands; thereby constituting the border not as a simple divide but a cultural terrain that disciplines and produces the queer, the troublesome and the confines of the normative. Queer scholarship on migration and borders has further highlighted the centrality of sexuality in migration and border regimes (Manalansan IV 2006; Luibhéid 2008; Lewis and Naples 2014). Building upon those insights, this special issue brings together queer scholarship on borders and migration with the rich archive of feminist, Black, Indigenous and critical border perspectives that highlight how the heteronormativity of the border intersects with the larger dynamics of racial capitalism, imperialism and settler colonialism, reproductive inequalities and the containment of contagion, disease and virality.

This special issue illustrates that sexuality undergirds the formation of national boundaries, citizenship and geopolitical borders in ways that secure racial hierarchies, capital accumulation and Western hegemonies. Borders have been understood as a method for reproducing racialized distinctions of belonging, humanity, deservingness, labour, life and death (Tadiar 2008; Ticktin 2008; Neilson and Mezzadra 2013; Genova 2017; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2019). We argue that sexuality is also a method of bordering. By this, we mean that the investment in the regulation and control of sexuality is a key strategy for the violent capture, containment and regulation of mobility and movement – and posit that this constitutive connection between bordering and sexuality demands more scholarly and political attention. Simultaneously, the border becomes understood, organized and contested through sexuality and sexual discourse. As such, our intervention sheds light on the centrality of intimacy and desire in the struggle against state violence. It is not least the desire for different sexual futures (Muñoz 2009; Rodriguez 2014) that can shape our political horizons today.

A transnational conversation

The special issue emerges out of the “Sexuality and Borders Symposium” convened in the spring of 2019 at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Our goal was to bring together researchers from a wide array of disciplines and fields under the signs of sexuality and borders. We wanted to achieve this by leaving the terrain conceptually open to see what connections would be made in response to our call. The high volume of incisive submissions exceeded our expectations and the generative discussions at the conference took us from questions of sex work and borders, marriage migration, assistive reproduction technologies and queer asylum to debates around sexual border panics, contagion, anti-Blackness, settler colonialism and transnational kinship. This special issue brings together some of the contributions from the conference to continue these discussions beyond the spatial and temporal limits of the original conference.

There are many ways to sketch the trajectory of this project. Not least important was the sociality that brought the three of us, co-editors of this issue, together and the conversations that shaped this project. The ties of our queer friendship were always interwoven with knowledge production and our political commitments. In this way, the special issue is also an expression of the desire for collaboration against the individuation of research and writing and the necessity to think, write and argue together for more just futures. Working on the cultural politics of border control and the coloniality of surveillance technologies in Germany and Europe, all three of us encountered sexuality as a crucial parameter in our own work. From the moral panics around racialised “sex offenders” constructed as a threat to the nation that emerged after New Year’s Eve in Cologne in 2015 (Holzberg and Raghavan 2020) to the colonial and slavocratic gaze of surveillance technologies (Madörin 2020) and the queer politics of refugee hunger strikes (Pfeifer 2018), sexuality figured as a prominent, if not always clearly articulated, force in the way borders are secured and contested in our own research context of German nationalism and the EUropean border regime.

A central aim of the conference and this special issue is to connect these insights and conversations to other geopolitical contexts and epistemological locations. Thinking sexuality and borders transnationally, this special issue starts with but extends beyond the EUropean context and includes contributions from and about different locales including histories of HIV in Turkey, the politics of reproduction in Palestine/Israel, settler colonialism and anti-Blackness in the United States, the sexual geographies of the Balkan and Southern Europe, the intimate politics of marriage migration between Vietnam and Canada and sex work in Australia, France, New Zealand and the United States. We acknowledge that this approach, while allowing for thinking sexuality transnationally and across a number of geopolitical contexts, also risks imposing a Eurocentric framework on other locales. Practicing a feminist politics of location remains in constructive tension with articulating a transnational conceptual language of sexuality and borders throughout this special issue.

Bringing different sites and locales together, this special issue is dedicated to developing a refined vocabulary for analysing the entanglement of sexual and border politics. Borrowing from transnational sexuality studies, we focus on the enactment and circulation of sexual discourses, practices and subjectivities in and across national contexts and analyse sexuality as a key site for the enactment of global hegemonies and national politics (Grewal and Kaplan 2001; Kim-Puri 2005; Hemmings 2007; Tudor 2017). As Alyosxa Tudor (2017, 20) reminds us, a transnational approach to the study of sexuality also has to focus on “analysing privilegings, contradictions and ambivalences in gendering, racialising and nationalising ascriptions of (non)belonging”. The special issue takes the histories of European colonialism, imperialism and racial capitalism as a starting point to trace and understand the manifold geopolitical inscriptions of national borders through registers of the sexual. Based on the contributions for this issue as well as the insights derived from the conference, we suggest that these inscriptions are most evident and need to be understood in close relation to the (I) intersecting dynamics of colonial histories of racialization, (II) national regimes of reproductive control and (III) the containment of contagion, disease and sexual deviance.

Colonial histories of racialization

What emerges centrally from our conference and the contributions to this special issue is that the sexual politics of border control needs to be understood in close relation to the biopolitical histories of racialization. Michel Foucault’s (2019) insight that sexuality is the preeminent site of biopolitics – as it is the point where the control of the body and the population meet – remains the starting point for many contributions to this special issue. While Foucault linked individual sexualities to the security and prosperity of the social body as nineteenth-century inventions, he paid little attention to the actual role of racialization and colonialism in his dissection of sexual discourses. In correcting this inattention to race, postcolonial scholars like Ann Stoler (1995, 2002) have shown that discourses of sexuality were integral to the making and maintenance of racial borders and imperial authority. Sexual discourses did not only define the distinctions of the white bourgeois self but mapped the moral parameters and borders of European nation states. Racial distinctions were essentially structured in sexual and gendered terms and sexuality at once classified colonial subjects into distinct (less than) human kinds while securing the boundaries of the metropole.

These colonial logics continue to structure border regimes today. A key case to think through the resonant sexual politics of the colonial past is the New Year’s Eve of 2015 in Cologne. The “Night of Cologne” describes the sexual panic that unfolded around cases of mass sexual assault and rape of women during the New Year festivities at the Cologne cathedral by large groups of men – most of them framed as racialized men of Middle Eastern and North African descent. The “Shame of Cologne” (Sat1 2016) conjured the spectre of a dangerous Muslim patriarchal masculinity targeting German women, Western values and women’s emancipation. Western media and German authorities deployed the term “taharrush” (harassment in Arabic), portraying collective sexual violence as a practice that originates from the Middle East and North Africa and as supposedly foreign to German and European culture (Abdelmonem et al. 2016). The Night of Cologne drew national and international attention and became read as the epitome for the failure of Germany’s Willkommenskultur (welcome culture). Attributed to the Merkel administration and the many volunteers who came forward to help when Germany and other European states failed to provide immediate support in the early days of the so-called “refugee crisis” of 2015, this hospitality was swiftly replaced by a nationalist security discourse and the implementation of asylum restrictions. In this affective conjuncture, Cologne served as proof that asylum seekers were impossible to integrate, and sexual violence was understood as a result of open borders, a problem imported from outside of Europe (Dietze 2016; Boulila and Carri 2017; Tudor 2018; Hark and Villa 2020).

To make sense of these logics, we can draw on the work of Miriam Ticktin (2008) who has fittingly described sexual violence as the “language of border control” in the case of France. She discusses how in the late 2000s, French-Maghrebian teenagers accused of gang-raping young women of North African origin in the outskirts of French cities became the focus of national media and political attention. “Les tournantes,” as these mass sexual atrocities conducted by men from former French colonies were called, became a sudden focus in public political debates – after decades of public neglect against issues concerning sexual violence against women. Ticktin argues that the obsession regarding the protection of women from uncivilized Others must be understood in relation to the Orientalist frames through which they became intelligible as a matter of public concern. While other forms of gendered and sexual violence remained confined to the private sphere, forms of spectacularised sexual abuse became the focus of state action which often resulted in pushing affected women and their communities into even more precarious positions in French society.

What the cases of France and Germany highlight is how the racialization of sexuality is tied to the continued and renewed alliances between right-wing populist and carceral feminisms (Phipps 2020) where the protection and safety of women becomes pitted against struggles for the freedom of movement. In the wake of Cologne, parts of the feminist movement called for tighter border protections so that women would feel save again. In France, arguments for sexual emancipation have been used to outlaw practices like the wearing of the veil constructing the notion of a secular republic at threat from Muslim migration (Ticktin 2008; Korteweg and Yurdakul 2014). Sarah Farris (2017) has described these discourses as the rise of femonationalism in which feminist rhetoric around sexual rights and freedoms goes hand in hand with nationalist and protectionist discourses and border securitisation. Other scholars have drawn on Jasbir Puar’s (2007) concept of homonationalism to analyse how discourses around gay rights and sexual diversity are increasingly central in securing the nation vis-à-vis presumably homophobic and intolerant migrant “Others.” Here, scholars have often turned to the Netherlands where tolerance towards sexual minorities has become a measuring stick for immigrant integration into the nation-state (Jivraj and De Jong 2011; Bracke 2012; Mepschen 2020) and Israel where discourses of pinkwashing are crucial in justifying the ongoing occupation and securing ethnic hierarchies of citizenship (Maikey and Stelder 2015; Alqaisiya 2018).

For the study of sexuality and borders, colonial histories do not merely offer symbolic templates onto which the neocolonial present is represented and made legible, they rather inform and continue to shape the material parameters of contemporary border regimes. As Farris (2017) suggests, in the context of Europe, the “sexualization of racism” is directly linked to the increasing demand for gendered racialized labour. While migrant men are commonly framed as sexual threats, women are represented as agency-less victims who need to be integrated to fulfil increasing demands for care and reproductive labour. This form of “differential inclusion” (Neilson and Mezzadra 2013) sustains the international divisions of reproductive labour and capital accumulation (Parreñas 2000; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). Marxist feminists have long insisted that capitalism inherently depends on seemingly non-capitalist milieux for its extension and primarily on women’s bodies, most of all racialized women and those living in the Global South, have been targeted in processes of ongoing primitive accumulation (Mies 1998; Federici 2014, 2020; Bhattacharyya 2018). Discourses around sexual vulnerability, propriety and docility are key in the management and legitimization of the ongoing exploitation of care and reproductive migrant labour across Europe and beyond (Constable 1997; Näre 2014).

While borders are often presented as a defence against foreign sexual harm and violence, scholars have pointed out how border regimes actually tend to foster sexual violence (Rodriguez 2015; Freedman 2016; Tyszler 2019). Not only has the constant threat of deportation made it more difficult for (undocumented) migrants who have become victims of sexual violence to come forward, sexual violence also forms a key part of the larger systems of border violence. In the case of Australia and the US, Joseph Pugliese and Suvendrini Perera (2018) point out how rape and sexual abuse are a key part of the everyday violence enacted in immigrant detention prisons. They show how these forms of abuse need to be understood in relation to the distinct settler colonial histories of these contexts and the impunity with which violence has been enacted against other racialized Indigenous and enslaved people historically. Abolitionist perspectives on borders and prisons coming out of Black and Indigenous feminist theorizing are key to understanding and contesting the violence that gets enacted through the sexual politics of borders (Gilmore 2007; Davis 2011; Loyd, Mitchelson, and Burridge 2012; Paik 2020). Colonial constructions of the sexual are evident in the discursive, affective and material securitization of borders today and it is the legacies of settler colonialism (Driskill et al. 2011; Ellasante forthcoming) and the transatlantic slave trade (Sanya forthcoming) that have sedimented into contemporary border regimes such as in the US.

National regimes of reproductive control

This special issue further highlights how the sexual politics of border control need to be understood in close relation to (trans)national politics of reproduction. In the example of Cologne, the defence of the nation from racialized men was legitimized through the protection of the vulnerable white female body that has come to stand in as a figure for the nation itself. These logics can also be identified in other national contexts such as that of India, where the figuration of the normative Hindu woman as Bharat Matha (Mother India) in need of protection from outside intruders plays a key role in securing the nationalist project of the Hindu Right (Kapur 2013; Holzberg and Raghavan 2020). Feminist theory has provided a rich body of work and frameworks through which to understand such gendered analogies that tie the reproduction of the individual to that of national bodies. Mary Douglas (2013) suggests that the body as a bounded system can represent any boundaries that are perceived to be threatened or precarious. Bodily metaphors are put in the service of policing the thresholds of the bodies’ openings, including the inside and outside of national bodies, making bodily control an expression of social control. Reading Douglas, Sara Ahmed (2013, 2–3) maintains that the national body is often perceived as soft and permeable, a feminized body prone to be “penetrated” or “invaded” by racialized others. The nation at risk not only bears the potential danger of being penetrated and feminized, but also of becoming less white or racially pure. This gendered imaginary works to augment the martial power of the state, including those of border control, framed as masculine power able to protect against this threat (Kim-Puri 2005).

The potency of such sexualized body metaphors shows how women have long been framed as the biological and cultural producers of the nation (Yuval-Davis 1997). As such, these body metaphors have dire political effects for the control of women and racialized migrant men. The role of idealized motherhood in securing the reproduction of the nation goes alongside the identification of migrant and other undesirable (potential) mothers as primary targets of border control (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989; Lentin 2004). Eithne Luibhéid (2013), for instance, has shown how the control of women’s reproductive capabilities is directly inscribed into contemporary border controls. In her ethnography of border controls in Ireland, Luibhéid shows how pregnant women from the African continent were singled out as threats to the nation, suspected of trying to gain illegitimate citizenship through childbirth and kept from entry to the nation. In the US context, whistle-blower Dawn Wooten, a nurse working at Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC), a Georgia ICE immigration detention facility, revealed in September 2020 that forced hysterectomies were regularly performed on detained women in the ICE jail. In the same report penned by Project South (2020), Wooten also revealed a substantial lack of medical care regarding the protection from COVID-19 in the detention centre such as the systematic refusal of testing for detained persons and the continuation of deportations of detained persons who tested positive for COVID-19.

These practices demonstrate that border regimes principally target women's bodies and their reproductive capabilities and determine who is allowed to represent and reproduce the nation. Given their detrimental effect on racialized women in particular, eugenic policies such as those implemented in the ICE detention centre need to be understood in the context of ongoing state eugenics informed by the histories of colonialism, slavery and anti-Blackness. As Hortense Spillers (1987) has pointed out, the transatlantic slave trade relied on the ungendering of Black bodies and instituted sexual reproduction as a privilege encouraged for some subjects while denying it to others. Slave owners attempted to control the reproductive patterns of female slaves since the seventeenth century and it was after the termination of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 when Caribbean and American planters adopted a “slave breeding” policy which included sexual and reproductive coercion to fill labour shortage and increase profits (Beckles 1995). Eugenic policies in the nineteenth century continued the control of women’s reproduction and focused on the forced sterilization of Black and Native American women (Ordover 2003). These histories’ ongoing legacies are tangible in the chilling accounts of women at ICDC referring to the doctor who has performed these forced hysterectomies as the “uterus collector” (Project South 2020, 19).

In response to their treatment in ICE detention, women at ICDC have provided testimonies and video messages from inside the jail that serve as a reminder that incarcerated and detained women continuously struggle and organize to resist these violent practices by making their claims public. In 2008, detained mothers in England's Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre staged a naked protest to condemn the dehumanizing conditions under which they were held and protested in solidarity with a Burundian mother and her child who were destined for deportation. Imogen Tyler (2013) suggests that such maternal protests reveal the biopolitical grounds on which state immigration and border control function. The mothers contested the securitization of reproduction as a key principle targeting the bodies of non-citizen pregnant women and (potential) mothers. By stripping bare, the naked mothers staged the unconditional refusal of their disposability and refuted the biopolitical attention to their bodies as objects of criminalization and state control.

A focus on sexuality as reproduction also highlights how borders extend into the governmentality of national reproduction more generally (Rexer 2021). Far-right movements and parties in Europe are becoming increasingly invested in constructing the racist narrative of a “population swap” that would see the replacement of white citizens with racialized migrant populations (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017). Yet, also in more centrist, liberal and leftist spheres, discussions about decreasing fertility rates in European countries like Germany, Italy and France have been accompanied by racialized panics about migration and migrant fertility. Low fertility in East Asian countries such as South Korea has similarly sparked anxieties about the loss of ethnic homogeneity and resulted in debates and policies that further constrict migration for people from South East Asia and mainland China while easing it for those from Europe and Northern America (Huang and Wu 2018; Lankov 2020).

The containment of disease, contagion and deviant sexualities

In understanding the intersection of borders and sexuality we further need to pay close attention to the ways in which biopolitical regimes of border control have long operated through the threat of sexual and viral contagion. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore once again how border figures serve as a tool to manage the collective health of the nation and play a key role in their securitization especially in regard to sexually transmitted diseases and viruses such as HIV (Ahuja 2016; Bayramoğlu 2021). An instructive example in this regard is the detention of Haitian refugees at Guantanámo Bay between 1991 and 1994. In the early 1990s, thousands of Haitians fled persecution by the Cédras regime and were largely intercepted by the US Coast Guard at sea before reaching US shores and were subsequently detained at Guantanámo. At Guantánamo, the refugees were subject to asylum determination processes as well as health screenings that determined that of the 300 refugees considered bona fide many of them were HIV positive (Paik 2018). As it would have been a violation to return the refugees to Haiti under the Refugee Convention and an HIV ban forbid the entry of HIV positive aliens to the US at the time, the refugees were indefinitely detained at Guantánamo. While the United States mobilized a language of humanitarian intervention to justify this decision, it in fact put the refugees in a position of rightlessness (Paik 2016). This also serves as a reminder that military and medical interventions of humanitarianism are enactments of carceral control and containment that (re)produce racialized and sexualized distinctions of contagion and the human (Ticktin 2006; Ahuja 2016, 170–172).

Moreover, the offshore interception of refugees at sea effected a shifting of the border itself that marks a crucial moment in the history of detention, deterrence and the externalization of borders. Alison Mountz (2010, 144) has shown how migratory movements have been increasingly restricted and controlled through “altered geographies” created by interception, excision, detention or the ad-hoc creation of transit zones. As scholars have pointed out, contemporary border regimes are marked by simultaneous externalization, containment and deterrence that characterize borders as shifting geographies (Perera 2007; Casas-Cortes et al. 2015; Mitropoulos 2015). Still, there needs to be further attention and critical examination of how these shifting geographies also operate through discursive mobilization of contagion and the material and bodily control of sexuality as the examples of an extension to the outside (offshore detention) and the inside (the proliferation of immigration detention) bring into drastic relief.

The border control of disease and virality is linked to enshrining divisions between healthy and unhealthy sexuality or what with Rubin we might refer to as “good” and “bad” sexuality. Border regimes police boundaries of health and disease through the control and exclusion of sexual subjects associated with such contagion. Prime among those are migrant sex workers who have long been targeted by border officials as they are framed as bringing social, moral and physical decay into the body of the nation (Mai et al. forthcoming). Here too, the language of humanitarian intervention has become increasingly prominent over the last decades. Sex workers are no longer simply framed as sexual deviants but as victims of human trafficking and smuggling. As Andrijasevic and Mai (2016) note, the spectre of human trafficking has allowed governments across the globe to criminalize sex work without addressing larger causal or structural factors of inequality. It has also functioned as a key tool in justifying and naturalizing border securitization as a humanitarian endeavour.

Moreover, discourses and policies around trafficking and sex work need to be understood in relation to the securitization of the heteronormative foundations of the nation more generally. Kinship and love are increasingly governed through the border (d'Aoust 2013; Bissenbakker and Myong 2020). In her work on Taiwanese border controls, Mei-Hua Chen (2015) points out how moral panics about migrant sex workers from China has led to all female Chinese migrants to be suspected of sex work and to be engaging in “fake marriages” with Taiwanese spouses to secure citizenship. Congruently, the state has implemented “fake marriage” tests, including visits to couples’ homes and bedrooms, to assess whether they adhere to a normative gendered and sexual conduct of marriage. We can see here how the border extends into the intimate sphere to reproduce proper norms of heteronormativity. As Bridget Anderson, Sharma, and Wright (2011, 7) argue, it is not only

“hard workers” who are produced at the border but also “good wives” who do not challenge patriarchal families, “straight guys and gals” who adhere to correct sexual scripts [and] “good parents” whose parenting accords with the requirements to produce “good children”.

While border controls police sexual subjectivities and practices, they also generate new forms of love migration and “strategic intimacies” that try to circumvent and make use of them (Tran 2021).

The heteronormative logic that underlies border practices such as marriage migration also directly impacts queer subjects. Based on the assumption that migrants and nations are and should be heterosexual, queer migrants have either been excluded from migration and asylum laws or been framed as direct threats to the nation seen, for instance, in the exclusion of lesbian and gay subjects from entry to the US until 1990 (Luibhéid 2002). Over the last years, we can see some changes to these patterns as countries like the US, the UK and South Africa have instituted special protections for gay, lesbian and trans asylum seekers persecuted in their countries of origin. In order to be recognized under those protections, however, asylum seekers have to prove their sexuality and/or gender identity alongside highly normative lines in which they do not only have to conform to stereotypical assumptions of gay, lesbian and trans identities but affirm spectacularised, orientalist depictions of homo- and transphobia in their countries of origin (Spruce 2014; Fassin and Salcedo 2015; Saleh 2020). The inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity as recognized categories through which refugee protection becomes possible must be contextualized amidst the increasingly restrictive asylum granting process in countries in the Global North (Giametta 2020). Rather than necessarily challenging the heteronormative foundations of the nation, LGBT inclusion into asylum and laws often works to strengthen hetero- and homonormative imaginaries in which the inclusion of LGBT identities is seen as a sign of progressiveness vis-à-vis less civilized geopolitical contexts (Sabsay 2012). Queer and migration activism have long struggled against these logics of inclusion. For instance, Karma Chávez (2013, 6) has theorized the coalitional activist practice of what she terms queer migration politics “as [an] activism that seeks to challenge normative, inclusionary perspectives at the intersection of queer rights and justice and immigration rights and justice.” Queer politics, therefore, enact solidarities and radical care amidst the continued racialised and sexualized violence of coloniality (Rexhepi forthcoming).

Contributions

While the colonial histories of the sexual politics of border control inform all the contributions for this issue, they are most clearly articulated in the papers focused on the US context which highlight how contemporary US border regimes need to be understood in close relationship to the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Writing from within the field of Indigenous studies, in their paper “Radical Sovereignty, Rhetorical Borders, and the Everyday Decolonial Praxis of Indigenous Peoplehood and Two-Spirit Reclamation” Ian Khara Ellasante shows how the extension of frontiers in US settler colonial politics went hand in hand with the eradication of Indigenous systems of sexuality and gender. They extend the understanding of borders as immobile structures that control entry to outsiders and instead focus on how borders crossing communities are entangled with sexual dominance and hegemonic imposition. In an analysis of federal American Indian policies, Ellasante shows how the settler colonial imperative targeted the forceful acquisition of Indigenous lands along with the destruction of American Indian cultural systems including Indigenous kinship and gender models. Settlers attempted to annihilate and forcefully subject Indigenous peoplehood to heteropatriarchal norms and turn lands into Euro-Western private property. Pointing to the possibilities of resistance within the landscape of settler colonialism, a resistance embedded in the continuity of Indigenous peoplehood with its interdependent elements of land, language, sacred history, and ceremonial cycle, Ellasante suggests that the self-naming and re-naming of queer Indigenous identities are tantamount to everyday acts of decolonization in and against the border.

The ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and their relation to the transatlantic slave trade underlie Brenda Sanya’s contribution “Blackness, Biopolitics, Borders: African Immigration, Racialization, and the Limits of American Exceptionalism.” Sanya illustrates how anti-Blackness informs the biopolitical bordering logic of US exceptionalism. Conducting a critical media analysis of three mediatized encounters between Black immigrants to the United States, she centres the embodied experiences of Blackness in immigration discourses. Situating these mediatized encounters within an analytical framework that centres race, gender and sexuality as crucial for the history of immigration and citizenship policies in the United States, as exemplified by family reunification programmes and the reproduction of Black sexuality and kinship as aberrant, Sanya identifies the “border as a site for social reproduction.” While African immigrants are seen both as the archetypical source of human capital, they are simultaneously positioned as a threat to the national cohesion of the American psyche, as such, laying bare not only the colonial legacies but the national regimes of reproductive control that underlie its bordering practices. Sanya provides a queer analysis to show how borders effect a racial sorting that puts Black immigration in a position of contradiction amidst continuous anti-Black state violence, surveillance and policing.

The racialized logics of reproductive control that Sanya’s paper analyses are further addressed by Gala Rexer and Grace Tran’s contributions to this issue. In her contribution, “Borderlands of Reproduction: Bodies, Borders, and Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Palestine/Israel,” Rexer shows how reproductive politics in the context of Palestine/Israel are central for securing ethnic and racial borders in Palestine/Israel. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Palestinian women and medical staff in Israeli fertility clinics, Rexer provides an analysis of the spatial and bodily politics of assisted reproductive technologies. Attending to the multiple forms of border-making that are re-produced under conditions of settler colonialism, what Rexer calls “borderlands of reproduction,” she analyses the resistant border-crossing practices of Palestinian women who underwent fertility treatment in Israeli fertility clinics. Politicizing what is constructed as a neutral medical non-space – imagined by Israeli fertility providers as a bio- and geopolitical context – Rexer draws out the multiplicity of material, symbolic, and linguistic borders that crisscross these borderlands of reproduction to show the entanglements of power, space and the body that Palestinian women have to navigate. Similarly to Sanya’s analysis of the discourse of exceptionalism that places Black immigration into a space of contradiction, Rexer argues that Palestinian women are included in fertility treatment as an exception to settler colonial discourses of reproduction.

Grace Tran's article “‘We’re Dating After Marriage’ Transformative Effects of Performing Intimacy in Vietnamese ‘Marriage Fraud’ Arrangements” deals with the politics of belonging and reproduction in the context of the Canadian state’s intent to control “fake marriage” migration in Canada. She examines the narratives of three Vietnamese women who participated in đám cưới giả (“fake wedding”) with Canadian men to gain entry to the country. Analysing how these women make use of the state’s highly stereotypical assumptions of heteronormative marriage, she develops the concept of “strategic intimacies” to examine how participants perform and navigate the classed, gendered and racialised ideals of love, marriage and the family that shape the Canadian border regime. Extending established work on love and marriage migration that mostly focuses on the confining effect of these policies, Tran traces their productive power by highlighting how the couples she interviewed fall in love after engaging in đám cưới giả. While these “strategic intimacies” are based on access to high economic capital and can expose women to further vulnerability and stigmatization, they question the state’s efforts to control boundaries between proper and improper, real and fake intimacies. Similar to Rexer, Tran shows how racialised women navigate, circumvent and subvert the reproductive logics of contemporary border control.

The nationalist logics of sexual and viral contagion are articulated in Yener Bayramoğlu’s and Nicola Mai’s et al. contributions to this issue. In “Border Panic over the Pandemic: Mediated anxieties about migrant sex workers and queers during the AIDS crises in Turkey,” Bayramoğlu shows how the arrival of AIDS/HIV in Turkey (1985–1995) created a border panic that entangled fears of migration and border crossings with sexual deviancy, contagion and virality. Providing a rich archival, media and discourse analysis, he shows how it were particularly queer men and migrant sex workers who served as contagious figures against which the nation could reterritorialize “Turkishness.” While by the mid-eighties, Turkey’s AIDS/HIV cases were still sparse, or, as authorities claimed, non-existent, the media was prolific in stoking fears about the virus and projected it on what was portrayed as the sexually tainted West that was conceived as a contagious outside. Looking at the first publicly mediated AIDS/HIV case in Turkey and the discourse surrounding migrant sex workers from the East Black Sea Region who were derogatorily referred to as “Nataşas,” Bayramoğlu shows how queer and migrant bodies were denounced as the carriers of a foreign disease that would cross borders with the mobility of people. AIDS/HIV was thus conceived as a problem of circulation and pointed to the fragility and permeability of both geographical and sexual borders.

In their article “Migration, Sex Work and Trafficking: The Racialised Bordering Politics of Sexual Humanitarianism” Nicola Mai, P.G. Macioti, Calum Bennachie, Anne E. Fehrenbacher, Calogero Giametta, Heidi Hoefinger and Jennifer Musto further examine how migrant sex workers continue to be key targets of contemporary border controls. Based on extensive field-work and semi-structured interviews with migrant sex workers in France, Australia, New Zealand and the US, they develop a rich conceptual analysis of sexual humanitarianism. Showing how humanitarian and racialised forms of governance intertwine, they examine how migrant sex workers are constructed as particularly vulnerable. This construction of vulnerability, they argue, fuels the eradication of sex work out of a humanitarian rationale and augments the exploitability and deportability of marginalized migrant groups. Focusing in particular on the experiences of cis Asian and trans Latina women as over-represented targets of border controls across their four national settings, they show how racialised and sex-gendered criteria of victimhood are key for sexual humanitarian justifications and the deployment of anti-migration rhetoric. Through their intervention, Mai et al. complicate divisions between sexual securitization and humanitarianism and instead show how policies of biopolitical protection commonly rely on the control and further disenfranchisement of racially marginalized subjects.

Piro Rexhepi’s contribution “Predatory Porn, Sex Work and Solidarity at Borders” engages with the possibilities of enacting solidarities and radical care amidst the continued racialised and sexualized violence of coloniality in Southern European borderlands. Taking us to the sexual geography of Salonika, Rexhepi examines the ways in which the economy of the refugee crisis investing in racialised securitization and surveillance not only generates profit but also desire. Specifically looking at what he calls “predatory porn” he shows how migrants in Salonika have to navigate the racial imaginaries that permeate the simultaneous desire for and dispossession of migrants. Rexhepi situates his reflections on Salonika as part of Euro-Atlantic enclosures, the legacies of colonialism and racial capitalism that mark not only forms of surveillance, extraction and precarity, but also inhere “moments and circumstances when sexual play generates new social and spatial relations.” Thus, Rexhepi points to the forms of care, solidarity, intimacy, sex and friendship that are enacted in, and against this context to engage in decolonial praxis that attempts to queer knowledge production as an “otherwise” of extractive libidinal economies. As such, he challenges us to confront the forms of extraction inherent in academic modes of knowledge production by highlighting complexities and contradictions that decolonial praxis demands.

Thinking across the different themes raised by the articles for this special issue, in their conversation “Sexuality and Borders in Right Wing Times,” Alyosxa Tudor and Miriam Ticktin identify sexuality as a key site where race and colonialism meet in our current times – both as a violent mode of capture and containment under postcolonial and pandemic conditions and as a mode for re-imagining different political horizons. They reflect on the intersections between sexuality and borders in times of COVID-19. Tudor and Ticktin argue that COVID-19 has brought into relief how national borders are framed as providing protection from sexualized contagion and invasion of “invasive others” heightening practices and technologies of surveillance and policing to distinguish between “healthy” and “deviant” subjects. At the same time, COVID-19 has also made visible our own entanglement with each other, between our bodies and those of non-humans providing possibilities for enabling expansive forms of relationality beyond the nuclear family and the nation-state as a response to the recognition of shared vulnerability and risk. They formulate a call for the need of transnational analysis of the gendered, racialised and sexualized ways vulnerabilities and risks unfold on highly unequal terrain, which dramatically reveal how neither the household nor the nation is a safe space, particularly for women, queer, trans and gender-nonconforming people, as well as border-crossers, migrants and refugees.

Finally, Radha Hegde reflects in her afterword to this special issue on the urgency of reflecting on the sexual politics of border politics today. Offering a closing to the special issue, she stresses the importance of confronting the entanglement of sexual politics with racialised border controls in the contemporary moment. While this special issue brings together an array of different cases across contexts and includes various theories and methods for analysing the sexual politics of borders, the urgency of further exploring the intersection of sexuality and borders consequently remains. Addressing the sexual politics of borders may include looking further into regimes of (feminized) labour and care and how they intersect with racialized border control (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2010). Analyses of how forms of sexual and gendered inequalities are enhanced by technological and media environments and how they particularly affect people unequally within surveillance regimes are also not included in this issue even though surveillance targets already precarious queer migrants, for instance in the context of love migration (Constable 2003; Brennan 2004). Further work might also address how the control of sexuality shapes borders within urban spaces by, for example, gentrifying neighbourhoods and making them a safe space for only some LGBTQ subjects (Hanhardt 2013). The pieces assembled in this issue, therefore, continue some pertinent discussions on sexuality and borders and, at the same time, call for and provide the contours for further research.

Conclusion

Based on the contributions of this special issue, we argue that sexuality needs to be understood as a method of bordering – a key locus for the securitization and contestation of contemporary border regimes. We posit that, as a key site of power, sexuality sits at the centre of biopolitical forms of governance focused on regulating the cultural and biological reproduction of the nation. Binary oppositions between sexual deviance and normalcy, perversity and purity, threat and protection, have long worked to secure racialized divisions and to legitimate border securitisations. These binaries have been crucially informed by biopolitical regimes of coloniality, the control of women’s reproduction and the containment of disease and sexual deviance. Racialized border regimes, then, cannot be separated from the politics of sexuality as they are one of the key features of how contemporary biopolitics operate.

At the same time, the border plays a crucial role in policing and reproducing normative understandings of sexuality. Whether through the policing of properly gendered marriages, the uprooting of Indigenous sexual identities, or the containment of HIV-positive and migrant sex workers, this special issue points out how the border continues to be a prime site at which normative sexual identities, behaviours and discourses are regulated and produced. The sexual politics of borders then emerge as a key prism for critical scholarship and as a particularly potent site for renewed alliances between feminist, trans and queer and anti-racist and migrant (solidarity) activism. We can take cure here from Radha Hegde (2016, 38) and her reflections in the afterword for this special issue, who has argued that “[q]ueering the terrain of immigration radically denaturalized the stability and coherence of identity categories that have traditionally served as the basis for defining nationalism and citizenship.” We thus need an insistence on feminist and sexual futures that extend action and care against and beyond contemporary border control.

Acknowledgment

We want to thank all the authors of this special issue and the participants of the “Sexuality and Borders” Symposium held at NYU in spring 2019 for their insightful contributions. A very special thank you goes to Clare Hemmings, Radha Hedge, Miriam Ticktin and Alyosxa Tudor for their generous support in bringing this issue to life as well as for their constructive feedback to this introduction. We also want to thank NYU’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication, LSE’s Department of Gender Studies and the DFG-funded Group “Minor Cosmopolitanism” at the University of Potsdam for their conference funding and assistance without which this work would not have been possible. We also would like to thank the editorial team at Ethnic and Racial Studies, especially Amanda Eastell-Bleakley, whose support and guidance throughout this process has been invaluable.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).