Borders of Desire: Gender and Sexuality at the Eastern Borders of Europe

(Hardback)

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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 fulfillment 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. As the chapters show, borders can create new desires expressed as aspirations, resentments, and actions including physical movements across borders for pleasure or work, or collective enactments of political ideals or resistance. The collection also shows how the persistent east/west symbolic border continues to act as a source of these desires in European political and social life.

Reviews

"Within a literature and dominant political discourse that overwhelmingly continue to view borders as obstacles, this book regards borders as performative: it asks what borders do, rather than what they are. By asking how borders producerather than only thwartdesires, the authors look afresh at the many ways gender and sexuality are at issue in border crossing. Considering desire, they return attention to the agency, humanity and imagination of border crossers and offer a glimpse into the complexity of their dreams, their decision-making and their experiences."
Jane Cowan, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of Sussex

Author Bio

Elissa Helms is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna

Tuija Pulkkinen is Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki