Border Encounters, Performing Thresholds

“I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me,” declares a renowned and oft cited migrant aphorism. While this assertion makes explicit reference to the historical imposition of a geographical demarcation that split and re-ordered indigenous lands and populations, the change of subject/object relation also emphasizes that borders traverse and mark subjects. In this threshold encounter, the body and the border perform simultaneously, not as a reaction to one another, but as a kind of intertwined duet. Borderlands are zones overdetermined by the presence of a singular, and usually static object set up to prevent movement, yet the act of bordering “cannot be geographically contained” (García-Peña 2016:16). Borders are not simply transnational geographical coordinates, margins and edges defining an inside(r) and outside(r), they are simultaneously complex social structures that author and authorize tensions between practices of border crossing and border reinforcement (Mezzadra 2013:3). Trans-gressing these sanctified thresholds, whether at a local or global scale, can carry a worldmaking potential and force that challenges dominant discourses of gender and race.

COVID19 has ushered in, with a new and unforeseeable force, a shift of social and political relations, further emphasizing the defining role that borders play in global and local governance. As physical, national and individual borders close in, reify and perpetuate unfounded racist tropes around infection, virality, and care, a heightened sense of insecurity has affected the performance of society at-large at the site/sight of the border. At the same time as borders are fortifying, this global health crisis has made more evident their permeable and unstable nature, their porousness and fragility. While elaborate securitization mechanisms attempt to cement the bordered subject, physically and psychically, they also invite interactions that resist their predicted utility and presumed productiveness.

This special issue seeks to theorize encounters where bodies and borders perform together. We conceive of the border expansively: as concrete structures that aim to delimit and contour where one location ends and the other begins (such as the wall, the fence, the river, the ocean, the swamp); but also as motile structures, as captured by Gloria Anzaldúa’s assertion that “the border itself moves, is mobile” – through the body, through the nation, through the virtual (2015:48). While “Border encounters” is a policy-oriented term currently used by the U.S. Border Patrol (and the media covering its inhumane actions) as a gauge or a metric that records the number of migrants “caught” crossing the U.S./Mexico border illegally, the coupling “Border Encounters, Performing Thresholds” of our title re-orients this form of institutional violence, bringing attention to the performativity of the border while directing our focus towards that which unfolds at the limit, on the threshold. Understanding the encounter as ignited by the “accidental collisions [and] improbable swerves” that bring unforeseeable contact, we set out on the task of “transforming the accident into an encounter.” (Lepecki 2016:113). The composite of terms foregrounds the performances enabled by the border, as well as the aesthetic practices developed in constant relation to its undeniably lingering, trailing and haunting presence.

In this call for papers, we put in conversation transnational feminisms and transfeminism, to invoke a trans-feminist ethic that refuses to adhere to the borders of individuation, and instead emphasizes the political and aesthetic alliances forged through its syntax: “[t]he prefix trans makes reference to something that traverses what it names, it vertebrates it and transmutes it” (Valencia 2016: 191). Trans-feminism helps us think about the ways that we are together in spite of the myriad bordering mechanisms set out to keep us apart; it is a commitment to a transnational politics that puts life and liberation at its center, and works towards dismantling what has been recently called the “TERF-industrial-complex.”[1] This issue seeks such movements across: connecting locations and bodies, genders and archives beyond the boundaries that are set to keep them apart, both concretely and intellectually. This includes historical methods, like those of Lisa Lowe, which read across separate offices and repositories and disparate global archives to implicate unanticipated connectivity and to reveal intimate relations between bodies as developed through the flows of global capital. Rather than assuming crossing is a linear matter, constituted by a point of departure and a point of arrival, we center performances (artistic and activist, contestatory and healing) that expand the notion of encounters with the border: touching, grazing, trespassing, chiseling, mending, listening, destroying, denying, caressing, refusing, taking apart, etc.

For this special issue we invite artists, activists, academics, and people new to Women & Performance who think and work amidst and across borders to submit either full-lenght article submissions (6000-8000 words), experimental performative texts (2000-3000 words), photo essays and visual pieces. We are particularly interested in papers that analyze performances of the contemporary border and enthusiastically encourage submissions of creative and artistic interventions. All works should adhere to the journal’s submission guidelines. Please send your submissions to performingthresholds@gmail.com by August 30th, 2021.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

● trans-feminist performances and interventions of/at the border

● gender & sexuality and the border

● critical (trans-)feminist geographies

● trans-feminist resistance and activisms of/at the border

● the border and the body, or the embodied border

● liminality, nepantla, the hold, threshold thinking

● border aesthetics and politics

● performativity, linguistic and grammatical borders

● border spaces (i.e. the checkpoint, the airport, the waiting room)

● the (im)materiality of borders

● (hyper-)objects of bordering (i.e. the wall, the fence, the river, the ocean, the swamp)

● digital borders, virtual bordering and hacking, biosecurity

● the borders of virality, contagion and immunity

● transnational, (trans)domestic, and comparative border studies

● performances of (counter)surveillance at/of the border

● performances of migration, detention, check-points and governance