Border encounters, performing thresholds: an introduction

A porous crisscross of metal overlay stands tall, made of vertical rusted pillars sunken in the concrete and a dense netting of metal mesh in a diamond-shaped texture, too tight for even a finger to penetrate through. These rusted metal structures are spaced apart enough from each other so that the eye can make sense of what is behind them, but too close for an adult body to pass through. They are triangular in shape and smooth in texture so grasping onto them or climbing them is necessarily impossible. They extend beyond the frame as if they might reach infinitely toward the sky. Fences like these are familiar architectures in the borderlands, though the design and materials of such bordering devices might also include concrete and barbed wire. Performance artist Francis Alÿs, in his series of drawings titled “Border Barriers Typology: Case #” (2019–2021) offers a compelling record of current designs that also map the geographies they split up. Unlike Alÿs’ drawn taxonomy, this photograph does not just feature a material structure. On the bottom left, a row of crosses, all in different colors, lean against the fence, reminding us of the violence it enables and upholds. The wooden material of these seemingly ordinary objects contrasts with the fence but adds a different kind of heaviness to this metal structure: an affective one. These hand-made obituaries are emplaced on this location as an homage to the lives lost and that still hover around it.

Accentuating this grid-like criss-cross of both the fence and the crosses is a graffiti overlay sprawling horizontally, one letter per pillar, that reads: “Palestina Libre, Boicot Israel.” There are multiple indicators of location in this image, but without the familiarity of the space or the provision of the photograph’s context, it proves difficult to pinpoint the exact location of this border fence. The explicit names “Palestine” and “Israel” direct us to the desertic geography of Israel/Palestine, while the Spanish language word “Libre” and the Spanish spelling of “Boicot” take us to another desertic geography, that of the US/Mexico border. Separated by widths of land and sea, this message puts in relation two disparate locations connecting them through a brutal juncture: objects and acts of bordering haunted by death and destruction. While the specificity and particularities of these two seemingly overdetermined “iconic” borderlands can never be fully subsumed or made into universals, with this performative act, this border’s punctual geography is also made transnational through a call for resistance. One struggle for liberation finds its connection to another through an effective network of anti-colonial and anti-fascist efforts. This image serves as a reminder of the violence, death and destruction propelled by these sort of bordering mechanisms, be they material monumental constructions such as the fence and wall or the quotidian, everyday acts of surveillance that have become mundane and culturally accepted. What does encountering a call for the liberation of Palestine on the US/Mexico border-fence, do?

This image not only encapsulates a layered depiction of so much of the global and contemporary issues that meet up at the border but also assists us, the editors of this special issue, in thinking through our own attachments to theorizing and raising questions about the border. As we hail from these two regions, Israel/Palestine & Mexico, the image brought together something we had long sensed in our own exchanges: that, geographic distance aside, locations so defined by the overbearing presence of its borders (both physically and discursively) develop a specific relation around their stability and frailty, an orientation toward them that makes it impossible to overlook them as defining aspects of the everyday; an attunement develops around politics and aesthetics that keeps one alert to the insidious, sometimes difficult-to-discern role that the border plays. In our separate and mutual work, we connect the divisions enacted by the presence of the border, the restrictive and constrictive contours of a nation, to the ways gender and sexuality are understood, constructed and lived, constantly asking after their inextricability. These are the types of questions that have drawn our thinking together since our early years as graduate students, and what moved us to convene other scholars, activists and artists whose thinking and practice are also concerned with the nuanced connections that gender and sexuality have with border theory and politics. At the end of 2019, we organized a roundtable discussion due to take place at a national feminist conference which was shortly canceled due to another border crossing global phenomenon, the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the impetus that drew us to make this special issue. The image we open with, which was graciously shared with us by Maxwell Greenberg, gave us an aesthetic representation of this confluence, especially the possibility of the transnational alliance it inspires. Simultaneously, it serves as an important intervention that shows us that these bordering mechanisms aren’t stagnant, but constantly being contested, vandalized, crossed, touched, repurposed, bent, grazed, disregarded, dislocated and much more that we are yet to imagine. It is these performances, which challenge and confront the border, that drive our special issue.

We have found an immense advantage in cross-pollinating our own thinking around Israel/Palestine and US/Mexico, to connect, contrast and complicate the functioning of borders and their relation to subjectivity and the body. The issue, however, does not exclusively concern these two borderlands. As the image suggests, when a border is erected in one location, resistance to it sprouts up not only in-situ but in “other” border sites as well; a kind of multi-location exponential effect. Following this logic, we ask, how does the border move with the body and how does it perform in dis/location? The response to our call brought about encounters of the border from near and far, at once historic and contemporary, both foreign and familiar. The expansive geographical scope this issue offers spans the US/Mexico border (García-Hernández and Emilio Rojas), lingers at the shore (Gaudry) and dives into the Pacific (Nguyen), crosses the Atlantic from Martinique to the Congo (Evans), finds paths that connect anti-zionist protests in London (Leshem) to feminist interjections in Israel/Palestine (Rajuan Shtang), even bursts the seams of these publication (Hernández-Cabal). As different locations and national contexts are explored in these essays, what brings them together is the resistance to qualify the border as either/or. All the authors in this issue come from a standpoint which resists the separation of the discursive, material and embodied nature of the border and understand these definitions to be operating in tandem. In this brief introduction, we move beyond a static definition of “the border” and propose looking at encounters with borders and thresholds through a feminist, performance studies lens.

Border encounters

The term “border encounter” is a policy-oriented term currently used by the U.S. Border Patrol (and the American media) as a gauge or a metric that records the number of migrants caught crossing the U.S./Mexico border illegally. In this issue, we redirect this term from its violent institutional usage, swerving it away from its association with illegality, terror, and abjection, toward an encounter which encapsulates acts of critical creativity, resistance and perseverance. The possibility of the “encounter” when approached through a performance studies lens seeks to concentrate on the unforeseeable contact of accidental collisions, those twists and turns that are unpredictable yet never inconsequential (Lepecki 2016, 113). Borrowing this term from dance and performance scholar Andre Lepecki, we seek to complicate and negate the pure violence of the border as an imperial/colonial mechanism, instead focusing on its effects and affects. Our understanding of “accident” in this context grants more importance to the acts and actions that take place in spite of partition (Hochberg 2007), those entanglements and complications that pressure binaries and blur dichotomies created by mechanisms of division. We follow literary scholar Mary Pat Brady’s important articulation that conceives of the border as an “abjection machine,” one that produces, reproduces and sediments difference through abjection, imposing on subjects an identity presumed to be “other” (Brady 2002). Sandro Mezzadra & Brett Neilson’s important intervention in the field of border studies serves as a critical caveat, expressing concern over the fixation of both theorists and activists around the image of the wall (2013), while seeking to comprehend the proliferation of borders away from their physical manifestation through labor. They suggest we understand the border as method, treating it simultaneously as an object of research and an epistemic approach, which provides insights on tensions and conflicts that blur lines of inclusion and exclusion, while investigating other important lines of demarcation within the social, cultural, political and economic.

Approaching border as a method of analysis invites us to think of the various ways in which division has infiltrated the western mindset while highlighting those objects, movements and performances that manage to evade that logic. The border encounters featured in this issue vary in magnitude and scale and do not merely cover an array of physical locations, but make explicit the way it performs on and through the body. If, as Brady states (following Anzaldúa), the border “follows us around” (Brady 2014), then how and when does it manifest? Whereas a demarcated physical space comes to inform and construct a national identity, the borders and boundaries of the body, a different yet equivocal demarcated space, come to define a certain subjectivity, be it racial, ethnic , gendered and/or sexual. These axes of difference, however unsurprisingly, are often further deployed to contain and define the subject, as its own “method of bordering” (Holzberg, Madörin, and Pfeifer 2021, 1487). If borders intend to fracture material and psychic space, how does performance and movement counteract and complicate these attempts?

This issue highlights various approaches which resist, undermine and dismantle the stifling boundaries that seek to define us, either as a homogenous collective or an eternal external other. The body is revealed as an essential site of analysis for the writers in this issue, which show how minor gestures and actions reverberate deeply and destabilize those ironclad borders of the body and the nation alike. In Yessica García Hernández’s “Border Trash: The Markings of Latinas as Foreign Bodies” the author explores the genre of border porn and its shifts, as she traces its responsivity to immigration policy changes and political anxieties around the permeability of the US/Mexico border. Through a close reading of different pornos and their modes of production, García Hernández elucidates how despite subjugation, moments of possibility emerge for the Latina porn stars who actively challenge the fixed docility attributed to the brown body on screen by activating their own agency. García Hernández’s article demonstrates how a defiant and direct gaze, though immaterial, can itself be a border transgression. Along this line of thinking, Joanna Ruth Evans’ “‘The world trembles:’ Thinking Édouard Glissant’s Borders with Martin Heidegger and Faustin Linyekula” focuses on the performative work that trembling does. Evans demonstrates through an analysis of contemporary dance, how “trembling on both bodily and dramaturgical scales emerges as a form of movement that blurs and dislodges borders.” Though trembling can be an involuntary response to those met with the brutality of the border, Evans theorizes it as a borderless encounter with the world, one that shakes up technologies of capture while defying one’s own borders. Sivan Rajuan Shtang’s “Situated Imagination of Zionist Borders: The Feminist Gender Nonconforming Photography of Yael Meiry” uses the body of work of nonbinary photographer Yael Meiry to illustrate ways in which resistance to the seperationist politics of Zionism can manifest through the subversion of iconographic imagery. Rajuan Shtang shows, for example, how by photographing the fist holding various objects, from dripping fruit to testosterone viles, Meiry queers the boundaries of meaning laminated by Zionist propaganda, exposing the effortful agenda of its iconography.

These other forms that encounters with the borders take – the gaze of the porn star, the trembling of bodies, the visuality of a fist – enliven the other affective and sensorial realm of borders. This is where the second organizing term of this special issue comes to the fore. Thresholds, much like borders, invoke a liminal spatiality but one whose relation to time is more explicit, for the word elicits temporal processes that, in the act of crossing, also implicate a change of form, state or status (Schechner 2003(1988)). Through the concept of the liminal, thresholds might appear as creative sites or events that are simultaneously an ending and a beginning, an entry and exit, both the time of dusk and the time of dawn, to draw from the visual poem “On Liminality” by Perrine Gaudry featured in this issue. Such an approach to thresholds does not merely serve as a bordering frame to a performance encounter, but is central to the performative force it yields, pointing toward “threshold” as critical limit. Like durational and endurance performances have taught us, playing with thresholds, that is, involving saturation, excess and putting the body to the test, might help us find ways to break away from the linear tendency that the border tends to evoke in an attempt to transcend critical limits.

Whatever form borders and thresholds may take, whether reaching a limit or crossing a de-limitation, performance might expand the frame of the event and open it up to other forms of encounter. The ampersand section in this issue offers further illustrative examples of such possible fugues. Artist and scholar Patricia Nguyễn’s photo essay “echoes | cartographies of refuge & containment,” offers a documentation of her immersive performances, detailing the creation of soundscapes which conjure the reverberation of whale calls underwater. This sonic experience is meant to evoke the real life experience of more than 3 million refugees who escaped from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, risking their lives across volatile terrain on land and sea by reminding viewers that “sound always escapes.” Gal Leshem’s poetic writing “Can You Own A Plant?” also asks what might escape attempts of containment by questioning the capacity that nature has to disregard man-made borders through literal cross-pollination: how might a sprouting seed challenge land ownership, its possession and dispossession? This puts nativism, and its implied imperial impetus, into question. These questions are refracted by the image that graces our cover, Emilio Rojas' 2019 work Naturalized Bodies (to Gloria), where borders raise tensions through histories of land, agriculture, and nature. The contributions in this issue propose new definitions and approaches to the border through an engagement of performance(s) which reevaluate limits of physical space, historical matter and feminist discourse.

Feminist thresholds

This issue is indebted to and imbued with a queer feminist politic. It enlivens what we have been calling a trans-feminist ethic, stemming directly from the two feminist genealogies it is informed by: transnational feminisms and transfeminisms. From the former, we hail the call for alliance and coalition building across geographies, for transnational solidarity that de-centers the Anglo-Saxon and Western canon and is deliberate about putting in conversation epistemes that emerge from the minoritarian, the global south, the “third world” (Lowe 2008). From the latter, stemming from its histories in the global north (Bey 2022 Enke 2012; Stryker 2006;) as well as its Latin/x American epistemes (Solá and Preciado 2013, Valencia 2016), we follow the increasingly urgent call to name a feminism that is unapologetic in its alliance to trans* rights activism, one that takes as a given that sexual dissidence is part and parcel of the feminist movement. This trans-feminist ethic 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). This type of 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 toward dismantling what has been recently referred to as “terfism” (Tudor 2021) or the “TERF-industrial complex.” 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.

We are excited that our own debt to the legacy of Gloria Anzaldúa's foundational queer, brown, and feminist theorizations of the borders are made tangible through the performance review included in this issue, “Retracing Heridas Abiertas (To Gloria): An exchange.” In an intimate conversation, curator Laurel V. McLaughlin and artist Emilio Rojas discuss the 2021 iteration of Rojas’ on-going performance “Heridas Abiertas (to Gloria)” as part of his solo exhibition at Lafayette College Art Galleries. In this work, Rojas gets a scaled version of the Mexican/US border etched on his back with an inkless needle, to constantly re-inscribe the ongoingness of the encounter with the border on the already marked body, forcing this “open wound” to continue to bleed out. The trans-feminist methods deployed by our contributors are diverse, which only shows the expansiveness that such an approach fosters. Rajuan Shtang’s piece might provide a more explicit proposition as she galvanizes a gender non-conforming feminism in her analysis transfeminist photographer Yael Meiry, offering a new read of zionist symbolism that accounts for the racial and ethnic histories that inform traditional views of gender in visual culture. At times, the feminist propositions for encountering and re-encountering the border in our contemporary present come from unexpected places. From objects of study, like in García-Hernández slow reading of border porn that gives us insight into the ways that hyper-sexualized actresses re-orient the masculine gaze; to methodological approaches, like Evans’ re-orientation of a top-down gaze to pay attention to the lowly, tremorous field; to feminist creative propositions, like Gal Leshem’s pleas which at times resemble a witch’s call to action (whether a herbolary or a mother). Feminism and performance also have an intimate relation to the realm of the pedagogic, made tangible in Catalina Hernández-Cabal’s piece “Inhabiting Borders,” where the author does not only propose an embodied performance practice to continue to question our own bodily borders, but invites you, the reader, to write directly on the journal, unequivocally challenging the very borders and performativity of academic reading and writing, and even the materiality of paper itself.

This humble collection of border encounters are but a few nodes that make up the evolving relationship we can have to contemporary border theory, praxis and resistance. We offer this issue as an open invitation to approach borders and thresholds as encounters that acknowledge the ambivalent tensions provoked by these blockades and separations all while insisting on our creative capacity to contend with them. As our mutual work elucidated surprising connections between disparate borderlands, we continue looking for ways to connect, contrast and complicate global borders in an effort nurture trans-feminist alliances across geographies. We can only hope it will inspire our readers to engage in this important dialogue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.