Borders of desire: Gender and sexuality at the Eastern borders of Europe

By Elissa Helms

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526165206

Book preview

Borders of desire

RETHINKING BORDERS

SERIES EDITORS: SARAH GREEN AND HASTINGS DONNAN

Rethinking Borders focuses on what gives borders their qualities across time and space, as well as how such borders are experienced, built, managed, imagined and changed. This involves detailed and often richly ethnographic studies of all aspects of borders: finance and money, bureaucracy, trade, law, new technologies, materiality, infrastructure, gender and sexuality, even the philosophy of what counts as being ‘borderly’, as well as the more familiar topics of migration, nationalism, politics, conflicts and security.

Previously published

Migrating borders and moving times: Temporality and the crossing of borders in Europe Edited by Hastings Donnan, Madeleine Hurd and Carolin Leutloff-Grandits

The political materialities of borders: New theoretical directions Edited by Olga Demetriou and Rozita Dimova

Border porosities: Movements of people, objects, and ideas in the southern Balkans Rozita Dimova

Intimacy and mobility in the era of hardening borders: Gender, reproduction, regulation Edited by Haldis Haukanes and Frances Pine

Border images, border narratives: The political aesthetics of boundaries and crossings Edited by Johan Schimanski and Jopi Nyman

Medicalising borders: Selection, containment and quarantine since 1800 Edited by Sevasti Trubeta, Christian Promitzer and Paul Weindling

Borders of desire

Gender and sexuality at the eastern

borders of Europe

Edited by

Elissa Helms and Tuija Pulkkinen

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2023

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6521 3 hardback

First published 2023

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Airut Heikkinen, Jakamaton /Indivisible

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of figures

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Gender, sexuality and desire at the eastern borders of Europe – Elissa Helms and Tuija Pulkkinen

1Crossing the lines on Lesvos: Navigating overlapping borders in the Aegean – Sarah Green

2Transgressing realities: Desire and the border in the southern Balkans – Rozita Dimova

3How do borders produce ethnosexualisation and lived senses of sexuality? Insights from lives of Latvian women in Guernsey – Aija Lulle

4Moving desire: Multiple lives and desires in border-crossing prostitution – May-Len Skilbrei

5Sex, love and a better future: Gendered desire in the narratives of women from post-socialist countries in Italy and Finland – Anastasia Diatlova and Lena Näre

6The hero and the ‘whore’: Croatia’s sexualised and gendered (self-)ascriptions and its desire for European belonging – Michaela Schäuble

7Desires for past and future in border-crossings on the Finnish–Russian border – Olga Davydova-Minguet and Pirjo Pöllänen

8Desire to resist: EU border-making and anti-LGBT mobilisation in Serbia – Katja Kahlina and Dušica Ristivojević

Index

List of figures

6.1Ferdinand Quiquerez, Antemurale Christianitatis (1892) Courtesy of the Croatian History Museum.

6.2Cover of the magazine Tjednik, 1997, ‘Why don’t they love us?’

List of contributors

Olga Davydova-Minguet is a professor of Border and Russian studies at the Karelian Institute of the University of Eastern Finland. She received her Master’s degree in Finnish and Russian philology at the Petrozavodsk state university in 1990, and her doctoral degree in folklore studies at the Joensuu university in 2009. Davydova-Minguet’s main research interests fall within the intersection of transnational migration, gender and cultural studies. She is particularly interested in transnational memory processes in the Finnish–Russian border context and mediatisation of transnational connections. Davydova-Minguet currently heads a research project funded by the Academy of Finland which investigates transnational mortal practices and meanings ascribed to death in the context of transnational migration from Russia to Finland. Her most recent journal articles have been published in Frontiers in Sociology, Genealogy and East European Politics and Societies and Cultures.

Anastasia Diatlova is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki. Her current research project focuses on the lived experience of men and gender-nonconforming people engaged in sex work. Her research interests include migration studies, labour, gender and sexuality, sex work and sex workers’ rights. She received her PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Helsinki in 2019 with a doctoral dissertation entitled Between Visibility and Invisibility: Russian-Speaking Women Engaged in Commercial Sex in Finland. She lectures on sociological theory and qualitative methods, and her work has been published in Gender, Place & Culture; Sexualities; Nordic Journal of Migration Research; Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics, and elsewhere.

Rozita Dimova is a social anthropologist. She has served as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Research Fellow at the Free and Humboldt Universities in Berlin, and Associate Professor in Southeast European Studies at Ghent University. She is also Founder and Permanent Board Member of the Center for Advanced and Interdisciplinary Research at the Saints Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia. Dimova is the author of Ethno-Baroque: Materiality, Aesthetics, and Conflict in Modern-Day Macedonia (Berghahn 2013) and Border Porosities: Movements of People, Objects, and Ideas in the Southern Balkans (Manchester University Press 2021).

Sarah Green is a social anthropologist based at the University of Helsinki, where she has worked since 2012. She has spent her academic career studying issues of space, place, location and borders, starting with research on safe space amongst radical and revolutionary feminist separatists in London. She moved on to study the reopening of the Greek−Albanian border following the end of the Cold War, and to look at the introduction of the Internet and digital technologies to Manchester. More recently, she has been studying how diverse borders and locations overlap in the Mediterranean region for an ERC Advanced Grant project she leads called Crosslocations. The main part of the Crosslocations research involves looking at the transportation of livestock across borders, the tracking of wild animals across borders and efforts to stop the spread of zoonotic disease. Her chapter in this book is part of the Crosslocations project.

Elissa Helms is a socio-cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor at the Department of Gender Studies at the Central European University in Vienna, Austria. She has been conducting ethnographic research in Bosnia−Herzegovina since 1997 on nationalism, gender, activism and the aftermath of war violence, with more recent work focusing on borders, race, European belonging and local responses to migration along the Balkan Route to the EU. In addition to her journal articles and book chapters, she is the author of Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nationalism, and Women’s Activism in Postwar Bosnia–Herzegovina (University of Wisconsin Press 2013), co-editor, with Xavier Bougarel and Ger Duijzings, of The New Bosnian Mosaic: Memories, Identities, and Moral Claims in a Postwar Society (Ashgate 2007), and co-editor with Aleksandra Sasha Milićević of the special issue of Nationalities Papers, ‘Masculinities after Yugoslavia,’ 34(3), 2006.

Katja Kahlina works as a senior researcher at the University of Helsinki where she leads a Kone Foundation-funded project entitled ‘Sexuality and Democracy: Exploring the links and rethinking the concepts for feminist politics’ (SEXDEM). Within SEXDEM, Katja analyses contemporary anti-gender mobilisation in Europe and explores the possibilities of feminist reappropriations of populism. Katja’s research commitments are to the study of sexual politics and political discourse, and the ways in which these two are culturally and geopolitically produced and entangled. In her publications, Katja has problematised the influence of ‘Europeanisation’ on LGBTI+ rights in Southeast Europe and has addressed the interplay of sexuality, populism and nationalism in the context of anti-gender mobilisation in Croatia. In addition to her engagements in SEXDEM, she serves as a Managing Editor of the journal Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory published by Helsinki University Press.

Aija Lulle is Senior Researcher at the University of Eastern Finland where she does research on interrelations between migration, ageing and home. She was Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Loughborough University, UK (2018–2022). Her research interests cluster around exploring migrants’ experiences and well-being over the life course. Lulle has pioneered research on ageing, gender and labour migration from the Baltic region to Western European countries and she has published widely on families, youth and older age migration in geography and interdisciplinary migration journals. She has co-edited a Special Issue on old age, sex and migration in the journal Sexualities (with Cornelia Schweppe); her monograph (together with Laura Moroşanu and Russell King), Young EU Migrants in London in the Transition to Brexit, was published by Routledge in 2022.

Lena Näre is Associate Professor of Sociology (tenure track) at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She holds a DPhil in Migration Studies from the University of Sussex, UK and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research focuses on migration, asylum, transnationalism, ageing, care work, precarity and ethnographic methods. Her research has been published in Sociology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Citizenship Studies and Journal of European Social Policy among others. She served as Vice-President and Member of the Executive Board of European Sociological Association from 2015 to 2019. She is Editor-in-Chief of Nordic Journal of Migration Research (Helsinki University Press) and Associate Editor of Global Social Challenges Journal (Bristol University Press).

Pirjo Pöllänen is Senior Researcher in migration, border studies and social policy at the Karelian Institute at the University of Eastern Finland. Pöllänen is studying the processes of the hollowing-out of the welfare state policies from several angles, namely precarisation of labour markets, rural border areas, migration, mobility and gender. She is engaged in everyday ethnographic methodology with her core expertise lying in border ethnographic studies on migration and mobility in the era of precarisation. Her most recent publications have appeared in the journals Frontiers in Sociology and Genealogy.

Tuija Pulkkinen is professor of Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research joins the disciplinary fields of philosophy, history and politics, and focuses on the politics and history of ideas and concepts. Her early work was on nineteenth-century German idealist philosophy, particularly Hegel, and on ideas and concepts of nation and the state, and she has intensively studied twentieth-century French thought, particularly Derrida and Foucault, as well as Judith Butler’s work. She has published The Postmodern and Political Agency (1996/2000) and co-edited The Ashgate Research Companion to the Politics of Democratization in Europe (2009) and Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought (2010). Her more recent work has concentrated on the politics of philosophy in contemporary feminist theory, and currently she is co-editing the Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy. She is also the editor-in-chief of the journal Redescriptions – Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory.

Dušica Ristivojević is a senior researcher at the University of Helsinki. Trained in sinology in Belgrade, Serbia, she holds MA and PhD degrees in Gender Studies from the Central European University (CEU), Budapest, and works in the areas of interdisciplinary Chinese and gender studies, media studies and international relations. Before moving to Helsinki, Ristivojević worked as a lecturer at Dong-A University, South Korea at CEU, Budapest, and as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She was a Chevening Fellow at the University of Oxford and MOFA Taiwan Fellow at the National Taiwan Normal University, and has served as a consultant for a number of in/formal organisations based in East Asia. She is collaborating with scholars and activists from the China–Hong Kong–Taiwan region and coordinates the Sino-Nordic Gender Studies Network based at NIAS, University of Copenhagen. At the same time, in recent years she has been analysing China’s presence in Serbia in the spheres of mining and digital technologies. Her most recent publications appear in Politics and Gender and Made in China Journal.

Michaela Schäuble is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology with a focus on Media Anthropology at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She is also the co-founder of EMB – Ethnographic Mediaspace Bern. Her research focuses on gendered experiences of violence, everyday religious practice and, more recently, on ecology and environmental humanities. She is the author of Narrating Victimhood: Gender, Religion, and the Making of Place in Post-War Croatia (Berghahn Books 2014/2017), and co-editor of ‘Rethinking the Mediterranean: Extending the Anthropological Laboratory across Nested Mediterranean Zones’ (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology 2021). Michaela has also published on artistic research and experimental media. In her current project, ‘Tarantism Revisited,’ she investigates corporeal dimensions of trance in Southern Italy. A feature-length essayistic documentary film with the same title, in collaboration with Anja Dreschke, is forthcoming.

May-Len Skilbrei is Professor at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research interests are mobility, gender, sexuality and law, and she has done empirical studies on subjectivities in and policy developments on prostitution, human trafficking, sexual violence and migration in the Nordic region, Estonia, Russia and Bulgaria. In recent years her main publications have dealt with sexuality and law in the Nordic region and in the European Union, and she recently published the book Sexual Politics in Contemporary Europe: Moving Targets, Sitting Ducks, co-written with Sharron FitzGerald (Palgrave 2022).

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank, first and foremost, the authors of the chapters of this book, who have persevered despite the time it has taken to complete this volume. We also thank them for their forbearance during the several rounds of comments which we have put everyone through. It has been wonderful to work with all of you!

Our most fundamental gratitude goes to the EastBordNet network, founded and skilfully led by Sarah Green as an EU-funded COST Action. EastBordNet inspired and made possible a series of workshops which we organised on the topic of gender and sexuality at the Eastern peripheries of Europe. These gatherings gave rise to the first ideas for this book and led to the writing of some of its chapters in their initial form. We thank particularly all the participants of the workshops organised through Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki and Gender Studies at the Central European University, then located in Budapest.

The American Anthropological Association meeting in San Jose, CA in November 2018 provided the framework for a panel discussion that pushed this book forward several steps. We thank the authors who were able to take part in that event. We also thank the University of Helsinki Faculty of Arts for funding a week-long visit which brought the two editors together in the summer of 2019 in Helsinki to work collaboratively on the book manuscript.

We are grateful to the Remaking Borders editor Hastings Donnan for accepting the book in the series, and particularly grateful to the external reviewers of the volume manuscript for their very helpful and supportive feedback. Finally, we wish to thank editor Tom Dark, who has been there from the beginning, and Laura Swift, at Manchester University Press, who have guided the manuscript to our final aim: to make the book publicly available and accessible to readers.

Introduction: Gender, sexuality and desire at the eastern borders of Europe

Elissa Helms and Tuija Pulkkinen

Borders have long figured at the centre of both political and personal dramas in the eastern parts of Europe, as elsewhere, whether at the focus of national claims to populations and territories or individual aspirations to cross borders and live on the other side. The more recent large and suddenly more visible numbers of people fleeing armed conflict and various degrees of political and economic violence have exacerbated the significance of already existing borders, both physical and symbolic. Yet the dramatic scenes of refugees moving in large groups through the Balkan Route or trapped at the Poland-Belarus border are only one of the ways in which borders have long shaped the lives and politics in the eastern regions of Europe. Since the collapse of state-socialist systems from 1989–91, border changes and contestations have especially marked life in these regions, particularly the Balkans and the Baltics, the focus of this collection. The symbolic and material divides between ‘West’ and ‘East’ in various configurations have been driving political rhetoric, as well as aspirations and movements across borders in the hopes of improved life conditions. These dynamics involve both desires and resistance. From whichever side you look at these borders, the desire to leave and to arrive, to emulate imagined conditions on the other side of the border, and aspirations to make a more liveable life elsewhere have long been part of life at the eastern borders of Europe, not least in the past three decades.

Gender and sexuality are invariably involved in these border dynamics in many ways, including the ways in which borders are imagined and constructed in political, legal and everyday discourses. Desires and hopes, restrictions and norms, and pushes and pulls governing motion at borders are gendered and sexualised in multiple registers. Crossing borders for marriage, for the expression of sexual identities or to engage in or consume sex work are obvious ways in which gender and sexuality drive border-crossings, but gendered and sexualised norms and aspirations are also strongly implicated in other border-related phenomena. These include work migration, invocations of legal and social realities across borders, and different versions of populism and nationalism, which range from homonationalist and femonationalist constructions to anti-gender movements, Islamophobia, anti-immigration sentiments and classically heterosexist nationalisms. Gender and sexuality have been an integral part of the shifting landscapes of border dynamics for the inhabitants of Europe’s ‘East’. The questions engendered by the existence of borders – why one has to move, why one wishes to move, why one cannot move, why one does not wish to let someone else move, why one wishes not to move – are caught up with gendered and sexual desires. Moreover, and this is the focus of this book, the existence of borders often produces such desires, desires that would not have existed in that form without the borders. The grass is always greener on the other side, some say. The very existence of borders generates desires to have whatever is believed to be on the other side. This book focuses on that kind of desire in relation to gender and sexuality: the kind of desire that is produced by the border itself.

Academic research, as well as popular thinking about borders, mostly focuses on the negative functions of borders: borders make things impossible, hinder, block, hamper, obstruct and bar the free expression of human desire. This tendency has only been magnified in recent years by the intense focus on migration and refugees. ‘No borders’, and thus free rein for the desire to move, is a slogan shared by a variety of actors keen to end arbitrary restrictions on movement as a way to enable all people to live a life free of fear and want, while advocates of border restrictions favour and build ever more impenetrable physical borders and legal barriers to freedom of movement. This framing of debates – border fortification vs. their dismantling altogether – reinforces a notion of borders as barriers, as obstacles to the realisation of human desires, whether that desire is positively or negatively perceived by others. Desire is thus seen as preceding the imposition of borders, a thing in itself that borders prevent.

In this collection we offer a different point of focus for thinking about the relationship of borders and desire: instead of looking at borders as obstacles to the free flow of desire we ask what is illuminated if we approach borders as being productive of desires. The chapters of this volume explore how borders do not simply block the fulfilment of desires but also generate desires. We draw on a performative approach, emphasising not what borders are, but what borders do – and in this case, what they produce. This shifts the analytical perspective so that borders are treated less as artefacts with respect to desires and more as sources of those desires: the borders’ existence, which marks some kind of difference between here and the other side, prompts tales of aspiration, fantasy, hope, fear and determination in the people who have become desiring subjects in the presence of borders. Drawing on this perspective, the book provides new insights into the productive and transformative qualities of borders.

Of course, plenty of scholarship already exists that explores what borders do, and that focuses on desires in their interaction with borders. Many years ago, coming from a set of concerns about identity and culture along the US–Mexico border, Gloria Anzaldúa (1987: 3), in Borderlands/La Frontera, approached borders as lines drawn to divide people. She wrote about all the ‘misfits’ who lived in the borderlands and discussed the ‘transgressors’ (herself amongst them) who tried to or did cross, and their sense of not fitting or not being understood, in terms of gender and sexuality amongst other things. Anzaldúa argued that the space of borderlands is a radical and transgressive space from the perspective of those trying to control territory and identity. Her work generated hundreds of studies that looked at border-crossing as being potentially transgressive, as a means to generate mixtures between people, places, ideas and even levels of wealth that the norms of the nation-state system prefer to be kept separate. Much of the literature on gender and migration points towards transgressive and emancipatory potentials for women border-crossers, as well as the pressures they face in coping with opposing gendered expectations from families and communities of origin as against those coming from the host society (Anthias and Lazaridis 2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Schmalzbauer 2009). Scholars have also examined the ways in which sexually non-conforming people aspire to cross borders and how their lives take on new forms once they cross (Carrillo and Fontdevila 2014; Fortier 2001), as well as how refugees and migrants navigate sexuality and sexual identities as they move through different migration regimes (Giametta 2017; Luibhéid 2002; Vogler 2016), or the role of gendered imaginaries in fuelling cross-border marriages (Constable 2003, 2005; Kim 2006). However, while much of this scholarship has in fact traced various desires people hold that nurture aspirations or propel them over borders, it has not explicitly focused on the way borders, as such, produce desire. In contrast, we find it important to ask how borders can also trigger people’s imaginations about what might be on that other side, providing potential for creating new desires that turn into aspirations, resentment, actions and movements. Unlike most studies, then, we are interested in examining desire as it is built through particular relations and circumstances, infrastructures and interventions that engage in different sorts of bordering practices and through which individuals are constantly called to be desiring subjects.¹

This book is thus distinctive in its focus on gender and sexuality, in its way of analysing the narratives and discourses from the point of view of desires, as well as in its emphasis on the desire-productive role of borders. It also stands out by connecting the border-produced desires to wider social and political structures and events. Sometimes desires spring from orientalising imaginaries of the other, sometimes from economy-inspired fantasies of a different life, and sometimes from ethnosexual projections or political histories. Borders define not only obstacles and divisions, but also possibilities and imagination. The desire-producing aspect of borders provides both a single interpretive frame and a novel approach towards thinking about borders. The contributors examine how the existence of a border inspires people to fantasise, to imagine the other side, and how people live in the crossroads of different border-produced desires, both in their hopes and in their fears concerning the other side of a border.

The approach

A key aspect of our approach in this collection is to acknowledge the performative dimension of borders: we approach borders as doing rather than as being. It has now become more common in border studies literature to consider border in verb form rather than as a noun, and to ask what borders do and are made to do. This is reflected in the way in which the terms ‘bordering’, ‘bordering practices’ and ‘border work’ (Reeves, 2014; van Houtum, Kramsch and Zierhofer 2005; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss and Cassidy 2019) have become more commonly used, replacing a simpler focus on where borders stand and how they are moved