Conference Presentations by Michelle Pfeifer
In her path-breaking work Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Gloria E. Anzaldúa parsed out the relat... more In her path-breaking work Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Gloria E. Anzaldúa parsed out the relationship between heteronormativity and the stretching of the border into various borderlands, subjectivities, and temporalities. In the context of ongoing migration and the intensification of border regimes, this formative thesis on the relationship between borders and sexuality needs renewed attention and consideration. How do sexuality and borders intersect? What role does sexuality play in the production, maintenance, and disruption of contemporary border regimes? How do borders as features of racial capitalism multiply inequalities via sexuality and, conversely, how is sexuality mediated through racialized border regimes? While people continue to move across borders, sexuality becomes a dominant frame through which such movement is attempted to be captured, framed, and contained. At the same time, the border becomes understood, organized, and contested through sexuality and sexual discourse. In response to these phenomena, this symposium conceptualizes sexuality as a method of bordering and thinks sexuality beyond identity towards its multifarious entanglements with contemporary border regimes. From moral panics about migrant sexuality, the pornotropic gaze of surveillance technologies, to media discourses about reproduction and contagion, sexuality can be said to play a key role in how borders are policed and managed. At the same time, intimacy, desire, and sexuality have become rallying points in challenging borders as seen in queer activism against deportations, critiques of homonationalism and imaginations of different sexual futures and political horizons. Bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplinary and regional contexts, this symposium aims to show how sexuality matters for the study of and struggles around borders. Topics include but are not limited to: ● Intimacy of border control, touch, and the haptic ● Sexual transmission, deviancy, and national health ● Family, state and, national reproduction ● Sexual panics and the intensification of border regimes ● Trans perspectives on gendered and sexualised border regimes ● Sexual violence, detention, and state violence ● Sex work, discourses of trafficking, and migrant sex work activism
Papers by Michelle Pfeifer
Culture Machine, 2021
Rather than taking for granted the emergence and implementation of data-driven automated technolo... more Rather than taking for granted the emergence and implementation of data-driven automated technologies as smooth tools of migration governance, I analyze how the discursive and political narration of intelligent borders is central for the socio-technical renderings of data-driven border and migration policing. To this end, I analyze the implementation of data-driven and semi-automated technologies to authenticate and recognize asylum seekers' identities and claims in the context of asylum administration and migration control in Germany, with a particular focus on the practice of forensic smartphone data extraction. First, I argue that discourses of intelligent borders produce smartphone data as representative of a person's history of flight and persecution, affecting a shift in asylum proceedings and decision-making that impacts political and legal personhood. Second, I show that current discursive framings of migration as a crisis in Europe make possible the proliferation of machine learning technologies in which invocations of intelligent borders reify migration management as a system of governance and administration that functions seamlessly. Third, I argue that local instances when data-driven and computational technologies emerge allow us to interrogate moments of failure and contestation and reveal the longer development of the legal and political convergence of racial securitization and migration as constitutive of the (partial) consolidation of power in the European border regime. As such, media technologies like the smartphone function to mediate contestations and struggles over the freedom of movement, recognition, and belonging.
Ethnic and Racial Studies , 2021
In this introductory article to the special issue, we ask what role sexuality plays in the reprod... more 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 racialisation, (II) national regimes of reproductive control and (III) the containment of contagion, disease and sexual deviance.
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Conference Presentations by Michelle Pfeifer
Papers by Michelle Pfeifer