The Sexual Politics of Border Control conceptualises sexuality as a method of bordering and uncovers how sexuality operates as a key site for the containment, capture and regulation of movement. By bringing together queer scholarship on borders and migration with the rich archive of feminist, Black, Indigenous and critical border perspectives, it highlights how the heteronormativity of the border intersects with the larger dynamics of racial capitalism, imperialism and settler colonialism; reproductive inequalities; and the containment of contagion, disease and virality. Transnational in focus, this book includes contributions from and about different geopolitical contexts including histories of HIV in Turkey; the politics of reproduction in Palestine/Israel; settler colonialism and anti-Blackness in the United States; the sexual geographies of the Balkan and Southern Europe; the intimate politics of marriage migration between Vietnam and Canada; and sex work in Australia, the United States, France and New Zealand. This collection constitutes a key intervention in the study of border and migration that highlights the crucial role that sexual politics play in the reproduction and contestation of national border regimes. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

This book explores the wats sexual divisions are constituted, regulated and transgressed.

Lesbians, prostitutes, women likely to have sex across racial lines, "brought to the United States for immoral purposes, " or "arriving in a state of pregnancy" -- national threats, one and all. Since the late nineteenth century, immigrant women's sexuality has been viewed as a threat to national security, to be contained through strict border-monitoring practices. By scrutinizing this policy, its origins, and its application, Eithne Luibheid shows how the U.S. border became a site not just for controlling female sexuality but also for contesting, constructing, and renegotiating sexual identity. Initially targeting Chinese women, immigration control based on sexuality rapidly expanded to encompass every woman who sought entry to the United States. The particular cases Luibheid examines -- efforts to differentiate Chinese prostitutes from wives, the 1920s exclusion of Japanese wives to reduce the Japanese-American birthrate, the deportation of a Mexican woman on charges of lesbianism, the role of rape in mediating women's border crossings today -- challenge conventional accounts that attribute exclusion solely to prejudice or lack of information. This innovative work clearly links sexuality-based immigration exclusion to a dominant nationalism premised on sexual, gender, racial, and class hierarchies.

Borders are changing in response to terrorism and immigration. This book shows why this matters, especially for sovereignty, individual liberty, and citizenship.

Today within neoliberal democracies, gender and sexuality provisions give people the opportunity of being granted social and legal protection. But how does the asylum system intervene within claimants’ understandings of themselves and in what ways does this affect their livelihoods in the country of arrival? The Sexual Politics of Asylum emerges from a 2 year long ethnography, which explores the experiences of 60 gender and sexual minority refugees in the UK. Bringing previously unheard stories to the forefront, this enlightening volume challenges dominant notions about the construction of sexuality and gender as an instrument for claiming rights in a world shaped by postcolonial relations. Giametta first examines why the migratory experience of the studied migrants is located within a set of humanitarian-inflected discourses that privilege suffering and trauma. This is then followed by an assessment of the respondents’ biographical accounts, which consequently uncovers how being situated in liminal socio-political and legal interstices produces precarious forms of life. Whilst the topic of asylum for gender and sexual minorities has attracted wide media coverage over the past decade, there persists a lack of academic attention to the complex experiences of these refugees. As such, this timely book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in human rights, sociology, anthropology, migration, sexuality, gender and cultural studies, as well as people working within the refugee granting process.

Today within neoliberal democracies, gender and sexuality provisions give people the opportunity of being granted social and legal protection. But how does the asylum system intervene within claimants’ understandings of themselves and in what ways does this affect their livelihoods in the country of arrival? The Sexual Politics of Asylum emerges from a 2 year long ethnography, which explores the experiences of 60 gender and sexual minority refugees in the UK. Bringing previously unheard stories to the forefront, this enlightening volume challenges dominant notions about the construction of sexuality and gender as an instrument for claiming rights in a world shaped by postcolonial relations. Giametta first examines why the migratory experience of the studied migrants is located within a set of humanitarian-inflected discourses that privilege suffering and trauma. This is then followed by an assessment of the respondents’ biographical accounts, which consequently uncovers how being situated in liminal socio-political and legal interstices produces precarious forms of life. Whilst the topic of asylum for gender and sexual minorities has attracted wide media coverage over the past decade, there persists a lack of academic attention to the complex experiences of these refugees. As such, this timely book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in human rights, sociology, anthropology, migration, sexuality, gender and cultural studies, as well as people working within the refugee granting process.