Summary of Workshop 3, 2010 MEETING
WS3: Gender and Sexuality
Second Workshop 3 meeting
Central European University
Budapest (Hungary)
5-6 November 2010
Convenors:
Elissa Helms, with Allaine Cerwonka and Hadley Renkin
Helmse@ceu.hu
+36 1 327 3000
Topic: Border Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality
1. Meeting theme
This was the second WS3 meeting, so it was meant to build on the 2009 meeting in Helsinki. In fact, we adapted the theme/call for papers with the help of last year’s convenor, Tuija Pulkkinen, who suggested that it would be useful to focus more on sexuality and possibly also transgender issues. While we did not expect there would be enough Action members able to offer research on transgender issues, we did consciously build on the “trans” element in constructing the theme/call for papers. It read as follows:
Border transgressions of gender and sexuality
In recent years, there have been numerous debates within studies of gender and sexuality about transgender and transsexual, issues that fundamentally involve studies of conceptual border-crossing. At the same time, within border studies, there have been numerous debates about the way moral, social, and political debates about gender and sexuality have been transgressing borders in a variety of ways. This has been particularly the case in the eastern periphery of Europe, where diverse understandings of gendered and sexual relations have led to numerous and often heated debates about moral, social and political characteristics of such relations. For a prominent example, we need look no further than recent controversies accompanying violence and threats of violence at gay pride events in several countries on the eastern borders of Europe and the various issues that have emerged from such debates and incidents.
Following on from the first meeting of WS3, which considered the intersection of gender and sexuality at borders, both concrete and conceptual, this second meeting will focus on transgressions of dominant narratives and practices of gender and sexuality in relation to borders and other sorts of ‘crossings.’ We will explore how various understandings of gender and sexuality have been travelling across material and conceptual, political and social borders, and how shifting political conditions and debates about identity categories, values and morals are implicated in this travel and crossing. Here we have in mind debates about ethnic, racial and national identity; legal measures; material and bureaucratic aspects of moving across borders; as well as the physical processes of transgressing the boundaries of gender and sex. Contributions are invited not only on the experiences of people who feel themselves to be at the edges of gender and national borders (e.g. LGBTQ or those associated with non-normative sexual or gender identities), but also on those who identify or are identified with dominant gender and sex categories. Contributions are also invited on the travel of concepts across borders, of transnational life and thought in the area of gender and sexuality, and on sexual and gendered imaginaries of the national at the eastern peripheries of Europe.
Participants can offer to contribute an outline of a standard research paper in progress (to be completed and submitted after the workshop), a review essay on existing scholarship and/or a wiki entry outlining paths for further research on an aspect of the topics mentioned above. All contributions must be based on research or analysis carried out by the participants.
Our hope was to broaden the topics covered away from “the usual” focus on sex trafficking and cross-border prostitution, in addition to our desire to delve into issues of sexuality and transgression in the many ways described above. The paper proposals did not quite cover this breadth, but they did nevertheless offer several promising areas of inquiry. Unfortunately also, the quantity of proposals was significantly less than for most of the other meetings and workshops, such that we were not able to be as choosy about the quality of those we accepted, nor about the range of topics. Still, the topics covered and the quality of the discussions did not disappoint, showing the difficulty of judging the ultimate quality of the work from the submitted abstracts.
2. Participants
In total we were 19, two having canceled. One (Antke Engel) came only for the second day. There was a good mix of disciplines, even though anthropologists again dominated. In this respect, a geographer, a political scientist, a queer theorist, and a historian/feminist theorist were the ones to shake things up a bit in terms of new questions and approach. We were dominated by women and early career researchers but there were plenty of more experienced scholars. Participants attending came from 12 different countries, with about half representing countries on the eastern borders of Europe. (But there were no Hungarians among the Hungarian representatives). The paper presentations analyzed phenomena in 9 different countries, several about migrants coming from additional places, and 3 papers were more conceptual rather than based on one place.
Details on participants and paper presentations
Invited: 14 funded, 7 unfunded = 21 (actual participants: 13 + 6 = 19 total)
Early career: 13 (12 attended), Senior: 7 (6 attended)
Men: 4 (3 attended), Women: 17 (16 attended)
Countries of participants: Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland (2), France, Germany (2), Greece (did not attend), Hungary (7) (6 attended), Latvia, Macedonia, Norway, Sweden, UK. (Unofficially, from the Hungary group: 3 US, 1 UK, 2 Croatia, 1 Austrian who canceled)
Countries/regions covered by paper presentations: Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina/SE Europe, Germany, Hungary, Macedonia/Albania, Romania/Italy, Russia, Turkey/Bulgaria, UK/Latvia, Various (UK, Czech Republic, India, Denmark…)
Conceptual papers: 3
List of participants:
Magdalena Elchinova
Department of Anthropology
New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria
Jeanette Edwards
Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester, United Kingdom
Tuija Pulkkinen
Christina Institute for Women’s Studies
University of Helsinki, Finland
Joni Virkkunen
Karelian Institute
University of Joensuu, Finland
Michaela Schäuble
Institute for Social Anthroplogy
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
Antke Engel
Institute for Queer Theory, Berlin, Germany
Aija Lulle
Centre for Science and Technology Studies
Latvian Academy of Science, Latvia
Madeleine Hurd
History Department
Södertörn University, Sweden
Haldis Haukanes
Education and Health Promotion
University of Bergen, Norway
Meri Stojanova
NI, Institute and Museum, FYR Macedonia
Serge Weber
Social Sciences
Université Paris-Est, Marne-la-Vallée, France
Larissa Titarenko
Department of Sociology
Belarus State University, Republic of Belarus
Korana Radman
Faculty of Philosophy
University of Zagreb. Croatia
(currently an MA student at CEU Gender Studies)
(did not attend)
Dr Laura Alipranti-Maratou
EKKE
National Centre for Social Research, Greece
Participants from Hungary, all from the Department of Gender Studies, CEU, Budapest
Faculty members:
Elissa Helms (convenor)
Allaine Cerwonka
Hadley Renkin
Anna Loutfi
CEU Gender advanced PhD students:
Sanja Kajini?
Katja Kahlina
Paul Scheibelhofer (did not attend)
3. Meeting structure
Maximizing discussion, focusing on sexuality: Taking a cue from the feedback on the 2009 meetings, our first organizational priority was to maximize discussion. In terms of content, too, we sought to focus the research presentations more on sexuality than had been indicated in the abstracts submitted. We therefore urged accepted participants to consider this focus, as well as the conclusions from the 2009 Helsinki meeting, when developing their presentations and papers. We also asked several applicants to serve as discussants instead of giving papers, so as to cut down on the number of papers presented. Participants giving papers were asked to circulate a draft two weeks before the workshop to give everyone a chance to read them and discussants time to prepare their remarks. All drafts did come in before the workshop, but many were later than the deadline and some were sketchier than others.
Panel organization: Another decision was to create one session of parallel panels so as to “get through” more research presentations quickly and concentrate on discussion. 8 papers were delivered in this session: 2 panels of 2 papers each in each of 2 parallel sessions. Each session had a facilitator who reported back to the whole group in the following session. Participants without a role in these sessions were somewhat arbitrarily assigned to a group to keep the numbers even. After the parallel panels, there was a joint session with facilitators summing up the themes and discussions from the smaller groups, followed by time for comments and general discussion. Two more panels of 2 papers each were delivered to the whole group together: a panel on LGBT public demonstrations (Pride marches), a key topic of the city tour, and the last panel, which was designed to be more conceptual. The parallel panels of course had the drawback that not everyone heard every presentation, something that a few participants said they regretted and did emerge as a drawback. However, several participants also remarked on the cozy atmosphere created in the smaller groups and that this had stimulated nice discussions and quickly led to a sense of shared purpose.
Time limits: We considered going the extreme route of limiting participants to 5 minute presentations, but we reasoned that most people would go over the limit anyway, and that too much would be left unexplained so that the discussion period would be filled with elaborations and questions about the cases presented. So we set the limit for paper presentations at 15 minutes each, Discussant’s comments at 10 minutes, and 20-30 minutes for general discussion.
City tour: Another suggestion from past meetings had been that excursions might be better integrated into the meeting if they did not occur at the end. With this in mind, and because accommodation costs were low, we planned for everyone to stay 3 nights and for the meeting to cover two full days (instead of 1½ days), with a city tour on the morning of the second day. The tour was organized by Hadley Renkin, an anthropologist with many years’ experience researching LGBT activism in Hungary, to trace the sites of Budapest LGBT history as well as some general sights (see below). It’s not clear that we achieved the goal of incorporating insights from the tour into our subsequent discussions, probably due to the specificity of the topic and the range of other aspects of gender and sexuality in which participants were interested and that became topics of discussion. Still, the tour was a nice change of pace on a lovely morning which allowed for more informal conversations and, for about 8 of us, the chance to have lunch in a lesbian friendly café.
Social time, experiencing Budapest: Two group dinners were arranged each night after the meeting, with an option dinner the night of arrival. Participants were free to choose their own places for lunch, which they did in smaller groups. We also offered to lead participants to a local gay bar on Friday night but no one seemed up to it after the dinner. On Saturday night we suggested a visit to a local mineral bath (also an important site for Budapest LGBT history). Two participants went but turned around because there was a disco party going on with loud music. But there was plenty of good socializing time over lunches and dinners and the participants seemed to be satisfied with their experience of Budapest.
Concluding discussion: An hour and a half was scheduled for the concluding discussion, in which each participant had a chance (or was forced) to say something about their impressions, the most important themes for them, questions that still remained, etc. This session was also for pinning down next steps in terms of wiki entries and final papers. We were running a bit late and inevitably were a bit rushed at the end, but it was enough time to get into an interesting discussion. What suffered was the time for persuading people to write wiki entries, so that in the end we had only one such commitment. See below on the content of the discussion.
4. Summary of panel presentations and discussions
Group A: facilitated by Anna Loutfi
Participants + Cerwonka & Virkkunen
Panel 1: On the Border of Change? Perceptions and Experiences of Sexuality across State Borders
1. Larisa Titarenko: Perception of non-normative gender and sexual identities by the people with normative sexual and gender identities
2. Aija Lulle: Sexuality and migration experiences: Latvian women in Guernsey
Discussant: Sanja Kajini?
Panel 2: Transnational Commodity Markets in Bodies and Sexualities
1. Jeanette Edwards: Reproductive tourists: a misplaced or productive category?
2. Michaela Schäuble: A Filmic Investigation into the Correlation between Trafficking and International “Peacekeeping Mission” in the Balkans
Discussant: Anna Loutfi
Summary: The presentations covered several aspects of border crossing. Larisa Titarenko was concerned with perceptions of non-heterosexual identities as a product of “the west” and how her students in Belarus, exposed to representations of homosexuality mainly through non-Belarusian sources, grappled with such challenges to normative sexuality categories. Aija Lulle addressed the experiences of Latvian migrant women who are sexualized both by the residents of their host society on the Island of Guernsey and by members of their home communities back in Latvia. Jeanette Edwards offered a more geographically wide-ranging (and therefore “conceptual” in the above classification) inquiry into the crossing of borders by (sexualized and gendered) body parts as well as whole bodies, such as women who travel for reproductive tourism. Michaela Schauble discussed a documentary film’s representation of sex trafficking, mostly of women, to and from Bosnia-Herzegovina and the ways in which male-dominated military and civilian intervention forces were implicated in the development and sustenance of sex trafficking in the country after the war.
In discussion, the group talked about the issue of commodification, asking exactly what was being commodified and what sorts of other social processes were being affected by these transactions. Sparked by the issue of trafficking, the concept of slavery was discussed with Anna Loutfi pointing to its symbolic position as the antithesis of democracy in discourses about the modern state. On the subject of the materiality of borders, it was suggested that bodies might also be analyzed as material things in a productive way.
There was further discussion of how to treat “class” given the Marxist baggage of the term that renders it a rather “blunt instrument” for analytical purposes. This issue was related to observations about traveling notions of “class” positions that come with migrants when they cross borders, as well as local conceptions and markers of class and social status in the host society and the interaction thus created. It was also asked whether gender might be a similar blunt instrument of analysis and whether we might need to refine it to better get at the particulars of cross-border movement of bodies and concepts.
This led to reflections on the ways in which human bodies may be used in analysis to track and map out the changing contours and border of nation-states, using the idea of intimacy to capture the dynamic and complex relationship between laboring bodies and their “host” and “home” contexts. Intimacy, then, can be seen as a specific way of denoting power relations articulated as forms of national belonging and uprooting, with recourse to familial or sexual metaphors.
The use of metaphors also came up in relation to the discursive production of geographies and borders in relation to particular political or social issues, such as the commercialization of surrogacy in countries like India, where prostitution is often evoked as analogous with the renting out or selling of one’s body parts to a paying (perhaps “foreign”) clientele. Discussants pondered why certain metaphors, tropes and analogies such as prostitution are evoked time and time again, without any necessary local salience: i.e. providing no context or information about a given issue. Why does the study of borders lead or give way to particular, recurring, and emphatic metaphors like prostitution (in relation to sex work/trafficking, a migrating work force, commercial surrogacy, and other quasi-legal medical industries) – even as such metaphors tell us nothing about social practices “on the ground”?
Commodification was discussed as a political impetus or set of drives capable of crossing seemingly impenetrable borders and also erecting new kinds of borders “to be crossed,” described by Jeanette as the “constant search for new blood.” One response to this was that capitalist commodification is mystified precisely by delineating “as new” its operations which in fact are not new. How new then, are forms of commodification that seem to operate across newly erected borders, and whose agents and targets constitute seemingly new kinds of political or (trans)national subject-citizen?
Group B: facilitated by Elissa Helms
Participants + Renkin, Kahlina, & Pulkkinen
Panel 1: Imagining Borders through Gender, Race and Ethnicity
1. Madeleine Hurd: Passionate Masculinities and Territorial Claims in Germany’s Borderlands, 1918-19
2. Serge Weber: Italian invest, Romanian help: the mechanisms of migration and capital mobility in an enlarged EU
Discussant: Haldis Haukanes
Panel 2: Women, Border Crossing and Cultural (Re)egotiations
1. Magdalena Elchinova: Crossing the State Border, Coping with Contradictory Gender Regimes: Bulgarian-born Turkish Women, Migrants in Turkey
2. Meri Stojanova: Intermarriages: Crossing Political and Cultural Borders
Discussant: Korana Radman
Summary: This group focused on border crossings for marriage and (nominally) non-commodified sexual relations, as well as on emotional and moral narratives underpinning constructions of differences demarcating borders. Madeleine Hurd gave a passionate account of the passions stirred up and articulated as competing hierarchies of masculinity by Germans arguing for the German-ness of cities contested by Poland and Denmark in the early 20th century. Serge Weber examined the implications of movements of capital and labor in the case of Italian (male) investors and women from Romania and Ukraine who serve as secretaries, translators, and sexual partners. Magdalena Elchinova presented a paper on Bulgarian Turkish migrants to Turkey and the ways in which the Bulgarians were derided in gendered terms by the local population, the women for working and the men for “letting their women work.” And Meri Stojanova discussed her work with Albanian Catholics who migrate to Macedonia as the wives of Orthodox Macedonians and who emphasize the common bonds of Christianity despite differences in language and variant of Christianity.
Discussion pulled out the issue of class and its malleability, especially when individuals cross borders. Marriage and long-term sexual/domestic relationships were discussed along with wage labor as mechanisms of class mobility even as individuals traveled through different gender and class regimes when they crossed borders. There was a fear of being socially (or in terms of class) downgraded. Serge Weber noted, however, that there was a price to pay for migration, especially for women, even when they did it out of a desire for emancipation, as they were then unable to fulfill their roles at home.
In the process of crossing borders, it was noted that morality was often stressed in different ways by informants in their explanations of why they had migrated or married across borders. Crucially, we noted that such moral narratives were always contextual: Albanian Catholics marrying Orthodox Macdeonians stressed religious commonalities despite profoundly different languages in a way that would have been unthinkable, for example, between Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs whose language(s) pose no communication barriers. These moral narratives implicitly denied the immoral, particularly for women but also for men who wanted to avoid any suspicion that such movements and marriages might have been in any way commodified. The danger of association with prostitution very often loomed in the background. Instead, love and attraction were stressed, prompting participants to discuss the role of emotion in narrating commonalities across borders, but also, as in the case of Madeleine’s paper, in constructions of difference.
Serge’s presentation brought out the connection between economic imperatives, class mobility, and expressions of desire, sexuality and love. This led us to consider the fragility of moralizing narratives and the social and economic contingencies of desire, sexuality, love, and marriage. We also talked about the resort to national(ist) and gender stereotypes, especially in public discourses, whether in newspaper accounts or through what Meri described as “learned answers” about what people think they are supposed to say when responding to the media or outsiders’ questions.
Panel 5: ‘Perverting’ the Nation with Pride
1. Joni Virkkunen: Purity and the Immoral West in post-Soviet Russian Sexuality Discourse
2. Hadley Renkin: Perverse Frictions: Pride, Dignity, and the Budapest LGBT March
Discussant: Katja Kahlina
Summary: Joni explored the politics of pride in the context of discourses of demographic crisis (falling birth rates), HIV/AIDS as caused by homosexuals, national security, and evocations of rights by both LGBT activists as well as anti-gay protesters insisting that their rights are being infringed. Hadley examined debates in Hungary among LGBT activists over the change from “Pride” to “Dignity” marches as an attempt at, or at least ultimate move towards, normalization and increased popular acceptance.
Katja pointed to the border issues involved in these cases, especially as the terms and forms of LGBT activism are often seen as coming, and often do come, from from “West.” The discussion explored issues of translation as political strategies, as in Hadley’s pointing out that the word “pride” is not in the Hungarian Constitution as a civil right, whereas “dignity” is there. We discussed what was lost, however, through such processes of normalization even as they afforded certain political benefits.
Panel 6: Interrogating the Intersectionality of Borders, Gender and Sexuality
1. Allaine Cerwonka: Slippery Paths: On the Difficulties and Possibilities of Thinking Sexuality and Borders Together
2. Antke Engel: Desire as a Mode of Transgressing Borders?
Discussant: Tuija Pulkkinen
Summary: Allaine reflected on how to think about the connections between sexuality and borders through what she proposed was the creation of geographies of rape by the international news media and humanitarian aid industry. Antke continued the focus on violence and sexuality with a rumination on the concept of desire as a way out of rigid gender binaries which allows us to see and theorize a wider range of power relationships than the concept of sexuality.
Tuija was concerned that we carefully differentiate between sexuality and violence, especially when it comes to rape. Antke said this was why desire was crucial, as a way of relating to the Other that can also take violent forms. There was a discussion about the classic feminist insistance, a la Brownmiller, that rape was violence through sexual means rather than a violent form of sex. Some participants pointed out that rape has profoundly sexualized consequences, both on the individual level but also on the geopolitical level, as Allaine showed with her CNN clip. We generally agreed that we needed to do more work on theorizing the relationship between eroticism (desire) and power (as linked to violence among other things).
5. Concluding discussion
Our hour and a half was cut short because we were running late. Still, we had time for each participant to share their thoughts on what had been most important or most significant for them or questions they still had after the workshop.
There was some consensus that we still need to push our theorizing further. The concept of border was revisited, both by veterans of EastBordNet and by those not familiar with previous discussions and working papers by the network. Questions were asked about the bordering practices of the organization of the network itself and its funding requirements as an exercise of power by the EU. Further discussion revisited questions of borders as material and physical sites vs. conceptual categories, with Hadley Renkin asking whether borders might not just be indicators of processes unfolding elsewhere. In another, related thread, there was also a discussion about materializing bodies in the same way as we treat borders as material, as in bodies that cross borders as material objects.
Many also expressed dissatisfaction with our theorizing of gender and sexuality, particularly the relationship between power and sexuality, calling for more precision about these concepts. Antke Engel’s suggestion that we substitute desire for sexuality as a way to escape hierarchical gender binaries led to continued productive discussion about the relationship between desire, power, and violence. However, many participants were skeptical in the end, feeling that her approach was too abstract. Anna Loutfi warned that there were things we cannot know, desire being foremost among them, while Katja Kahlina asked how we could specify and theorize sexuality as something outside of the social or pre-social. Jeanette Edwards added that desire cannot be conceptualized without an Other, which means it must be socially and historically shaped. She also asked whether it was at all possible to separate sexuality from desire. Participants called for further theorizing that was grounded in human experiences.
This call was related to the insights brought out in several presentations that desire, love, and sexuality are inextricably linked to aspirations to class mobility and fears of being socially downgraded and to cross-border movements themselves. This emerged particularly from Serge Weber’s presentation which stressed the precariousness of late capitalism/neoliberalism where workers and would-be workers face particularly unstable conditions that contribute greatly to their decisions to migrate and to the development of their feelings towards sexual and romantic partners from across borders. Antke suggested the term precarity, which many participants liked for the way in which it captured a variety of aspects of contemporary economic and social conditions and particularly advanced our thinking about commodification (across borders). Hadley Renkin asked, however, whether borders or contemporary neoliberal configurations were more precarious than in other times and places.
And how are they different from the non-precarious? Is anything not precarious?
Many participants also indicated a wish to further specify our understanding of the role of class. Was there another concept we could substitute in order to get more analytical purchase? Can we apply the notions of potential, imminence, or liminality as we discussed doing for violence and for borders? And can the same thing be done with gender and/or sexuality?
Another theme was the consistent appearance of moral narratives, particularly expressions of outrage when it came to violations of or improper use of female sexuality. As Michaela Schauble put it, these reactions, including those surrounding mass rapes in Congo as discussed by Allaine Cerwonka, point to the commodification of value systems, or sexuality as a particular type of currency. This was similar to Serge Weber’s suggestion to (analytically) treat sex as an object, as something that circulates in both physical and discursive ways on multiple levels. These examples tied together many of the themes of the workshop: notions of morality, emotion, sexuality, desire, and eroticism; commodification and precarity vis-à-vis sexuality and gender; and the relationship of all of these to power and violence.
6. Tasks agreed upon
Papers: All participants who sent in paper drafts are expected to submit a final version of their paper by 31 January. (Originally we had set the deadline at 10 December but participants felt this was too soon so we agreed to extend it, as it turns out, past the official limit of two months. However, we felt this was necessary given the end of the Autumn semester for many and the winter holidays.)
Wiki entries: several options were suggested, starting with “commodification” as it relates to gender, sexuality and the movement of bodies across and along borders; the relationship between capital and labor; the “price tag” of sexuality in the context of migration or “class” mobility; or desire in the context of migration. Many suggested wiki writers were already producing research papers or were otherwise committed to other projects, so that in the end, no wiki entries were promised.
7. Optional activity: City tour of Budapest’s gay and lesbian history
This city tour was organized by Hadley Renkin, a member of the faculty in the Gender Studies Department at CEU and an anthropologist whose research focuses on LGBT activism in Hungary and other post-socialist countries of Europe. He engaged a professional tour guide who is also a long time member of Budapest’s LGBT community to put together her own vision of significant places in LGBT history (that were accessible in a two hour bus tour). Hadley also contributed insights from his own research, which enriched the presentation. Our guide showed us some standard Budapest sites but made the focus on the geographies of lesbian and gay life in the city both during and after state socialism. We were taken around by bus but also got out to walk in several places. Conveying this early history entailed passing many cafes, bars, and clubs where gays and lesbians used to gather. It also encompassed some of Budapest’s famous mineral baths and a 19th century figure, Károly Kertbeny, who is credited with coining the term “homosexual” and whose grave has become a pilgrimage site for the contemporary LGBT community. Sites that have become significant more recently included monuments, streets, squares, and bridges of national-historical importance that had been part of the route of recent Pride/Dignity Parades, some of which had turned violent, in part as a response to LGBT activists’ claims to spaces of national importance. Here, Hadley was able to explain the significance of the places covered and the arguments put forth by the anti-LGBT counter-protesters that showed the convergence of sexuality with national identity and the geography of the city.
The tour was particularly interesting to those interested in LGBT activism and in the integration/marginalization of LGBT life in urban spaces but less so to other participants it seemed. In some ways it was unfortunate to have to only point out the fronts of cafes and bars (and in one case, a Raiffeisen Bank branch which had replaced the café in question) without having the chance to go inside, but it was a Saturday morning so this was perhaps to be expected. Still, it was a nice chance to get out and see Budapest, to interact informally with each other, and to recharge ourselves for the second part of the workshop.
8. Further topics and reflections
As continuation from the Helsinki meeting, we succeeded in focusing more strongly on sexuality and also on furthering our thinking about commodification and other economic aspects that were first brought up in Helsinki. As in Helsinki, we discussed the limits of class as an analytic tool and speculated on, but did not come to any conclusions about, what some possible alternatives might be. We did less of a good job in exploring the notion of “trans” and “transgression,” whether in the material/physical or metaphorical/discursive senses, as something we had called for in the workshop description. We were less concerned with sex trafficking or with conceptualizing border as such, though neither of these was absent from discussions.
Reflecting on the reports from the other WG and WS meetings so far, it is remarkable the overlap of themes that also appeared in this meeting: for example, the appearance of money and the economic in various guises; notions of East as well as west, north/south, etc.; the appearance of moral narratives to mark and (re)produce borders; and the observation that crossing borders means crossing systems of gender but also of sexual behavior and a whole host of other morally coded social categories and regimes.