Book Review: Bordering Intimacy

Post by Dr Sara Marino. Sara is Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Her recent book “Mediating the Refugee Crisis. Digital Solidarity, Humanitarian Technologies and Border Regimes” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) critically explores the evolution of migration governance in Europe through the lens of technological mediation and asks in what ways communication technologies have contributed to the strengthening of Fortress Europe, while providing opportunities for resistance among migrants, activists and solidarity groups. She is on Twitter @SN_Marino

Review of Bordering Intimacy. Postcolonial governance and the policing of family by Joe Turner (Manchester University Press 2020).

Joe Turner’s fascinating book provides a compelling and timely analysis of the relationship between familial intimacy and the historical evolution of borders in Britain. Thoroughly researched and informed by a rich literature consisting of post-colonial, decolonial and Black feminist scholars, the book sheds light on the convoluted trajectories of mobility and citizenship today as well as in the past, while demonstrating how profoundly political ‘family work’ is in a context where westernized conceptions of ‘family’ have actively supported the reproduction of colonial and post-colonial power.

The book has three overarching aims that constitute the backbone of the analysis: first, to discuss how intimacy intersects with questions of bordering power; second, to explore the role that family plays in mobility management; and third, to observe how intimacy itself can constitute a new form of bordering. The ultimate value of this book is its contribution to our collective understanding of how bordering power—the symbolic, cultural and economic processes that construct the migrant as the ‘other’—is also dictated by political configurations of ‘family work’ through the exercise of the ‘right’ forms of intimacy. In arguing that “borders follow and surveil bodies as part of the domesticating states” (p. 57), Turner’s work invites us to critically interrogate the intricacies of (post) colonial racism and sexuality in the making of European empires, and most importantly, in the perpetuation of colonial governance in today’s management of mobility. “Dominant modes of socio-sexual intimacy,” the author says, “have been central to the organization of personhood and violence in modernity, including questions of who can/cannot move” (p. 5).

The book is divided into two main sections. The first half of the book introduces the reader to the relationship between borders and family in historical terms. This is done through the analysis of ‘domestication’ which, in the author’s words, has worked as a “liberal humanist project in which European order is imagined to be universal and universalized through imperialism” (p. 37) by subjecting lands and people to systemic violence and abuse. This focus on domestication helps the reader to better contextualize the relationship between family, borders and empire by situating the notion of family at the center of state formation. This is crucial to understanding how states have evolved through the mechanism of inclusion (the whiteness of domesticity), but more crucially through the exclusion, dispossession and control of the ‘undomesticated’ and uncivilized.

The historical framework outlined in Chapters 1 and 2 serves as a preparatory layout for the second half of the book, which focuses on how colonial logics still operate in contemporary Britain. Chapter 3 looks at what the author calls ‘intimate borders,’ which are explored through the analysis of how sham marriages in the UK have been recently placed at the center of ever more restrictive immigration policies. This part intersects with broader discussions around issues of national security, the authenticity of “sham marriages, intimacies or families” (p. 25) and the public display of the ‘unintegrated woman’ to safeguard what ‘real family’ is supposed to look like. From the notion of intimate borders, the author then moves to the analysis of how borders can become ‘sticky’ by acting as labels that only stick to certain racialized bodies and identities, resulting in political acts of delegitimization and citizenship deprivation. Bordering here is seen not simply as the targeting of those with precarious citizenship statuses, but also of those who already have citizenship rights but are made unwelcome by portraying them as monsters. The focus then shifts from the ‘unintegrated woman’ to the deviant Black or Asian man who is placed at the center of public debates around the dangers of street grooming or gang crime. By making “large numbers of British citizens deportable” (p. 27), racialized masculinity works as an active force in favor of white masculinity and white femininity, affecting “the double bind of forgetting the everyday violence that affects many women of colour” (p. 158).

The final declination of borders is perhaps unexpected as attention is placed not on how certain identities are again excluded, but upon how trajectories of inclusion operate on a more visual level. Chapter 6, ‘The good migrant,’ focuses on how visual regimes of representation can also create borders by only making visible those subjects deemed as ‘good migrants’ while reinforcing humanitarian/securitization narratives that serve to exacerbate the invisibility of the criminal migrant. “Who is made invisible,” Turner says, “who is pictured, who is imaged as a problem, who is imagined as in need of saving or as a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ migrant runs through these technologies and shapes the contemporary politics of mobility” (p.198).

After outlining how mundane practices of governing highlight systemic and deep-rooted violence against the ‘other,’ the final chapter turns to a generative analysis of how bordering can be contested and resisted. This is a crucial aspect in Turner’s fascinating study—and one that promises to expand the debate on how borders can be challenged from the bottom up. The first strategy we encounter is described as ‘inversions,’ or as “forms of counter-surveillance” and “visual empowerment” (p. 222) that reveal the intrinsic violence of borders through mediatized forms of witnessing. The second strategy, ‘escapes,’ or “modes of becoming invisible” (p. 222), comes alive through people’s refusal to be recognized based on identity markers such as fingerprints and documents. The final strategy—‘decolonial aesthetis’— pushes the practice of borders resistance by promoting the establishment of creative and artistic projects aiming at challenging the racialized codes of intimacy. This is an important and incredibly fruitful conclusion that could also be contextualized as central to the formation of a transnational public sphere, where alternative modes of agency are not only recognized, but also accepted as legitimate.

The book has many merits, but what I found especially worthy is how the notion of borders is approached holistically, from border checks and visa regimes to the subtle forms of everyday racism and violence that often go unnoticed in their mundane normalization. The focus on intimacy as an entry point for broader discussions around race, violence, forced mobility and immobility paves the way for more critical debates around citizenship and migration, which need further investigation in the current climate. To this end, the book will appeal not only to scholars and students working in the fields of migration, border security and international relations, but also to artists and individuals who are planning to contest border politics through more creative pathways.

Any comments about this post? Get in touch with us! Send us an email, or post a comment here or on Facebook. You can also tweet us.

__________   

How to cite this blog post (Harvard style) 

Marino, S. (2021). Book Review: Bordering Intimacy. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2021/11/book-review [date]