Borders and Stories: Feminist Geographic Perspectives on Bordering in the United States

My senior research project in geography draws on perspectives from feminist and critical geography to explore borders and bordering processes in the United States today. This project seeks to be twofold, a work of both... [ view full abstract ]

My senior research project in geography draws on perspectives from feminist and critical geography to explore borders and bordering processes in the United States today. This project seeks to be twofold, a work of both synthesis and translation. First, I reflect on the discipline’s contributions to border studies and in particular contributions from feminist geography, including its focus on the production of knowledge; its attention to identity as a material operator in sociospatial interactions; and its commitment to centering perspectives traditionally pushed to the academic outskirts. These perspectives help us see state borders as more than thin lines in space, painting borders as both constantly produced by intimate social interactions and embodied in people and places beyond the precise points of territorial division. I then consider the emancipatory potential of geographic practice, in an exploration of using storytelling, through maps and audio, to translate these powerful ideas outside the academy accessibly and inclusively. Understanding borders as denoting and producing sets of divisions and groupings, I explore ways to create counter-narratives to the exclusionary imaginaries in which we are enmeshed. If feminist geography studies difference and power, what can it teach us about dismantling the borders that divide us?