Intimacy and Mobility in an Era of Hardening Borders: Gender, Reproduction, Regulation

This book is a collection of articles by anthropologists and social scientists concerned with gendered labour, care, intimacy and sexuality, in relation to mobility and the hardening of borders in Europe. Interrogating the relation between physical, geopolitical borders and ideological, conceptual boundaries, this book offers a range of vivid and original ethnographic case studies that will capture the imagination of anyone interested in gendered migration, policies of inclusion and exclusion, and regulation of reproduction and intimacy.

The first part of the book presents ethnographic and phenomenological discussions of people’s changing lives as they cross borders, how people shift, transgress and reshape moral boundaries of proper gender and kinship behaviour, and moral economies of intimacy and sexuality. In the second section, the focus turns to migrants’ navigation of social and financial services in their destination countries, putting questions about rights and limitations on citizenship at the core. The final part of the book scrutinises policy formation at the level of state, examining the ways that certain domains become politicised and disputed at different historical junctures, while others are left outside of the political. – .