[ Call for Papers ]

The online journal Re-public invites contributions for the upcoming special issue entitled Gendering Border Crossings. Most of the debate on sexual migration has been fashioned by the discourse of trafficking. Largely dominated by gendered representations of feminine victims and male victimizers, this discourse has come to complement the perception of migration as a dangerous and threatening form of border crossing associated with illegality and criminality.

Beyond the moralizing politics of trafficking, where humanitarianism is happily wed with policing, however, border crossings linked to the sexual industry or/and sexual relations continue to take place and have in fact flourished opening up spaces of transnational and transgender flux. From sexual tourism to transnational love affairs, from forced prostitution to
migration for employment in the sex industry, the range of gendered crossings seems to present multiple challenges to the ethnocentric and gendered bias of contemporary politics. This special issue aims to explore the dynamics and potentialities of gendering border crossings. Potential papers may include the following:

1. Analyzing and problematizing forms of exclusion and inclusion produced
2. through border crossings
3. Exploring representations of sexual desire and identity in border
4. crossings.
5. Identifying challenges to gendered and ethnocentric notions of the
6. political
7. Critically assessing gendered and racist biases that often underpin
8. anti-trafficking policies and the protection of the victims of
9. trafficking.
10. Conceptualizing the political character of sexual border crossings
11. beyond the trafficking discourse
12. Exploring alternative practices and migrant identities that emanate
13. from the sexing of borders.

Essays should be approximately 1.500 words long

Please submit contributions in any electronic format to: kambouri@re-public.gr

Issue editor: Nelly Kambouri

Deadline for submissions: 30 April 2008.