Moving Between Worlds: Border Women in Narratives of Forced Displacement in Greece

In this paper I look at refugee women’s narratives of border crossings and inhabiting borderlands. Following tracks and traces of feminist geopolitics, the paper unfolds in three parts: first I explore borders as political, cultural and material practices, particularly focusing on the sea borders of the Aegean islands as gateways to ‘the fortress Europe’. Then I consider border situations within symbolic and imaginary spaces inspired by feminist critical poetics. Finally, I turn to women’s stories, which were not so much about understanding borders and their contested politics, but rather about the risks and joys of crossing them at any cost, as well as about surviving the borderlands. My argument is that refugee women’s stories of forced displacement challenge abstract theorization of borders and illuminate the importance of embedded and embodied practices in understanding the borderlands as liminal and marginalized spaces of transition, thus contributing to a wider project of charting feminist political geographies.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Gender, Place and Culture on 28/10/2020, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0966369X.2020.1825216.