Introduction: Gender, sexuality, and desire at the eastern borders of Europe – Elissa Helms and Tuija Pulkkinen

1 Crossing the lines on Lesvos: Navigating overlapping borders in the Aegean – Sarah Green

2 Transgressing realities: Desire and the border in the southern Balkans – Rozita Dimova

3 How do borders produce ethno-sexualisation and lived senses of sexuality? Insights from lives of Latvian women in Guernsey – Aija Lulle

4 Moving desire: Multiple lives and desires in border-crossing prostitution – May-Len Skilbrei

5 Sex, love, and a better future: Gendered desire in the narratives of women from post-socialist countries in Italy and Finland – Anastasia Diatlova and Lena Näre

6 The hero and the ‘whore’: Croatia’s sexualized and gendered (self-)ascriptions and its desire for European belonging – Michaela Schäuble

7 Desires for past and future in border crossings on the Finnish-Russian border – Olga Davidova-Minguet and Pirjo Pöllänen

8 Desire to resist: EU border-making and anti-LGBT mobilization in Serbia – Katja Kahlina and Dušica Ristivojevic?

'Within a literature and dominant political discourse that overwhelmingly continue to view borders as obstacles, this book regards borders as performative: it asks what borders ‘do’, rather than what they ‘are’. By asking how borders produce – rather than only thwart – desires, the authors look afresh at the many ways gender and sexuality are at issue in border crossing.'
Jane Cowan, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of Sussex

Borders of desire takes a novel approach to the study of borders: rather than seeing them only as obstacles to the fulfillment of human desires, this collection focuses on how borders can also be productive of desire.


Based on long-term engagement with sites along the eastern borders of Europe, particularly in the Baltics and the Balkans, the studies in this volume illuminate how gendered and sexualised desires are generated by the existence of borders and how they are imagined. The book takes a performative approach, emphasising not what borders are, but what borders do – and, in this case, what they produce. Borders are thus treated less as artefacts of desires and more as sources of desire: a border’s existence, which marks a difference between here and there, can trigger imaginations about what might be on the other side, creating new desires expressed as aspirations, resentments, actions, movements, political ideals or resistance. As the chapters show, sometimes these desires spring from orientalising imaginaries of the other, sometimes from economically inspired fantasies of a different life, and sometimes from ethnosexual projections or reimaginings of political pasts and futures. Taken as a whole, Borders of desire offers new perspectives on the work borders do, as well as on the gendered and sexed lives of those in and from the eastern borders of Europe, and the persistent East/West symbolic divide that continues to permeate European political and social life.