Screening Unlivable Lives: The Cinema of Borders

Abstract

Border anxiety currently dominates the political rhetoric of Western governments and is dutifully amplified by the corporate news media. In the United States, Australia, and Europe ever-tighter national and international border controls have accompanied the implementation of harsh and punitive asylum, immigration, and terror laws. A significant body of “border theory” has emerged during the last decade in response to the new politics of the border, exposing the ways in which the geopolitical landscape impacts unequally on the movement and flow of people, objects, and images (Ahmed 2000, 115).¹ In bringing feminist concerns with the “micro-political” to bear upon critiques of global capital, transnational feminist theory has produced some of the most vital accounts of the border politics of the present.² What is important about this scholarship is that it theorizes the asymmetrical relations of power and knowledge that characterize international borders through a focus on the complex border zones of racial, sexual, and economic exploitation. In this essay we bring a transnational feminist approach to bear in analysis of border cinema.