Borders of desire

<i>Borders of d</i><i>esire</i> 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 <i>productive</i> of desire. Based on long-term ethnographic 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 sexualized desires are generated by the existence of borders and how they are imagined. As the chapters show borders can create new desires expressed as aspirations resentments and actions including physical movements across borders for pleasure or work or collective enactments of political ideals or resistance. The collection also shows how the persistent east/west symbolic border continues to act as a source of these desires in European political and social life.