Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/83524

JaLCDOI : 10.14943/ebr.8.1.59

What difference do borderlands make for people’s everyday lives, safety, and freedom? This question is best answered with a gendered approach, that is, one that differentiates the experiences of women and men. In borderlands, people deal with opportunities, burdens, and ambiguities that come from the different policies imposed from capital-city decision-makers in two or more nation-states. This paper will explore gender issues in borderlands, but then move to analyze several legal cases involving internal anal and vaginal body cavity searches by U.S. border police, also known as the Border Patrol (and its sister agency, within the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection (CBP)). The paper draws on documentation from legal cases and official complaints.a heretofore underexplored source in border studies. for selective women border crossers who experienced, we argue, an invasion into the privacy of their bodies. In stronger terms, one could argue that the practices became a form of unjustifiable state-instigated sexual assault.