Intimate Borders Feminist Migration Ethics

In Intimate Borders, Amy Reed-Sandoval offers a decolonial, feminist theory of borders that enables us to perceive hidden gender injustices at borders and then take concrete steps to stop them. Grounded in feminist privacy ethics, Chicana feminism, Indigenous philosophies of borders and space, and original ethnographic research conducted by Reed-Sandoval at two abortion clinics in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, this book challenges political philosophy's public/private divide by urging us to understand borders as intimate. Specifically, it argues that borders are sites of embodied and identity-based harms that often tamper with the boundaries of our "selves" in ways that impact our personal autonomy.

Reed-Sandoval also critically investigates unhelpful dichotomies. Intimate Borders calls into question popular, all-or-nothing proposals for both "open" and "closed borders," arguing instead that a feminist approach to borders requires careful exploration of how different borders (including non-Western borders) may both cause and protect against intimate harms of vulnerable groups. This book unpacks some of the most urgent and under-theorized ethical challenges presented at borders today, including border-crossings for abortion care, the migration of children, pregnancy and miscarriage at borders, family separations at borders, and the complicated relationship between borders and Indigenous identities. Intimate Borders is a theoretical framework for feminist migration scholars, policy makers, activists, and anyone else who wishes to raise awareness of gender injustice at the world's borders.

Amy Reed-Sandoval is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Previously she was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, El Paso. She is the author of Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice (2020), and co-editor of Latin American Immigration Ethics (University of Arizona Press, 2021). She is also the founding director of the Philosophy for Children in the Borderlands program and a former Fulbright García Robles scholar in Mexico. Her writing has appeared in venues such as The New Yorker, LA Times en Español, Salon, and Ms. Magazine.