Borders divide, they are strokes delimitating inhabitable material spaces, territories. These are the visible ones, those we recognize in maps, those which are disputed in wars, those naming us foreigners, those where migration flows are sustained and whose walls are violently defended. And, however, material borders, which can be crossed with our passport in our hand, are built upon invisible borders, whose definition implies the erasure of other truths and other places from where the world exists.
To think these invisible borders – that penetrate us and give us a symbolic place – is to risk the existing comfort around learnt patriarchal norms and codes. It means moving them aside and finding another place where we can name the resistances and talk about how we live in this world made up of borders, how they affect women’s lives and how we can weave strategies to resist and repair sexist violence exercised against women and their daughters and sons by borders – and those who defend them –.
Displacing these codes learnt within the patriarchy also engages us to think the place – our own – from where we see the world. This context is the perfect opportunity to pick up the notion of INTERSECTIONALITY, a word coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989 referring to “the phenomenon by which each individual suffers oppression or holds privileges based on its belonging to multiple social categories”.