Bordering as the Breaking Force of Border Subjects

Border Studies scholars have long since considered borders neither as given entities nor merely as markers and maintainers of state sovereignty. They have shifted their perspective from the static notion of a border to a procedural understanding of the bordering as a process of relations between power and people (Pijpers, Van der Velde, Van Houtum, Van Naerssen, Vaughan-Williams). Beyond their function as demarcations that delineate distinct territories, they consider borders as disciplinary mechanisms of power as they are erected specifically to restrict undesirable classes of humans (Geddes, Häkli, Mountz). This paper aims to elaborate on the role of borders in everyday life and how of bordering, drawing upon Judith Butler’s thought. Based on Foucauldian concept of governmentality, Butler shows how norms operate to decide the question of who will be a human subject. The other against which the human is made by norms is a border subject, i.e. the inhuman, the beyond the human, the less than human, the border that secures the human in its ostensible reality. The power of norms is performative, as it homogenizes and excludes the non-conforming. However, the performativity is aporetic. On the one hand, performative power is a disciplining exercise that normalizes, configuring the normative standard, on the basis of which subjects are either recognised as normal or categorised as abnormal. On the other hand, considering that the performative efficacy of a norm depends on being repeated, an unconventional repetition can act as a breaking force, as a process involving performative bottom-up negotiations conducted by those who inhabit the borderland or are born crossing the normative border. These weak individuals at the borderline perform work that does and undoes the meaning of the borders, which can thus be accounted for in their double-function as both markers of belonging and places of becoming (Brambilla).