The Border Problem: Gender and the In/visibility of the UK-Irish Border

A key principle underpinning the 1998 Good Friday Agreement was the ‘bi-communal’ resolution of the ‘constitutional question’, therefore rendering the UK-Irish border as politically and symbolically less important. The subsequent ‘demilitarisation’ of state border infrastructure from 2004 onwards gave way to a set of prevailing narratives suggesting that not only had policing of the border ceased, but that the border itself ceased to be a political and social relevance in the everyday lives of people. The propagation of the ‘borderless’ narrative on the island of Ireland is underpinned by an assumption that the ending of traditional forms of border control and surveillance synonymous with the Troubles and the political accord between nationalism and unionism on the constitutional question erased the UK-Irish border as a significant factor in the lives of those who cross it, are policed by it or live in its shadow.

Based on our current research project, Women of the Borderlands: A Walking Biographical Study of Women’s Everyday Life on the UK-Irish Border, this paper uses an intersectional framework to offer a reconceptualisation of the UK-Irish border from the perspective of women, including racialised/and migrant women. We contest what we consider to be the androcentric and ethnocentric construction of the UK-Irish border as invisible by drawing on women’s embodied experiences of the border and the ways in which it has served to restrict mobility and police women’s daily life.