Beyond trucks and tariffs: What might a feminist analysis of the UK/Irish border * offer?

Abstract

In the wake of Brexit, the border on the island of Ireland has received unprecedented scholarly and journalistic attention. A quick search using Google Scholar indicates that since 2020 over 15,000 scholarly works have been published on ‘Brexit’ and ‘Northern Ireland’. Despite the exceptional space, time and conversation made for discussions of the border in academia, the media and political and policy circles, gender as an analytical frame has been conspicuously absent from the discussions and analysis. Indeed, there has been very little engagement with the border by feminist scholarship, either in the wake of Brexit, since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, or indeed throughout the duration of the Troubles. This blind spot, we suggest, has helped perpetuate a dangerous narrative of the border as ‘open’, ‘invisible’, ‘soft’ or ‘seamless’. This paper offers a critical reflection on the scholarship regarding the UK/Irish border and argues for the urgent need to study the border from a feminist sociological perspective. After outlining the landscape of research on the border and identifying its gender insensitivity, we look to the field of feminist border studies to problematise these absences and flag questions that remain unanswered about the gendered dimensions of the border and its effects on women who live in borderlands on the island of Ireland, including women from racialised, ethnic minority and migrant backgrounds. Our hope is to instigate a feminist sociology of the border with the expectation that by centring the experiences of women, including racialised/and migrant women, we gain a perspective of the border and border life that has yet to be meaningfully considered in UK/Irish border studies, and one that disrupts what we consider to be an androcentric and ethnocentric view of the border.

Keywords

Gender borders feminist border studies cross-border mobilities racialisation

Introduction

Though the border on the island of Ireland has always been a site of contestation, particularly during the years of conflict from 1969 to 1998, popular convention suggests that it ceased to be a physical and political issue post the 1998 peace agreement, which, despite its many shortfalls, was lauded for ‘de-escalating the border as a political issue’. As the only UK land border, the vexed outworkings of the 2016 Brexit referendum ‘re-weaponised partition’ and once again positioned the UK/Irish border front and centre politically in ways not seen since the conclusion of the Boundary Commission in 1925 (Cochrane, 2024: 242). The prevailing view of the border as ‘invisible’ or ‘soft’ became readily observable during Brexit negotiations. While the eventual agreed solution comprises a ‘sea border’, nevertheless, the uncertainties generated by Brexit have caused border residents to draw on anxiety-filled memories and narratives from the securitised border of the pre-Good Friday Agreement era. According to the predominant narratives and analyses, Brexit seems to have ‘reintroduced’, if not the physical border, the psychological borders of the past (Rosher, 2021). Newspapers at the time were awash with headlines about a feared return to a ‘hard border’, and endless column inches were gifted to politicians and government leaders in Ireland and elsewhere decrying a return to a ‘hard border’,¹ language also echoed in scholarly commentary.²

The propagation of the ‘borderless’ island of Ireland narrative is underpinned by an assumption that the ending of traditional forms of border control and surveillance synonymous with the Troubles, coupled with 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. Brexit therefore inevitably provoked a gold rush of scholarly endeavours on the border seeking to interrogate the seemingly endless dilemmas provoked by the UK's departure from the EU. Much of this work has been state-centric and institutionally focused even from scholars located within sociology.

Conspicuously absent from this gargantuan body of work on Brexit and the border have been the perspectives of women. Arguably, the dominance of state-centric approaches has resulted in a privileged, gender-insensitive view of the border that fails to recognise how the border is already a structural feature in the everyday lives of many women on the island, and especially women living in the borderlands. The neglect of the gender dynamics of bordering on this island is not particular to the Brexit fallout but symptomatic of a wider gender insensitivity as it relates to the UK/Irish border. Though there has been a proliferation of research on the gender dynamics of Northern Irish society (Ashe, 2006, 2022; Galligan, 2016; Gilmartin, 2018, 2019; Kennedy et al., 2016; O’Keefe, 2021, 2018) and a healthy body of work that examines gender relations on the island as a whole (Browne and Calkin, 2019; Buckley and Galligan, 2015; Earner-Byrne and Urquhart, 2024; Redmond and McAuliffe, 2024), there has been, to date, scant regard for how the border shapes the lives of women on this island, especially from sociologists. As such, knowledge about women's experiences of living on and traversing the border during times of crisis or calm is limited. The lack of attention to women and the border is, in part, a symptom of academic disinterest in the lives of women living in rural Ireland (McNerney and Gillmor, 2005), which compounds the narrow conceptualisations of the border in the wake of Brexit.

Furthermore, sociological research on the racialised nature of bordering practices, namely, passport checks along the land border and at ferry ports on the island of Ireland, remains almost non-existent. This is especially striking when one notes the lack of sociological attention paid to the Common Travel Area (CTA)³, an arrangement that paves the way for freedom of movement, work and residence for Irish and British citizens in both Ireland, north and south, while curtailing movement of non-EU third-country nationals without Irish or British passports. This lived reality has been tangentially highlighted by some legal scholarship on the issue (namely, Butler, 2015; Meehan, 2011; Ryan, 2001) and by activists, NGOS, journalists and community groups (Butterly, 2019; Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (MRCI), 2011). It is not from sociological attention but through migrants and people from racialised communities who have spoken up about their experiences that knowledge of a ‘hard border’ has been in effect for migrants and racialised citizens on the island (Butterly, 2019).

Curiously, feminist sociology on the island has tended to ignore the border. Much of the strong feminist sociological work in Ireland that explores borders primarily relates to migration (see e.g. Fathi and Ní Laoire, 2024; Grey, 2013; O’Neill and Einashe, 2019) with women's experiences of navigating the UK/Irish border receiving scant attention. This, as we suggest below, may be indicative of a wider tendency within this field to conflate border mobilities with migration, thereby overlooking certain forms of cross-border mobilities that are typical of the UK/Irish border, including the mobilities, or lack thereof, of migrant women in the borderlands whose everyday lives are governed by the presumed invisible border on the island.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical reflection on the scholarship on the UK/Irish border using a feminist lens. Our goal is not to offer a feminist analysis of the border but to ask sociologists writing on the border as well as feminist sociologists in the main to consider the gender dynamics of the border and to ask questions regarding women's experiences of the bordering practices in place on this island.⁴ Through a review of the literature on the UK/Irish border, we outline the need for a feminist sociology of the UK/Irish border that considers key issues of border significance during ‘the Troubles’ and in the present day. We detail how international feminist research has documented the myriad ways in which borders and bordering practices are gendered and the difficulties borders pose for women, especially those who are racialised. Borders, often militarised and masculine spaces, are sites of contestation and struggle for women and often bring heightened risk of sexual and gender-based violence, marginalisation, making them places of vulnerability (Anzaldúa, 1987; Chaban, 2012; Griffiths and Repo, 2021; Pickering, 2011). We argue that a feminist lens would bring to the fore some key dimensions of the UK/Irish border that have yet to be reckoned with, which may complicate some of the prevailing assumptions about the benign nature of the border.

We begin by offering an overview of border studies scholarship concerned with the island of Ireland and highlight its failure to consider how the border shapes the lives of women, including women from racialised and marginalised backgrounds. We then offer an overview of feminist border studies, identifying key thematic areas and conceptual frameworks in the field that we suggest should be brought to bear on the study of the UK/Irish border. Finally, we illustrate why we think a feminist analysis of the border is necessary and provide an indication of the sorts of questions feminists might ask about historic and current gender dimensions of bordering practices and border life. In doing so, we outline some of the ways in which gender-blind constructions of the border, crossed daily by 30,000 people, mask the material experiences of women who live in the borderlands, thereby problematising some of the conceptual clumsiness and narrow-sightedness of the existing scholarship. In adopting a feminist lens – one that accounts for the intertwining systems of power (Collins, 2019) – we identify several key areas in need of feminist exploration and how this might shift our understanding of the border on this island. This includes a re-conceptualisation of the border as far from soft and seamless, but as a jointly policed entity between different state and non-state actors in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the UK.

Dominant perspectives on the UK/Irish border

The partition of Ireland by the British in 1921 and the imposition of an arbitrary border to create two states have been the central and most enduring features of Irish political, social and economic life for the last century. Though partition is often assumed to signify the overarching root of the conflict known as the Troubles, the establishment of consociational structures and the provision for a possible future border poll within the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) diminished the political significance of the border, effectively ‘parking’ the border issue for some time. The removal of customs checks in 1993, and the subsequent deconstruction of British Army military installations and checkpoints, is said to have transformed the UK/Irish border into one of the most seamless and frictionless borders in the world, so much so that it could all too easily be forgotten about (Hayward, 2021). The removal of customs in 1993 coincided with Republican and Loyalist ceasefires in 1994 which cultivated endeavours towards a peace agreement. With moves towards peace, coupled with wider processes of globalisation and Europeanisation, the previous ‘hard border’ mutated into a ‘de-bordering’ period (McCall, 2018), generating a flurry of scholarly outputs regarding economic possibilities on cross-border trade and socio-economic cooperation (O'Dowd, Corrigan and Moore 1995; Tannam, 1999), new relationships between North and South (Coakley and O’Dowd, 2005) and the significance of the Irish border in an era of free trade and free movement across a ‘borderless’ EU (Anderson and Bort, 1999; Anderson and O’Dowd, 1999; Donnan and Wilson, 1999; O’Dowd and Corrigan, 1996).

The GFA and its resulting consociational institutional framework of ‘good relations’ effectively mollified much of the conventional political science debate regarding the border, constitutional preferences, ethno-national identities and conventional state-centric security. Nevertheless, a growing body of work resonated with the broader ‘social turn’ within border studies and explored the experiences of ‘border lives’ and ‘border communities’ with the emergence of memoirs, stories as well as the utilisation of microhistories examining the border from below (Anderson and Bort, 1999; Leary, 2016; Nash et al., 2016). These recent endeavours to reconsider the UK/Irish border and explore its social and economic impact at a grassroots level were accompanied by creative efforts to record the recent and longer histories of the border counties and to explore the meaning and significance of the border for those who have experienced it most directly (Nash and Reid, 2010). Reflecting this discernible turn in both subject matter and methodological approaches, an impressive and growing body of work broadened the framework of analysis to include socio-economic conditions (Anderson, 2006), considered border residents as agents living within a region dominated by structures and the coercive reach of the state (Leary, 2016; Nash et al., 2016), while others demonstrated the need to consider generational shifts in identity formation (Todd et al., 2006).

Unsurprisingly, the last 8 years witnessed a deluge of thought, research, analysis and commentary on the border. For the most part, this literature has been institutionally focused, pertaining to matters of constitutional futures and preferences regarding a possible border poll, the economic and security implications of a resurrected ‘hard border’, the impact on electoral politics within Northern Ireland and, of course, the impact on relations between the two dominant communities (Anderson, 2018; Garry et al., 2020; Hayward, 2018, 2020; McGuinness and Bergin, 2020; Murphy, 2021; Murphy and Evershed, 2021; Rosher, 2021; Stevenson, 2017). Northern Ireland and its contentious border became constructed as the site of collision between, on the one hand, the Brexit proposition of ‘taking back control’, particularly of borders, and the EU's position on open borders, free movement and shared sovereignty on the other (Hayward, 2020; Murphy, 2021).

The prevailing reading of the 1998 GFA and its various outworkings is that the period known as the peace process reduced the ‘actual significance of the Irish border in day-to-day terms’ (Hayward, 2018: 239) and the relative ‘visibility’ of the border in the everyday lives of citizens from the late 1990s onwards (Anderson and O’Dowd, 1999). Prominent within much of the literature pertaining to the UK/Irish border is an adherence to the idea that the material and symbolic impact of the border resides solely in its tangible infrastructures of militarism and surveillance of agent-based threats to the state. For example, the contention that UK and Irish membership of the EU engendered the conditions where ‘the border has been transformed from a sharp dividing line between states into a meeting point’ (Hayward, 2018: 239) while others suggest the peace process and accompanying EU funding led to a reconfiguration of the border from a political barrier to bridge and the production of a cross-border cultural space that is conducive to contact and communication between unionists and nationalists to a conflict transformation end (McCall, 2011).

Thus, the border is discursively constructed as being of renewed significance, and primarily in relation to the ‘frictionless’ movement of goods across the island. Post-Brexit border rhetoric constructs the border as a genderless transit zone, viewed only in terms of ‘trucks and tariffs’, as Louise Coyle of the Northern Ireland Rural Women's Network once quipped (Ferguson, 2022). Furthermore, while sociological scholarship on race and migration in Ireland, north and south, has tended to focus on questions around integration, attention to cross-border mobility for racialised migrants, especially in border counties, remains rather scant (notable exception McGinnity et al., 2023). This narrow yet dominant view of the border is compounded by the fact that there has been very little interrogation of the border from a feminist perspective and even lesser concern for the experiences of minoritised women, especially from racialised migrant backgrounds.

Critical perspectives on the UK/Irish border

The paucity of literature on gender and border or the intersection of gender, race, citizenship and the border is remarkable, especially in the wake of the Brexit frenzy. While there are some notable exceptions, these are mainly found in disciplines other than sociology. Political scientist Yvonne Galligan (2019), for instance, has written on gender and Brexit as it relates to Northern Ireland though her focus is on the equivalence of rights guaranteed to women under the Good Friday Agreement. Writing on the militarised border, which she characterises as a ‘spectacle of state control’, anthropologist Begoña Aretxaga, asks us to consider ‘what the border hides’ (1998: 16). She notes that ‘border incidents’ are part of everyday life and details her experience of a cross-border journey with women from the nationalist community in Belfast returning from a feminist organising meeting in Dublin wherein the car was stopped by security forces and the women’s bodies searched. She concludes that women embodied the border and that different forms of Irish womanhood are constituted through different kinds of violence north and south of the border (p. 28). Though these reflections are brief, they stand out as significant because so little has been written on this topic.

Some work exists on border policing and reproductive justice activism such as sociologist Linda Connolly's discussion of the contraception train action wherein women travelled to the north to bring contraceptives to the Republic, where they were banned (Connolly, 2002; see also anthropologist Alyssa Best (2005) on abortion rights along the ‘Irish-English’ sea border). Gilmartin and Kennedy (2018), Geography and English respectively, have directed our attention to migrant women's potential lack of access to abortion services in the face of the geopolitical ‘immobilities’ that they come to embody along the ‘Irish-English’ sea border. One of the most insightful pieces of research on gender and borders on the island of Ireland was published by Sydney Calkin (2021), a feminist geographer who examines the illegal flow of abortion pills between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The article offers rich evidence of the ways in which the border was policed by security forces on both sides to, in effect, criminalise those activists and pregnant people involved in the purchase of abortion pills through the cross-border support network.

While we were unable to find evidence of any sociological research on women's experiences of border dwelling or a gender analysis of the UK/Irish borderlands, there have been a handful of interventions on women living in border regions from those writing in other disciplines. Renowned artist Rita Duffy (2018) has published on her 2017 art installation – Soften the Border. Duffy, in collaboration with cross-border and cross-community women's groups, installed textiles on a bridge along the Fermanagh/Cavan portion of what she terms ‘the British border’. McNerney and Gillmor's (2010) research on rural women's perceptions of the border was written mainly to counteract the tendency in Irish geography to overlook rural women and especially women not tied to farms and farming. They examine the experience of women living in the Republic of Ireland in two counties that rest along the border, Leitrim and Louth. Mainly concerned with the advantages and disadvantages of rural life, the research examined satisfaction with access to services such as transport, health, education and care support. Though some evidence of cross-border mobilities surfaced, especially in relation to healthcare, it was not a focus of the study and thus offers little by way of understanding such movements.

William Kelleher (2000), another anthropologist, wrote a compelling piece on his ethnographic study of what he interchangeably terms the ‘British/Irish’ or ‘Irish/British’ border. Though not especially concerned with gender, some participants are women who disclose to him an unease with discussing their experiences of border life for fear of retribution from state forces. Historian Peter Leary's (2016) book on the use of unapproved routes includes references to women's cross-border smuggling practices. Similarly, Nash, Graham and Reid (geography and environmental studies) in their 2016 study of the ‘Irish border’ include some reflections on the gender dynamics in border communities. Based on oral testimonies with border dwellers on either side of the border, they examine how the border is understood. Though women are interviewed for the study, and the authors repeatedly acknowledge that the border is gendered, there is only a minor analysis of the gendered experiences of border dwelling.

The most comprehensive account of the border from women who live near it is found in Harris and Healy's (2001) book Strong About It All. This ground-breaking non-academic book produced by two feminist activists and published through the Derry Women's Centre offers clear evidence of the forms of gendered violence women experienced at the hands of security forces during the Troubles, when the border was militarised. It also examines how women's mothering roles were shaped by the fear of violence being visited upon their sons, a common concern for women from nationalist communities.

Furthermore, there is relative silence on racialised and gendered forms of bordering practices that give rise to a ‘hidden border’ or to how this shapes migrant women's lives. The scholarship on race and migration in Ireland, north and south, has seldom paid attention to the impediments to cross-border mobilities of migrant women in border counties. Ronit Lentin (2016) has highlighted the racialised complexities of citizenship for those residing on the island of Ireland in the wake of the 2004 Irish Citizenship Referendum. More recent work has shed light on migrant women's ‘(im)mobilities and blockages’ in Northern Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic (Kempny, 2023). Despite its attention to the mobility strategies of non-EU migrant women in Northern Ireland, Kempny's work does not look at their experiences of crossing the border over to the Republic of Ireland or on the regular cross-border mobilities of women living in the borderlands.

Considering the volume of published work on the border, the interventions outlined here are the exception rather than the norm. It is therefore no exaggeration to state that we know very little about how the border on this island has shaped women's everyday lives. This lack of scholarly attention to the gendered and racialised impacts of the border, especially for border dwellers, is a by-product of what Su-Ming Khoo (2024) characterises as the conservative nature of Irish sociology and social science, wherein feminism and criticality are at the periphery, alongside a reluctance to critically interrogate Irish whiteness and white ignorance. ‘Epistemic whiteliness’, which ‘maintains and reproduces white ignorance and white privilege’, remains at the core, leaving huge absences in Irish social scientific thought (Khoo, 2024). The peripherality of feminism coupled with epistemic whiteliness intermingles with the failure of Northern Ireland to capture the allure of sociologists in the south, beyond energetic bursts precipitated by momentous periods of social transition like the signing of the Good Friday Agreement or Brexit (Corcoran, 2021).

This fabricates a vision of the border that is patchy and underdeveloped. These gaps create a need to bring into sharp focus the power structures, such as those organised around gender and race, that shape life in the borderlands. We suggest a feminist sociology, which scrutinises everyday life, has the potential to reveal what gender-insensitive constructions of the border hide and can immediately complicate the dominant view of the border as soft and seamless. In the next section, we review some of the key insights from the field of feminist border studies and highlight four thematic areas of significance: resistance and empowerment in borderlands, feminisation of border spaces, gender violence and the gendered medicalisation of border spaces. This is followed by an engagement with some of the complexities of the conceptualisation of border mobilities put forward by more contemporary scholarship on gender and bordering practices. Here, we raise the possibility for feminist research on the UK/Irish border to bring clarity to the international debates on border living and border mobilities.

What does a feminist analysis of borders offer?

The origins of feminist border studies can be traced back to postcolonial and transnational feminisms (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Kaplan et al., 1999; Mohanty, 2003) with many feminist roads leading back to Gloria Anzaldúa's now infamous Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). Anzaldúa's work offers a pivotal understanding of the cultural configurations of border life as they are constituted through race, class, gender and coloniality and is inherently intersectional in its approach. Her work serves as a touchstone for feminist border studies as well as queer studies (Barrick and Sundberg, 2013; Hernández, 2019). Postcolonial feminists show how histories of border construction are indeed histories of inclusion and exclusion, often done along racialised lines (McClintock et al., 1997; Mills, 1996). Whether this history pertains to the bordering of cities to demarcate lines of civilisation in the colonies - ‘the civil lines’ versus the zones outside of contact with the racialised other (Mills, 1996) – borders, they suggest, serve a purpose of maintaining the racial homogeneity of entities such as cities and in the contemporary historical period, of nation-states. In the spirit of Anzaldúa, Chicana and Latina feminisms establish how the colonial imprint on the interlocking nature of race, class and gender systems of power intersects with the transnational liminality arising from cross-border inhabitancies (Briggs et al., 2008).

Borderlands have been shown to be spaces of resistance and empowerment for women. Anzaldúa's (1987) work is ground-breaking here, but as Aaron et al. (2010) also illustrate, attention to gender and everyday life in borderlands has shown how women exert agency in relation to borders, thereby challenging the tendency within border studies to cast women as passive dependents (see e.g. Ruiz and Tiano, 1987; Wright, 2013; Sowards, 2019). Kathleen Staudt's (2008) study, Violence and Activism at the Border: Gender, Fear, and Everyday Life in Ciudad Juárez, details, for example, feminist organisation against gender violence and femicide along the Mexican-US border. Augusto and Braun's (2022) study of women's cross-border trade between Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo shows how women used unapproved routes or illicit passage during COVID-19 restrictions to facilitate movement and continue to trade. Wilkins’ (2017) examination of women's journeys from Myanmar into Thailand illustrates how the activism of women living and working on the border led to alternative concepts of home and identity that challenged gendered associations between women and home.

Conceptualising borderlands as feminised spaces, Cassidy (2013) examined women traders on the Ukrainian/Romanian border and found that in the areas where daily and regular border crossings occurred, businesses were ‘appropriated’ by women to cater for their cross-border travel. Indeed, it was women who were making multiple crossings a day as a part of cross-border trade (Cassidy, 2013: 103). Furthermore, Solis (2016) research on border cities observes a ‘feminisation of survival’ through the presence of women's labour in the companies that relocate to these regions and, in the dependence on women's income, who are by function of the factory work, those whose labour is in most demand. The reconfiguration of home is a dimension of borderlands as feminised spaces. According to Magalhães (2021), the home in cross-border areas is ‘an expanded and ambivalent place’ as the home, and indeed its associated care work, may span either side of the border.

Relatedly, feminist research has illustrated how borderlands are also spaces of gender violence. One of the important complexities to be considered is the use of violence in the gender regimes that operate in borderlands. Attending to the nuance in such spaces has the potential to reveal more about the intricate ways in which borders control women and how violence operates at the level of the everyday. Paula Banerjee's important work on gender and borders in contemporary South Asia shows that not only do women living in, on and across these borders endure a ‘life of extreme hardship’; they are the primary targets of violence at the hands of both the security personnel and criminals operating in these zones (2010: 121). Similarly, Jamwal and Shuchismita (2012), in their study of the Kashmir and Indian-Pakistan border, found evidence that women living in border districts are those most under threat of violence, and from security forces and militants alike. Marcela Lagarde y de Los Ríos, through her work on the murder of women along the Mexican-US border, developed the term feminicidio, which not only explained this violence as patriarchal but also enacted with the complicity of the state (Lagarde, 2010). Ribas-Mateos (2016) talks of the bodies of the disappeared in Ciudad Juárez and Arizona, outlining how the bodies of the disappeared are connected to an absence of human rights for some in borderlands.

Borderlands are also shown to be gendered, medicalised spaces. Research by Hobbs (2021) details Mexican-US border crossings for plasma donations at centres located on the US side in the borderlands. She notes the increase in plasma donation centres in borderlands and the ways in which this heightens securitisation. Hobbs uses this example to argue that feminists must centre the body and technoscience to understand borders, as a ‘feminist technoscience studies’ approach can reveal how bodies are governed at borders that may not, at once, appear to be because of militarism (Hobbs, 2021: 50). This is significant in that it draws our attention to the gendered biopolitics on or near borders. She makes the case that how bodies are governed at these securitised sites is in fact connected to overt forms of state violence in and around the border and that feminist technoscience studies ‘draws our gaze towards the governance of bodies, desire and danger in medicalized spaces at border sites’ despite its appearance as seemingly mundane and normalised (p. 50).

A reflection on borderlands as gendered and medicalised spaces also necessitates us to think about access to reproductive healthcare and the making of reproductive health migrants. Research on ‘abortion tourism’ and ‘abortion trails’ when placed within the larger context of ‘conversations about refugees and human rights’, necessitates the creation of new pathways for the study of discourse around healthcare migrants and providers (Reagan, 2019: 338, cited in Murillo, 2023: 797). Feminist scholars have also researched questions around access to abortions and reproductive healthcare along the US-Mexico border. In the pre-Roe v. Wade period, abortion in the US-Mexico borderland produced a ‘prosperous business’, with several reputable providers operating in the northern border while abortions remained illegal in Mexico. Lina-Maria Murillo (2023) uses theories of reproductive justice and intersectionality to de-centre US-centric reproductive rights histories and unravel ‘the intricate narrative that tied abortion providers in Northern Mexico to a racialised logic of dirt, danger and death’ (p. 796). Such an unmasking and unravelling also allows her to trace the work of abortion care provided by conscientious providers who attempted to ‘create a safe space for a procedure that was criminalised on both sides of the borderline’ (p. 819).

Due to the wide embrace of Anzaldúa's work, the term ‘borderlands’ was quickly adopted and, as Segura and Zavella (2008) argue, became a catchall term, used uncritically and often in reference to that which lies outside the mainstream, moving us away from understanding the material realities of border life. Wilkins (2017) notes that it is here the term ‘borderlands’ becomes useful because in such contexts it reflects not just the territorial depiction of borders but that borders are also shifting processes that shape everyday life. The term, as it was fashioned by Anzaldúa, also recognises border areas as a ‘zone of transition’ in which one might feel a simultaneous sense of belonging and unbelonging. As Anzaldúa writes: ‘a borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and the forbidden are its inhabitants’ (1987: 3).

It is rather striking, therefore, that, despite the popularity of Anzaldúa within feminist border and migration studies, the study of the experiences of women as border dwellers and the gender regimes that operate in borderland spaces is relatively diminutive in relation to migration studies. There remains limited research on the gender regimes in operation in physical borderlands, despite the widespread use of the term borderlands, and this lack of understanding has prompted calls for a gendered exploration of borderlands (Hernández, 2014: 2). The concentration of research on gender and borderlands remains on women's experiences of life on the Mexican-US border (see Finnegan, 2018; Hernández, 2014; Ruiz, 2020). Some research has been published on other contexts including Morocco (Alverez, 2016; Nair and El-Khamlichi, 2016), the Ukrainian/Romanian border (Cassidy, 2013), Jammu/Kashmir (Jamwal and Shuchismita, 2012), the Iran/Iraq border (Jafari, 2024), the India-Bangladesh border (Ghosh, 2023) and women's mobilities in Palestine and the ‘internal’ borders as they are policed by Israel, a case not dissimilar to Northern/Ireland (Griffiths and Repo, 2021).

In part owing to the conflation of migration studies with border studies, there developed a tendency to conceive of borders as places of transition, transit zones or temporary holding spaces, as opposed to places of residence (Ortíz-González, 2004; Téllez, 2008). Recent scholarship has also moved away from the study of borders as ‘fixed lines’ to ‘their relocation in a multiplicity of spaces spread throughout civil society – especially in urban settings which have become official and unofficial border checkpoints’ (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019: 18).

Attention has thus been directed away somewhat from the experiences of women who are from and/or are settled in border regions, who make their lives in the shadow of the territorial border whether as part of an intergenerational existence or as themselves migrants who seek to remain in border communities and whose mobilities are part of the fabric of everyday life (see e.g. O’Neill et al., 2019; Pickering and Cochrane, 2013). This emphasis, as Lina Magalhães (2021) argues, has led to a conflation of border studies with migration and murky conceptual and theoretical distinctions between the varied forms of border mobilities. In her estimation, it is only since 2010 that the term ‘cross-border’ was used to characterise those that move and dwell in border areas and she advocates for the use of the term ‘cross-border mobility’ as a means of distinguishing between transnational migration and what might be considered the negotiation of border movements as a function of border living. This is a term we too find useful and necessary so as to isolate the idiosyncrasies of different forms of gendered bordering. The term mobilities, rather than migration, offers more flexibility and has a wider capture.

Though the feminist study of borders is vibrant, more care is needed in the theorisation of gender, borders and border mobilities. The UK/Irish border, we suggest, has the potential to offer some theoretical nuance to de-conflate border and migration studies in ways that consider how wider forms of bordering impact border dwellers. A feminist sociology of women border dwellers would consider the everyday routines shaped by bordering practices and border functions, including work, relationships and everyday violence. Nevertheless, this snapshot of the diverse and rich contributions feminist scholarship has made to the study of borders highlights the epistemic constraints that govern existing constructions of the UK/Irish border, as we detail below. In the next section, we outline some questions feminists might ask of the UK/Irish border in the hopes that it might inspire future research. Even the fleeting glimpse offered here, we believe, begins to dismantle the concept of a borderless island of Ireland.

Towards a feminist sociology of the UK/Irish border: beyond trucks and tariffs

This review of the international literature begs the question: if we use a feminist lens to deeply examine the border, what might it uncover? Returning to Louise Coyle's plea, a feminist sociology of the border must move the discussion beyond trucks and tariffs cemented by the dominance of political science approaches. We suggest that the starting point must be to query whether the conventional wisdom of the border as soft and benign holds true. Has the border restricted the mobility of women or in ways that are gendered? If so, how has it impacted access to services, including health, family and friendships, work and bodily autonomy? How does the border shape and inhibit women's lives, including their work, social relations and bodily autonomy?

A soft border for whom?

The invisibility of the dividing line between north and south is often cited as a distinctive feature of the UK/Irish border, but even an elementary feminist focus reveals this to be far from the case. Living in borderlands, as Michelle Téllez writes, is a ‘unique socio-political experience’ (2008: 547), and this is no more evident than in the areas along the UK/Irish border on the island of Ireland. These borderlands occupy a liminal space, spanning a border that is not always observable to the untrained eye but always politically and culturally present, especially for those subjected to its policing on an everyday basis. The minutia of women's cross-border mobilities can shed light on the gendered and racialised ways in which the border is constituted.

Adopting a rudimentary feminist frame immediately reveals incoherence in the discourse around the border. Using the matrix of gender and race as a vantage point, it becomes blatantly obvious that the border was never soft or invisibilised for people who are pregnant and seeking abortion access, migrants who are regularly subjected to checks on buses and trains that traverse the border or for women who, during the times of a militarised border, made crossings alone at night. Evidence of a hard border for some is found in the unevenness of the Common Travel Agreement and its enforcement mechanisms.

Although there has been little desire to see a ‘hard border’ erected between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, complete with an implementation of passport and identity checks, the UK government does not want to see the Irish border being used as a ‘back door’ for migrants to enter Britain either (Graffin and Garcia Blesa, 2019: 246). The CTA itself has a surprisingly ‘fluid’ legal framework which consists of an undisclosed set of patchwork bordering practices between the UK and Irish immigration authorities established to perpetuate a ‘hidden’ border in the island of Ireland. Among these is ‘Operation Gull’, a joint initiative between the UK Border Agency, PSNI, Police Scotland, An Garda Síochána and the Garda National Immigration Bureau, which seeks to prevent the movement of undocumented migrants between Ireland and Britain (Butterly, 2019; McKinney et al., 2023: 9). As Luke Butterly of End Deportations Belfast points out, it is under the guise of Operations Gull (UK) and Sonnet (ROI) that police and immigration forces carry out searches on trains, buses, ferries, planes and private transport, including those crossing the UK/Irish border (Butterly, 2019). Research and the continued advocacy work of groups, such as the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (MRCI) (2011) and the North West Migrant Forum, point to the racial profiling of people by immigration officials along the land border and at ferry ports in Northern Ireland. Between 2015 and 2017, 140 people were detained under Operation Sonnet (BrexitLawNI, 2018: 22), as compared to 2024, when 107 people were detained in just the first 5 months of the year (McEntee, 2024).

Apart from the UK-led Operation Gull and Operation Sonnet in the Republic, a UK-wide counterterrorism operation known as ‘Operation Bi-Vector’ has been used 12,479 times in Northern Ireland by the PSNI, raising concerns around its misuse for routine immigration purposes (BrexitLawNI, 2018; Butterly, 2019). In fact, reports from 2018 highlight the UK Home Office plans to set up ‘stop and search zones’ across Northern Ireland's southern land border in a bid to extend the use of Terrorism Act 2000 powers for ‘what may be routine immigration purposes’ (BrexitLawNI, 2018: 23; Rothwell, 2018). As the BrexitLawNI Policy Report points out, this law could provide for ‘anyone to be stopped, searched and detained, without any reasonable grounds or suspicion of any offence, simply in order to check if they are entering or leaving NI’ (p. 24). The report further argues that such a law had the potential of creating a hard border by stealth. Reflecting on these different opaque legal tools of bordering, Butterly (2019) points out that ‘in any particular stop it is by no means clear which operation is being used’.

These practices directly impact women in a multitude of ways but are acutely observable with respect to reproductive healthcare. Bordering technologies in the form of mandatory visa documentation for certain third-country nationals continue to impede the ability to travel to access abortion care when the failure to provide adequate services in both states remains an issue (Bodelson, 2023; see also Side, 2020). It is here too that we can see linkages with feminist arguments made elsewhere that borderlands are medicalised spaces. Furthermore, the hard border comes into plain view when we consider attempts by the state to criminalise any subversion of the border by women seeking access to abortions or by activists or support groups. Despite an increased all-island shared service approach to healthcare, a Public Personal Service Number (PPSN) is required to access subsidised care in the Republic of Ireland, which directly impacts women's access to abortion healthcare in Ireland (Mishtal et al., 2022).

Before the Repeal the 8th referendum of 2018, reproductive rights were grossly limited in Ireland, north and south, and activists would obtain abortion pills from Women on Web, a transnational feminist organisation committed to providing abortion support through the distribution of pills to pregnant people who could not travel outside the island to obtain abortions. However, by 2009, the large number of pills coming through the post caught the attention of the Irish customs agency which began to seise them (Calkin, 2021). Here, what we see in the Irish context is the use of the border and its new manifestations as a means to criminalise women and people who seek access to abortions, as well as those who facilitate this. The only prosecution for importing mifepristone into Ireland was brought against a Chinese national residing in Ireland, Fang Huang (Calkin, 2021). Most recently, a proposed House of Commons bill sought to remove limits for the detention of pregnant women crossing the border, which would have specific implications for those in Northern Ireland (Tunney, 2023). Between 2016 and 2022, eight pregnant women were detained in an immigration detention centre in Larne House near Belfast, which is unsuitable for access to proper reproductive healthcare. As End Deportations Belfast (2023) argues, it was the immigration status of these people that resulted in their detention at Larne House. More work is therefore needed to investigate how the UK/Irish border is in this way constituted as a gendered bio-border through the criminalisation of some forms of migration, abortion and abortion support work.

These bordering practices also affect migrant women's access to healthcare available through the HSE’s EU and North-South unit. Services along the borderlands are increasingly shared, and access to primary care may fall on either side of the border, depending on the respective shared partnership agreement for the area or type of treatment needed. For instance, patients in Donegal in need of cancer diagnostics and treatments are sent to Derry in Northern Ireland, while all paediatric cardiology patients are referred to Crumlin Hospital in Dublin (HSE, 2023). Similarly, the Cross Border Directive Scheme allows residents in Ireland to avail of treatment in Northern Ireland for procedures with multi-year waiting lists. Thus, healthcare is, in effect, cross-border for patients, carers and healthcare workers. Migrant women, who need cross-border mobility to perform their work in the social care and health support sector or to access health services, are disproportionately disadvantaged, especially in the case of visa-required migrants. Reports by the ESRI in 2023 and the Committee on the Administration of Justice in 2022 note the effects of the invisible ‘hard border’ on migrant people's ability to access cross-border services normally available to both British and Irish citizens. The invisible border with its visa regime also has repercussions for migrant communities’ access to certain cross-border health initiatives. For instance, the ESRI report records existing barriers to accessing the all-island paediatric cardiology services under the Co-operation and Working Together (CAWT) partnership between health services North and South. The report notes that in the case of a child residing in the North who was sent to Dublin for cardiac surgery, both parents required visas to accompany the child and the process for obtaining them was ‘an extremely long, drawn-out process’ (McGinnity et al., 2023: 85).

The border as a site of gender violence?

Conflict-related gender violence on this island has often received insufficient attention relative to other dimensions. This is due, in part, to a misplaced view that gender violence was not a feature of the conflict. Conflict-related gender violence has received increased attention (see O’Keefe, 2018; Swaine, 2023), and though more work is needed in this area, the gender violence of and at the border is especially understudied.

State and paramilitary violence in border areas is well-documented, though to a lesser extent than in urban settings. As a contested and sovereign frontier, the border and its ubiquitous military structures along its hinterland were the focus for much violent attack, differentially experienced and interpreted by those living within the Northern side of the border (Patterson, 2013). Despite the paucity of research in this area, there are indications that violence at and around the border was also gendered and sexualised (Harris and Healy, 2001; Kennedy, 2017). It has been suggested that violence against women in border regions is suppressed, not only because of the rural location but also because of the complexities of an ongoing armed conflict and/or the residue of an armed conflict (Kennedy, 2017). As Aretxaga (1998) rightly asks, what does the border hide? How has gender violence and the fear of gender violence along the border restricted women's cross-border mobilities? How did women traverse the militarised border? How do certain women's experiences of border policing differ, including in the present day, when the presumed seamlessness of the border is the largely accepted view?

This raises even more questions about the gendered patterns of work, paid and unpaid, that operate in the borderlands and how these patterns have been governed by border policing practices (historical and contemporary). In borderlands like Derry, Donegal, Fermanagh, Cavan, Monaghan and Armagh, women worked in the garment, handicraft and textile factories, often as sole earners in their families and commonly crossing the border to do so. To what extent were these journeys shaped by fear of gender violence from security forces or paramilitaries? Research is lacking on how women's work was shaped by (gendered) bordering practices and how this changed over time through reconfigurations brought on by militarisation, demilitarisation and Brexit.

Resisting the border?

If the border creates a gender regime, practices and structures, which in turn shape women's (im)mobilities, this also begs the question: how to do women resist and subvert the border? Feminist claims that borderlands become spaces of resistance and empowerment for women might also apply to the UK/Irish context. We know, for instance, that abortion activists have subverted the border to widen access to abortion for pregnant people living on the island. What does this look like though within the borderlands and especially in rural areas, which historically received less scholarly attention? How do women organise in and around the border? How does the border impede or structure women's organising? How do groups like the Northern Ireland Rural Women's Network structure their work in border communities? Is there a hard border for women's activism? Questions might also be asked about the more informal ways women subverted the border. For instance, smuggling was a common practice in border areas. Though there is a gendered tendency to assume that the bulk of smuggling was a predominantly male enterprise, academic as well as anecdotal evidence suggests women were as active and efficacious (Leary, 2016). The relative neglect of women's smuggling and the gendered motivations and experiences of smuggling advances the erroneous idea of smuggling as a masculine activity practiced in the main by republican paramilitaries smuggling cheap fuel, tobacco and alcohol from the UK side of the border into the Republic. How did women negotiate and subvert customs and border checks? To what extent was the use of unapproved routes, to avoid checkpoints and security forces on either side of the border, gendered?

Despite the sociological neglect of the gendered and racialised dimensions of the UK/Irish border, there are indications that the border has been and continues to be a structural feature of everyday life for many women on this island, and especially for women in the borderlands. The widely held view that the UK/Irish border is soft and benign is therefore a dangerous assumption and one in need of rigorous feminist interrogation.

Conclusion

Recalling Banerjee (2010), we are of the view that existing knowledge claims on the UK/Irish border are predicated on gender-blind assumptions and are therefore problematic. In the first instance, we do not know what actually constitutes the ‘UK/Irish borderlands’. Because marginalisedexperiences are excluded from dominant understandings of the border, we cannot truly say that we know what constitutes border life, and where borderlands begin or end. A feminist analysis of the border is needed to move beyond the masculine rhetoric of trucks and tariffs, to allow for the centring of women's experiences of border life. As it stands, a number of questions remain unanswered, including how gender shapes the borderlands and how the border is experienced by women as part of their everyday life.

We suggest that a more holistic depiction of the UK/Irish border is needed to lay claim to any understanding of the border. A feminist sociological analysis of the borderlands on the island of Ireland has much to offer Irish sociology (and, we suspect, the Northern/Irish case has much to offer international feminist debates). The invisibility of the dividing line between north and south is often cited as a distinctive feature of the UK/Irish border, but a feminist frame will no doubt shed light on the ways in which the border has and continues to impact women's daily lives and the downstream consequences of those impacts in the present day. Thus, the murkiness of the border and its complexities offer a good case study to bring theoretical and conceptual refinement to our understanding of borders, border mobilities and bordering practices.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank our research participants for their generosity, shown not only through the time they gave and the trust they placed in us, but also through their warm hospitality.

ORCID iDs

Theresa O’Keefe

Niall Gilmartin

Dyuti Chakravarty

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Higher Education Authority North South Research Programme.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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