This abstract is from the cover of the book.
From the Oprah Winfrey Show through filmic texts on ‘Eating the Other', from scientific discourse within the AIDS epidemic to grieving as boundary crisis, Border Patrols explores the ways sexual divisions are constituted, regulated, and transgressed.
The authors, who work together as the Politics of Sexuality Group begun at the Department of Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, share a common framework which holds in tension the materialist emphasis on power and sexuality and the postmodern interest in multiplicity, contingency, and ambivalence. Sexual borders are seen as matrices of power and oppression, but also of the impossibility of unified identity.
One main focus of the collection is the nexus of heterosexuality and contemporary ‘gender troubles'. Strongly influenced by feminist, lesbian, gay, and queer theories, the authors ask, ‘How are heterosexual relations sustained and recuperated despite their evident contradictions? How could they be changed or dissolved in a world where sexualities were equally valued or had become indistinguishable?' In examining these questions, the authors also explore different forms of research and writing. They all draw on the methods of Cultural Studies, using critical media analysis and the critique of scientific discourses, to map the ways in which sexual boundaries, especially those between heterosexual and lesbian and gay identities, are patrolled. They also use psychoanalytical theory ethnography, auto/biography and poetry-as-analysis to focus on the contradictory ways in which sexual identities are affirmed, disrupted and policed in people's particular and contingent lives.
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