Borders of desire takes a novel approach to the study of borders: rather than seeing them only as obstacles to the fulfillment of human desires, this collection focuses on how borders can also be productive of desire. Based on long-term ethnographic engagement with sites along the eastern borders of Europe, particularly in the Baltics and the Balkans, the studies in this volume illuminate how gendered and sexualized desires are generated by the existence of borders and how they are imagined. As the chapters show, borders can create new desires expressed as aspirations, resentments, and actions including physical movements across borders for pleasure or work, or collective enactments of political ideals or resistance. The collection also shows how the persistent east/west symbolic border continues to act as a source of these desires in European political and social life.

Elissa Helms is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna
Tuija Pulkkinen is Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki

Introduction: Gender, sexuality, and desire at the eastern borders of Europe - Elissa Helms and Tuija Pulkkinen
1 Crossing the lines on Lesvos: Navigating overlapping borders in the Aegean - Sarah Green
2 Transgressing realities: Desire and the border in the southern Balkans - Rozita Dimova
3 How do borders produce ethno-sexualisation and lived senses of sexuality? Insights from lives of Latvian women in Guernsey - Aija Lulle
4 Moving desire: Multiple lives and desires in border-crossing prostitution - May-Len Skilbrei
5 Sex, love, and a better future: Gendered desire in the narratives of women from post-socialist countries in Italy and Finland - Anastasia Diatlova and Lena Näre
6 The hero and the 'whore': Croatia's sexualized and gendered (self-)ascriptions and its desire for European belonging - Michaela Schäuble
7 Desires for past and future in border crossings on the Finnish-Russian border - Olga Davidova-Minguet and Pirjo Pöllänen
8 Desire to resist: EU border-making and anti-LGBT mobilization in Serbia - Katja Kahlina and DuSica Ristivojevic?