By – Anisha Jyotirmyayee

Abstract

This article conceptualises borders as gendered social institutions regulating mobility through narratives of protection. It theorises borders as gendered metaphors themselves and characterizes this in the reality of gendered borders of feminizing vulnerability and masculinizing danger. Drawing on the theory of bio politics of Michel Foucault, it argues that the paradoxical state’s justified approach for security in the name of protection. The article shows how the construction of women as victims legitimises surveillance and transforms protection into a form of control. It also looks at the role that the state plays in violence and abandonment of the population in the borders. Finally, it uses a case study to show how these regimes further into our society, while the fundamental ideas always remain the same.

Introduction

With the rise in mobility of refugees and migrants in recent times, geographic and political borders have gained an extensive amount of relevance. Borders are commonly understood as neutral instruments of territorial sovereignty consisting of lines that mainly regulate the movement across nations for legality, security, and national order. Borders often impact cultural, economic, and political interactions with the neighbouring countries.  However, this understanding of borders often undermines how borders function deeply as social and moral institutions, structured by race, class, nationality, and gender. 

Border regulations often actively produce and police gendered norms of mobility and vulnerability.. Borders are often imagined through “threats”, “protection of the nation”, “invasion”, language that is overtly connoted as “masculine”, which appears like a strong male body guarding a feminized homeland. 

This is exemplified through the fact that gendered metaphors extend to borders themselves, where borders are cast as feminized objects of protection, symbolized by female figures characterized as noble mothers “Bharat Mata”, or framed as aggressive and protective male soldiers armed with surveillance technology meant to protect the (feminized) nation/land/culture from external threats assaulting the border. 

Furthermore, there is a gendered view of how individuals near borders are treated, while men crossing borders are often framed as “potential criminals”, “terrorists”, “threats”, women are mainly only framed as “victims”, “trafficked”, or “defendants”. While both are subjected to control by the authorities, the logic used and the approach to “deal” with them are different. Female migrants are rarely treated as autonomous bodies, and instead, they are categorized as “trafficking victims”, “vulnerable dependents,” and so on. 

Similarly, male migrants, especially racialized or poor men, are framed as “aggressive,” “hypersexual,” and “culturally incompatible”. This type of risk-framing often justifies highlighted surveillance, rescue, and detention practices, restriction of movement, and denial of work permits. Through this, the very act of protection becomes pre-emptive control. The very existence of differentiation creates the idea of borders seen as something that protects women by immobilizing them and secures the nation by feminizing vulnerability and masculinizing threats. 

Gendered Borders and the Biopolitics of Protection

This entire system of differentiating and gendered views reflects what Michel Foucault referred to as the biopolitical control. Biopolitics can be understood as a political rationality that takes the admiration of life to ensure, sustain, and multiply life. Foucault states that the idea of biopolitical control is about managing risk, life, and reproduction, rather than the overt use of force. 

Borders decide which lives are worth saving, which risks are acceptable, and which bodies can move. Reflecting the logic of biopolitics which talks about the shift from the older sovereign power to a new form of governance, “making live and letting die” and further expanded in necropolitics, where Achille Mbembe showing how states actively have the power to determine who may live and who must die. This exemplifies the duality of the functions that borders are used to control. From a Foucauldian lens, borders do not stop everyone, and instead, they sort the population, and gender plays a major role in this sorting process. 

Gendered borders tend to favor specific forms of movements which reinforces the idea that women’s mobility is legitimate only when tied to family and care work. Autonomous female migration or any type of non-normative gender expressions like women from Eastern Europe, Africa, or Southeast Asia traveling alone to Western countries are sometimes profiled under anti-trafficking regimes. challenge these expectations and are under heightened scrutiny or denial. 

Borders thus reward gender conformity while punishing gender deviation.  Foucault’s notion of biopower, indicating the state’s control over life and population, can be applied to migration, where borders are increasingly managed through gendered lenses. Modern border regimes like those in the EU use “vulnerability” as a way to filter, control, or deny the rights of migrants according to the authorities. With the stereotypical approaches faced by women in general, racialized women in particular face “humanitarian” approaches that are also violent, controlling their bodies through bureaucracy. This includes racialized women, particularly from the Global South, who are frequently subjected to greater scrutiny and surveillance at the borders.

Gendered Abandonment and Violence

The narratives of gender disempowerment at the border unmask the state’s real patriarchal and hegemonic intentions. The intensification of state efforts to tighten the borders to assert sovereignty is directly linked to higher levels of harm experienced by transnational migrants, especially women. Gendered violence perpetrated by the state does not occur in a vacuum; rather, it is a part of a structured apparatus made to exercise power and authority over women. This violence involves doubting women’s stories and invasive checks. 

The case of virginity testing of fiancées from the Indian subcontinent with regular visa status at the British border is a historical testament to this. In this case, women had to prove their virginity literally by showing that they had an intact hymen in order to obtain permission to enter Britain with a fiancée visa. 

Alongside the use of overt force, borders also operate through systematic abandonment. Refugee camps without adequate sanitation, healthcare  or legal recourse, as well as the informal labor regimes that exclude migrant women from protections, and asylum systems that dismiss gender-based violence as “private” or “cultural,” all exemplify how the state governs through non-intervention. This type of abandonment is not an administrative failure but a deliberate form of governance. By removing protection while retaining territorial and legal control, the state makes certain populations exposed. 

Borders expose how state power maintains patriarchy not only through the use of force but through consent and normalization.

From Borders to Society

The very idea of this gendered viewpoint of the state extends to the functioning of the society and the way legal judgments are framed. In 2018, the case of Shafin Jahan v. Asokan K.M., popularly known as the Hadiya case, highlights the fundamental aspect of women’s mobility across social, religious, and other types of national imaginaries and how the state still treats that movement as a security threat. It formulates a basis of how protection logic travels from family, police, and courts to the working of the nation. 

Hadiya, converted to Islam to marry a muslim man. Her father alleged that she was brainwashed and trafficked. The High Court too annulled her marriage and put her under custodial protection, even when she claimed it was her choice.. The state claimed that Hadiya needed to be rescued and needed protection, as well as safeguarding national security for its actions. Hadiya’s movement was framed as suspicious, dangerous, and not truly voluntary despite her statements otherwise. Her consent was treated as legally unreliable because of the “vulnerability” assigned to her gender. 

Finally, the Supreme Court overturned the verdict, rejecting the idea that women’s autonomy can be suspended. This connects to how women are treated in the same way, even in the borders where consent is overridden, protection turns into forceful detention, and safety turns into immobility. All this highlights misuse of the state’s authority in the name of protection. The anxiety around this case became national, where her body itself became a border site where family honor, religious identity, and national security were policed. This mirrors where migrant women get stopped for their own protection, but also to safeguard the state’s own symbolic threats she could pose. Hadiya’s case reveals how gendered borders operate within the nation where the idea remains the same, but the implementation is disguised better. 

Conclusion

The case exposes how gendered borders operate not only at the edges of the nation but within it. The implementation is more legally articulated but the underlying premises show how women’s autonomy remains conditional and their mobility is subject to surveillance under the guise of protection. 

Author’s Bio

Anisha Jyotirmayee is a student of Journalism and Media Studies at O.P Jindal Global University. Starting with an inclined interest towards literature, she started writing research-based articles that defined and worked with real social issues. She has also embarked upon interviews and panel discussions with experts and marginalized groups. With an interest in literature, she also dances, plays the guitar, and is a columnist for Swabhimaan and Nickled and Dimed.

Image Source:https://www.e-ir.info/wp-content/uploads/fly-images/89697/shutterstock_410370190-960×541-c.jpg