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

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.