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Bordered Bodies. Intersectional Determinants of (Non-)Entry

A blogpost by Marie Hoffend

What comes to mind when thinking about the word ‘border’? A line that has been agreed to divide one country from another? What sounds simple and consensually agreed upon, is a much more complex, impactful and forceful matter. Borders between countries or territories are not simply nor only a fixed physical landmark. They occupy, intrude and are facilitated by numerous other spheres. which are interconnected. Created in these territories but also as a result of the interaction and colonial history, they are part of controlling how certain bodies are migrating, mostly through interlocking border regimes upheld by information technology and internalization processes. In the following, the impacts of citizenships, racial borders, class differences and angulating power are being discussed to show that facially neutral legal systems of entry, especially in the EU, are in fact not neutral.

Racial Borders and Necropolitics

The space between nation states is filled with mechanisms and policies for shaping the way individuals are able to move across the globe, including and excluding certain human bodies in certain areas. Bodies that are marked by systems and governments as desirable for a nation state are treated differently as opposed to those who are seen as not. These attributes are closely linked to the legacy of the global norths (neo-)colonial structures, which create what Tendayi E. Achiume describes as “racial borders”. Racial borders are characterized by the global norths aim to protect its racial boundaries, and stem from specific legal doctrines from imperial and colonial projects, that have been initiated in the past and keep on existing. These projects favor whiteness and proximity of whiteness is privileged. Borders systems as institutions apply different prerequisites for entry and movement such as citizenships, passports and visas to limit and organize global migration, stirred by the global north while imposing structural violence.1

A picture onboard a ship that is crossing the mediterran sea. Three cameras point at the deck. A sign on the wall reads: "This vessel is under CCTV Surveillance".

A CCTV camera on a passenger vessel crossing the Mediterranean Sea (Marie Hoffend)

Borders manifest and are created within bodies, embassies, technologies, rooms, spaces, physical and non-physical. While many white European passport holders including myself may easily book a ferry for a trip across the Mediterranean Sea for any reason, be it vacation or work, at the same time this year 2025 over 1745 individuals died or went missing trying to cross the same sea on the flight from north African countries and more than 1865 individuals died in the first five months of 2025 on the less known access routes to Spain via the Atlantic.2

These deaths of migrating and fleeing persons, mostly PoC and Black individuals, are results of structurally bordered territories and bordered bodies that selectively influence who is allowed entry, who is seen as desirable by nation states. The statistics can be read as the result from diverging attention and care for the different reasons and different bodies that are migrating. Part of this are the workings of biopower, which Michel Foucault describes to be rooted in racism and which is furthered in the concept of necropolitics by Achille Mbembe. Necropolitics can be described as deeply embedded in the state’s reasoning, power and sovereignty. As a result, racialized individuals and groups are being stripped of their humanity and human rights, and are left to violence and death while migrating, while moving between borders.3

Citizenship as a Categorizing Factor for Sorting Bodies

Bordered territories, such as the European Union’s Schengen Area, become bordered territories acting as containers of people, with certain diffusion practices. These practices are different for certain groups of people that meet or don’t meet entry prerequisites based on the facially neutral legal system. In the border politics of the EU, a close-knit combination of migration and border politics shape the organization of (non-)entry, is mainly enacted by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, which is made up by different actors and institutions, that act on national level but also supranationally.4 As both Achiume and Kasparek describe: The legal framework for movement and migration attempts to appear neutral, but particular mechanisms are inscribed that treat individual peoples’ bodies differently.5

At the base of sorting individual bodies into categories lays the notion of categorization. In the European Union one factor of categorizing is nation state heritage which is closely tied to citizenship to a nation state. Citizenship can be transferred through descent (jus sanguinis) or by being born in a certain territory (jus soli). Jus soli is also related to the length of time a person’s parents have been accepted as living in a certain territory.6 Meanwhile, some European countries previously offered a simpler route to citizenship through a process known as “EU citizenship by investment”. This allowed individuals to become naturalised citizens of countries such as Cyprus, Bulgaria and Montenegro, and, until the beginning of 2025, Malta, if they were able to invest in these countries.7 Individuals with class privilege were thus able to legally supermount the border for immigration, while others were and are denied access because of insufficient financial background.8

The Discursive Construction of Refugee Categories

A picture of a window in a brick building. In the window are two signs: one figure walking in green and one figure standing in red. The green one is crossing a street without a border. The red one stands on a red line. They look like German traffic light icons. On the bottom of the window you can see two lamps in the background of the room.

Stop and Go illustration inside a brick building (Marie Hoffend)

Next to class and the racial border system other hierarchical structural categories act as barriers or as markers for borders. When looking at formal documentation of individuals who are migrating because they are fleeing from one place to another and apply for asylum, there is, as Tina Nina Dixon notes, a “discursive construction of the refugee category”, which becomes visible as part of the facially neutral documentation process. Once individuals were able to physically reach a country to apply to asylum, the documentation process proves to be highly exclusive to white, cisgender, heterosexual and able-bodied individuals.9

Persons marked by the system as not fitting their categories are summarized under the category “special need”, rendering them as others and disregarding them as subjects. The discursive construction of groups that are not seen as individual human beings anymore, not only within the European Union. A most recent example of categorising individuals in reference to their mobility can also be found in the United States’ presidential action on “Restricting the entry of foreign nationals to protect the united states from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats”. In this, groups of people are referred to as “removable nationals”, “immigrants” and “nonimmigrants”, agglomerating individual persons into a mass of bodies that is defined by racialization, which acts through visa and citizenship.10 Who gets to be put into these categories is heavily influenced by the narrative of governments and the repetition in the media echo chamber.

This adds up to a multifaceted legal system that appears neutral but is actually pervaded by the Global North’s desire to uphold its neo-colonial structures. In the context of colonial systems, María Lugones describes the continuous normalisation of the “light side”, encompassing white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender bodies. This can only be achieved by rendering non-white, disabled and queer bodies as ‘other’ and undesirable migrants.11 Similarly, Achiume emphasizes that bodies categorized as non-white are a site through which territorial and political exclusion is achieved in neocolonial empires and whiteness acts as presumptive site of inclusion in the same.12

The reiteration of bordered practices stabilizes and is being stabilized by hegemonial hierarchies and represent intersectional forms of discrimination towards different bodies. The texts and policy documents give hints towards underlying constructed hierarchies and the public discourse may sympathize more with this hegemonial discourse dispersing through media and local politics. As Dixon points out in relation of LGBTQIA+ migrants, there is a skewed visibility and unrecognizability of this group of people, albeit sexuality and gender identity are only part of a human’s identity. Starting from the countries of origin that do not protect them from persecution or even enable it. Falling out of the hegemonial brackets, these bodies are rendered invisible and left vulnerable, especially when they are not white. Dixon also explains that visibility of reality is not the only way to go, as for many areas where there is a distance in power and force, the same needs to be redistributed within policy and advocacy, so that the body of an individual is becoming less and eventually no prerequisite for movement and migration between states and areas. The way different borders are enacted within bodies of individuals and groups also shows when people arrive in a at first glance “safe” country within another bordered territory. More often than not, the systems in place show just how little states care for individuals in need of care. Structural discrimination does not stop even for the second or third generations of migrantized families. The bodies remain bordered by the system.13

Marie Hoffend is currently studying for a second Master’s degree in Gender, Culture and Social Change at the University of Innsbruck, having completed a Master’s degree in Strategic Management with a focus on communication. This essay is the result of the seminar on gender, migration and borders.

Diesen Artikel zitieren: Hoffend, Marie: Bordered Bodies. Intersectional Determinants of (Non-)Entry, in: Migration and Belonging, 12/12/2025, https://belonging.hypotheses.org/7151 [Abrufdatum].

  1. Achiume, E. Tendayi: Racial Borders, in: The Georgetown Law Journal 110 (2022) 3, 445-508. []
  2. IInternational Organization for Migration: Missing Migrants Project, 2025; Ca Minando Fronteras: Monitoring the Right to Life on the Euro-African Western Border, January–May 2025. []
  3. Foucault, Michel: In Verteidigung der Gesellschaft. Vorlesungen am Collège de France 1975-1976. Frankfurt am Main 2001; Mbembe, Achille / Meintjes, Libby: Necropolitics, in: Public Culture, 15 (2003) 1, 11-40. []
  4. Kasparek, Bernd: Europa als Grenze. Eine Ethnographie der Grenzschutz-Agentur Frontex. Bielefeld 2024. []
  5. Achiume 2022, Kasparek 2024. []
  6. European Parliament: Acquisition and loss of citizenship in EU Member States. Key trends and issues, 2018. []
  7. Papanikolaou, Konstantinos: European Court of Justice ruling prohibits Malta from selling citizenship, in: The Loop: ECPR’s Political Science Blog, 2025. []
  8. Achiume 2022. []
  9. Dixon, Tina Nina: Queer refugees and human rights: in the limits of recognition, in: Journal of Refugee Studies (2024), 1-17, 2. []
  10. The White House: Restricting The Entry Of Foreign Nationals To Protect The United States From Foreign Terrorists And Other National Security And Public Safety Threats, 2025. Siehe auch: Şahin, Ezgi: Being a Student in Austria as a Migrant: Gendered Perspectives on Borders and Belonging, in: Migration and Belonging, 28/11/2025. []
  11. Lugones, María: Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System, in: Hypatia. A Journal of Feminist Philosphy 22 (2007) 1, 186-209. Siehe auch: Amendt, Anna: Racial Borders and Indigenous Migration in Latin America. How Colonial Legacies Shape Indigenous Mobility in Latin America, in: Migration and Belonging, 24/10/2025. []
  12. Achiume 2022. []
  13. Dixon 2024. []

OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Marie Hoffend (12. Dezember 2025). Bordered Bodies. Intersectional Determinants of (Non-)Entry. Migration and Belonging. Abgerufen am 7. Februar 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/15c7j


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