Ulysse and Shoaff

Once again, the pairing of Ulysse’s Downtown Ladies with Shoaff’s article Borders within Borders is excellent. Both authors delve into how borders interact with the women who choose to cross them in order to buy/sell goods. Though the borders in question may be different, Shoaff focuses on the Haitian/Dominican border while Ulysse focuses more on international borders, it is obvious that gender, race, and class are factors that affect their crossing. As Shoaff states, “the importance of borders to the everyday lives of individuals lie in what they reveal about interplay…between the nation and the state” (Shoaff, 241). What may be just as pertinent is the ways in which those who research have their own borders to cross and how race, gender, and class interact in those crossings.

One of the more interesting aspects of these pieces though are the ways in which the authors found themselves crossing race and class borders. Notably, Ulysse mentions how her own experiences and situation led her to having difficulties crossing the social borders that exist. As she says, “managing the emotions produced by my context was one of the most difficult aspects of research for me to adjust to” (Ulysse, 181). This was obvious with her discomfort to the ‘gendered violence’ she witnessed as well as her astonishment at the ways in which the women she interacted with dealt with such realities.

Violence isn’t only gendered in how it relates to men though. As shown by Shoaff’s work, women were often subject to violence and aggression at borders when they would cross to sell their wares as well as when they would return from buying goods. This goes to show the ways in which women are not only trying to cross class borders with their profession, but also gendered ones. The use of crude verbal assaults and harassment by men who are in positions of power, if even for the day, against these women exemplifies how illegitimate their positions are seen. Though some have the protection of union cards, these women are still seen as bodies that can be manipulated and violated.

What is interesting is the fact that there are many positions of power in place to regulate the bodies that cross borders both international and national, but there seems to be very few in power that desire this regulation to be one that respects or recognizes the black female bodies as legitimate actors with rights to be protected as opposed to exploited.