Becoming selves with/in landscapes and across borders

In this chapter we explore processes of becoming subjects with/in particular landscapes and the movement from one landscape to another. We find moments becoming in intricate movements from one landscape to another where the child lets go her immersion on one landscape in order to embrace another. The movement across the border is propelled by the intensities of the new landscape seem dangerous. We have argued, as does Butler, that we depend on others (who are part of those landscapes) for our existence and for what “we harbour and preserve in the beings that we are” (Butler, 1997b:2). In our analysis we find that the willing break from dependence on one landscape opens up a new connection, across extensive borders, with a shift in intensity that may be embraced with pleasure or with pain. Our stories work at the paradoxical space of immersion and separation, of movement from one coextensity to another and back again. They show the dependence for existence on particular landscapes, their zones of intensity, and the places and people with/in them. Our stories also show the necessity of letting go in acts of becoming. What our stories suggest is that the disavowal of dependency through which the autonomous subject is created might better be theorized as the movement from one set of intensities to another, and from one set of relations to another.