Recasting gender: precarity, exchange, and smuggling across the India–Bangladesh borderlands

This chapter explores how borderlands gender space, politics, and economies. As overlapping zones of power, authority, and economic transactions, societies respond to political and economic forces in different ways. These processes in turn re-order authority and social structures and shape how people live and make a living from borders. The chapter makes the argument that the gendered asymmetries that shape nationalism and smuggling are fundamental to the making and un-making of borderlands. Taking inspiration from scholarship on borders and borderlands across the disciplines of history, anthropology, geography, and gender studies, the chapter recasts attention to the 4,096-kilometer-long India-Bangladesh border.