At a time when the European Union is currently intensifying its electronic frontier through unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, and remotely piloted aircraft and satellite remote sensing devices, it is crucial to ask what this ‘view from above’ in effect enables. Although creating enhanced visibility in the Mediterranean basin of migrants’ crossings, the technological solutions provided by the European Union do not prioritize search and rescue. In analyzing European Union policy documents regarding visibility-making at Europe’s maritime borders, as well as the rationale presented by the industry delivering the technological backbone, this article shows how the ‘view from above’ is not only constructed through data but feeds back into data-generating ‘vision machines’. The working together of the scopic/visual/ocular and the digital/algorithmic/metrical is coined ‘postvisuality’ – a term highlighting the entanglement of image and code and the subsuming of the visual under the digital, or digitality. Postvisuality is framed by Europe’s long history of racial securitization, which in this case facilitates migrants’ data doubles becoming a key locus for financialization and the generation of a surplus for the security and defense industries.

In this introductory article to the special issue, we ask what role sexuality plays in the reproduction and contestation of border regimes and think sexuality towards its various entanglements with border control. As borders have been understood as a method for reproducing racialized distinctions, we argue that sexuality is also a method of bordering and illustrate how sexuality works as a key strategy for the capture, containment and regulation of mobility and movement. Taking a transnational approach, we bring together queer scholarship on borders and migration with the rich archive of feminist, Black, Indigenous and critical border perspectives to suggest that these strategies need to be understood in close relation to the (I) intersecting dynamics of colonial histories of racialization, (II) national regimes of reproductive control and (III) the containment of contagion, disease and sexual deviance.

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