Tense Borders: Culture, Identity, and Anxiety in New Zealand’s Interweaving Discourses of Immigration and Genetic Modification

Immigration and genetic modification (GM) are two contentious sociocultural issues that have attracted considerable academic, political, and public attention in New Zealand. Although seemingly disparate, the discourses around the two issues share common anxieties about the protection and breaching of a range of boundaries, particularly national, cultural, political, and genetic ones. This article argues that the issues of immigration and GM epitomize the struggles over the politics of recognition and redistribution. On the one hand, these issues are steeped in the contested culture-driven politics of identity. On the other hand, they grapple with the economic realities of a globalized world and the ways in which economic wedges are driven between people on cultural lines. Studied together, the discourses of immigration and GM reveal how boundaries are created, maintained, and policed in an era of globalization and technoscience.