Concern about border control is a defining feature of contemporary international relations. Borders are spaces in which citizens demand that their states carry out security in gendered, masculine ways. We propose that the gendered terms in which people think about their states have important implications for citizen levels of support for border security. We describe two competing ways that people might respond to feminized imagery of their states and we test these hypotheses in three waves of an original survey experiment conducted in the United States. Contrary to themes in existing literature, we find that citizens adopt rather than react against feminized conceptualizations of their states. When seeing the state as feminine, people reduce their support for strong border security action. Our paper demonstrates that the masculine conceptualization of states is malleable and the gendered conceptions that people hold about their states affect public demands for border security.
