Queering Borders

Eithne Luibhéid's careful introduction to Queer Migrations notes that the book does not aim to represent queer migrants equally by geography or type of (im)migration. Instead, and more usefully, the collection deftly draws immigration and sexuality studies together in critical conversation. Luibhéid situates the collection historically, demonstrating how immigration practices and concerns about sexuality have worked together to shape conceptions of nation and citizenship, writing that the immigration control apparatus does "not simply apply preexisting sexual, gender, racial, class and cultural categories to individuals, but rather actively participate[s] in producing these distinctions and linking them to broader processes of nation-making and citizenship" (xvi). The essays here mark a burgeoning scholarship that provides not just historical and cultural analyses but a model of research that formulates immigration and sexuality studies as inseparable and mutually informing, offering new avenues for research, cultural production, and political practice.

The first of the collection's two sections, "Disciplining Queer Migrants," frames immigration into the United States through analyses of regulatory norms that both constrain and construct immigrant identities and mobilities. The authors take specific legal and cultural sites as points of entry for discussing broader institutional and discursive practices shaping immigration. Alisa Solomon's "Trans/Migrant" foregrounds the case of Christina Madrazo, a transsexual woman from Mexico seeking asylum in the United States, detailing the policies and power structures that render invisible the sexual and physical violence enacted against particular populations of migrants. Solomon notes that Madrazo's transsexual status alternately positioned her as in need of saving by the United States (fleeing antitrans and antiqueer violence in Mexico) and as that which the United States must be saved from (bringing with her the degeneracy of transsexuality). Similarly, Timothy J. Randazzo's historical overview of asylum cases for queer migrants traces the contradictory and fluctuating ways U.S. immigration law has taken up sexuality, particularly as the law began to distinguish between sexual behaviors and sexual identities in the early 1990s.

While Solomon and Randazzo primarily describe the political and social barriers preventing many queer migrants from being granted asylum, Lionel Cantú Jr. poses critical questions of the very process of seeking asylum. After Cantú's unexpected death in 2002, Luibhéid and Alexandra Minna Stern completed the revisions on his article in this collection, which builds on the previous two essays by examining how the asylum system depends on both essentialist constructions of sexuality and colonialist constructions of the United States as safe and liberatory in contrast to Third World "primitivism." He argues that asylum seekers are compelled to "paint their countries in racialist, colonialist terms, while disavowing the United States' role in contributing to the conditions that they fled," a legal strategy that also effaces discrimination against immigrants and queers within the United States (65). Siobhan Somerville explores the broader history of inequalities structuring immigration law as she unpacks the language of exclusion in the 1952 U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act. Demonstrating the inseparability of racial and sexual contestations over citizenship, Somerville convincingly argues that the removal of the language of racial exclusion in 1952 worked in tandem with the addition of homosexuality and adultery exclusions, such that purity of blood(lines) through heterosexual monogamy continued to be a primary factor constituting U.S. citizenship, even without explicitly invoking race.

Wrapping up the first section, Erica Rand's essay diverges from previous articles in both form and content. Deliberately writing in a conversational style, Rand considers the meanings of race, sexuality, gender, class, and citizenship not through legal processes per se but through a collection of incidents surrounding the 1986 restoration of the Statue of Liberty. Exploring first the multiple gendered readings of Liberty (as "hot butch," as commodified and prostituted, and as national mother), Rand then deftly weaves three cultural events together with the centennial celebration of the statue to show "how the traffic in Liberty both occludes and depends on homophobic...