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188 12 Latina/o Sexualities in Motion Latina/o Sexualities Research Agenda Project SUSANA PEÑA This chapter examines the existing literature on the relationship between Latina/o sexualities and migration. Drawing on literature in the social and behavioral sciences (and related disciplines), I examine studies that explicitly focus on Latino migration to the United States and sexuality. In addition, I draw on studies indirectly related to migration and sexuality that add important issues to our conversation. In general, the literature discussed in this chapter tackles the following questions: How does the state monitor, control, and categorize sexuality in the migra-ƒ tion and naturalization process? How does this affect the sexuality of firstgeneration immigrant Latina/os? Does a sexual minority status or experience of sexual violence promoteƒ emigration? How do immigrant-generation and acculturation affect sexual practicesƒ and identities? How are sexual values, practices, and identities being communicatedƒ between generations of Latina/os? Several recent edited collections focus explicitly on the intersection of sexuality with immigration, globalization, and transnationalism. The primarily humanitiescentered Queer Diasporas was followed by the 2002 publication of Queer Globalizations . Preceded by a conference at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies of the City University of New York, Queer Globalizations draws on scholarship in the humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences to “identify both the opportunities and perils inherent in [global] transformations and their implication for queer cultures and lives.” Contributors draw on geographically and racially diverse examples to illustrate the queer contradictions of globalizations. As the editors argue, globalization “despite its tendency to reduce the social and political significance of queer sexualities and culture to a commodity exchangeable LATINA/O SEXUALITIES IN MOTION 189 in the marketplace—has also provided the struggle for queer rights with an expanded terrain for intervention.” The 2005 collection Queer Migrations similarly combines papers from two conferences held at Bowling Green State University and at the University of California–Santa Cruz. This volume is particularly relevant to this essay because it squarely centers on immigration per se and a majority of its chapters focus on Latina/os. This collection examines both how immigration discourses monitor, control, and categorize sexuality and how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual (LGBT) immigrants of color create communities in the shadows of these policies. Published the same year, Passing Lines emerged out of a conference at the David Rockefeller Center of Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Defining as queer “anyone who does not conform, or who is understood as not conforming, to conventional sexual mores,” the editors argue that “U.S. immigration law and practice have historically considered queer people as problems and have made our sexualities, desires, and ‘lifestyles’ into objects of interrogation, debate, censure, control, and exclusion.” In addition to providing a strong foundation for the conceptual underpinnings of this essay, these collections and the university-supported academic conferences that inspired them indicate increasing scholarly attention to the study of Latina/o sexualities “in motion.” In this chapter, I discuss the strengths of this emerging literature as well as some of the gaps that remain in the scholarship, ending with recommendations for future areas of study.1 Sex and Immigration Policy Although the relationship between gender and immigration is now generally recognized, until fairly recently there was almost no acknowledgment that sexuality might bear on immigration. In her review of heteronormativity and immigration scholarship for Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Eithne Luibhéid laments that the “study of sexuality and immigration remains marginalized, trivialized, depoliticized, or treated with hostility.” By documenting and analyzing the ways sexuality has historically factored into immigration exclusion and naturalization policies, scholars such as Luibhéid, Margot Canaday, and Siobhan Somerville have been instrumental in demonstrating precisely why sexuality should be examined in immigration studies. I want to emphasize that this concerns sexuality in all its forms—not just the sexuality of stigmatized sexual groups. In a recent article, Martin F. Manalansan emphasizes that a focus on sexuality in migration research is particularly important because it makes visible the heteronormative assumptions about family, reproduction, and marriage that structure immigration policy and are reproduced in the scholarly literature.2 In Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border, Luibhéid argues that the “U.S. immigration control system has served as a crucial site for the construction and regulation of sexual norms, identities, and behaviors since 1875.” She examines the ways technologies of “examination” figure in immigration [3.19.31.73] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 17:04...

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