ABSTRACT
This essay introduces the special issue on “Migrant and Refugee Lesbians: Lives that Resist the Telling.” It discusses the stakes involved in silence about migrant lesbian lives that permeates scholarship; reviews published works that address migrant lesbians; and highlights theoretical traditions that promise to enable further scholarship. The essay then critically explores multiple meanings associated with the terms “lesbian” and “migrant,” and reviews common colonialist binaries and linear narratives that condition im/possibilities for “telling” about lesbian migrant lives. It concludes by describing the essays in the special issue, including their contributions to enabling forms of telling by highlighting multiple relations of power, and possibilities for intervention and transformation.
This special issue, centered on “Lives that Resist Telling: Migrant and Refugee Lesbians,” was prompted by consistent silence in scholarship about the lives of migrant women who identify as lesbian, queer, or nonheteronormative (hereafter “lesbian”). This silence extends to queer migration scholarship, a relatively recent area of research that explores the ways that sexuality structures and is restructured by migration processes. As this special issue goes to press, no major book-length work focuses primarily on lesbian-identified migrants and many leave them out entirely. The problematic of “lives that resist telling,” which draws inspiration and analytical insights from scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1992), asks why the lives of lesbian-identified migrants seem to remain untellable across scholarship.
Crenshaw used the phrase “lives that resist the telling” in her 1992 essay that analyzed how Black women, including law professor Anita Hill, who accused nominee and eventual Supreme Court appointee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, live in a “political vacuum of erasure and contradiction” (403). Crenshaw describes “existing within the overlapping margins of race and gender discourse and in the empty spaces between, [the lives of Black women are] a location whose very nature resists the telling” (403). Crenshaw is describing intersectionality, meant not in the neoliberal sense of “adding” together considerations of race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship status to derive understanding of someone’s identity conceived as personal property, but in the sense of being located at the intersections of several nondominant positionalities, which results in “the lack of available and widely comprehended narratives to communicate the reality of [one’s] experience to the world” (404). In the Hill/Thomas case, competing narratives that centered either sexism or racism, but never both, ensured that “the simultaneity of Hill’s race and gender” positionality went unrepresented even as the events surrounding her were “appropriated to tell everybody’s story but her own” (406) and the injustices she experienced went unaddressed. Crenshaw concludes with a call to center Black women’s stories in order to come to grips with and transform how power is allocated and withheld, because “the empowerment of Black women constitutes the empowerment of our entire community” (436).
Crenshaw’s analysis provided the lens through which I formulated my question about the intractable silence across scholarly fields concerning migrant lesbian experience. Following Crenshaw and others, this special issue is a call not simply to “add” consideration of lesbian experiences to migration research and activism, but also to inquire into and work toward the transformation of relations of power and knowledge that continually situate lesbian-identified migrants within erasure, silence, and violence. Lesbian migrants are heterogeneous and scholarship must therefore name and address the varying forms of erasure, silence, and violence they experience, depending the interlocking positionalities that they inhabit within contexts of neoliberalism, imperial power, and decolonial struggles. Transforming these relations opens up new spaces for considering lesbian-identified migrants’ experiences and strengthens scholars’ capacity to analyze how sexuality structures all migrant experiences in ways that normalize some while rendering others available for violence and silencing. This approach may contribute toward imagining and creating worlds where, as Loyd, Mitchelson, and Burridge (2013) describe, possibilities for some do not depend on the subordination of others.1
Ground on which to build
A handful of pathbreaking works that center migrant lesbians provide an inspiring foundation on which to build.2 M. Jacqui Alexander’s (1994) “Not Just Any Body Can Be a Citizen” begins: “I am an outlaw in my country of birth.” She describes being raised in the Bahamas with the promise that the master’s day was done, yet subsequent governments steadily betrayed that promise and revised the terms of citizenship to exclude women, including lesbians who asserted erotic autonomy. Alexander risked criminalization in the Bahamas for engaging in same-sex sexuality; as a permanent resident but not citizen in the United States, she remained at risk of criminalization for same-sex sex acts and being a Black woman migrant (5). In this essay and subsequent work (2005), Alexander incisively analyzes connections among colonial and postcolonial state-making, mandatory heterosexualization, capitalist development and migration, and contributes to their transformation
Several book-length works on queer diaspora theorize the interplay between lesbian sexualities, female genders, and international migration—especially Gloria Wekker’s (2006) The Politics of Passion, Gayatri Gopinath’s (2005) Impossible Desires, and Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s (2010) Thiefing Sugar.3 These luminous books rewrite accepted histories and paradigms, create methodologies for silenced lives to be considered, and open up possibilities for different futures. Although not the central focus, migrant lesbians are discussed in several book-length studies of queer migration and queer asylum (e.g., Amit 2018; Chávez 2013; El-Tayeb 2011; Giametta 2017; Kuntsman 2009; Rand 2005). They make fleeting appearances in books about supposedly heterosexual marriage migration, migrant sex work, and migrant domestic work. A handful of groundbreaking Ph.D. dissertations center lesbian migrant women, and other dissertations include them within general rubrics such as “queer” or explorations of same-sex couple migration. Growing numbers of individual articles and book chapters also explore experiences of lesbian migrant women. Some of that work centers lesbians in relation to labor migration, a largely overlooked issue until recently (Lai 2018; Muñoz 2016). Information about the lives of migrant lesbians also appears under rubrics other than migration, diaspora, or transnationalism. For example, Oliva Espín (1997) has insistently centered and theorized Latina migrant lesbian lives in the field of psychology. Katie Acosta’s (2013) Amigas y Amantes theorizes “sexually nonconforming Latinas relationships with partners, families of origin, children, and friends” (2) by building on interviews that include 18 migrant women.
Information about migrant lesbians is also contained in archives and sites like None on Record: Stories of Queer Africa; the LGBTQ New Americans Project at the Brooklyn Community Pride Center; and in materials collected and created by queer migrant-serving organizations. Lesbian migrants sometimes appear on screen and in cultural productions, including plays, novels, songs, and short stories. They are often present but not marked or conceived as lesbian migrants.
Scholarship on lesbian migrants has been significantly enabled by feminist of color, queer of color, decolonial, postcolonial, and indigenous theorizing, whose richness and multiplicity defy summary but generally make expansive use of intersectionality theories. Drawing from Grace Hong and Roderick Ferguson (2015), we may say that these diverse bodies of work “provide alternative understandings of subjectivity, collectivity, and power” (2). They particularly engage questions of difference framed not as multicultural celebration that serves neoliberalism, but as produced through power and violence; as multiple, relational, and non-binary; and as tied to processes of valuing and devaluing that unevenly distribute possibilities for living and dying (11, 16). The works offer diverse theoretical and methodological tools to challenge binary and linear logics; center those at the intersection of nondominant positionalities; rethink spatialities and temporalities; create ways to describe that which has been rendered unknowable and valueness (Hong and Ferguson 2015, 16); and suggest forms of consciousness and world-making practices that seek to remake the dominant order.
Scholarship on lesbian migrants is also made possible by the shift toward transnational, postcolonial, decolonial, hemispheric, and regional analyses of migration. These approaches resituate nations and states within global histories of empire and capitalism that continually drive migration. The theories denaturalize hegemonic nationalist and statist frameworks that legitimize yet erase histories of violence and dispossession that underpin immigration policies. For example, Alyosha Goldstein (2014) describes, “the United States encompasses a historically variable and uneven constellation of state and local governments, indigenous nations, unincorporated territories, free associated commonwealths, protectorates, federally administered public lands, military bases, export processing zones, colonias, and anomalies such as the District of Colombia… the heterogeneity of this condition is not exceptional to the United States” (1). This heterogeneity reflects multiple processes of violence and dispossession that underpin, and continually threaten to rupture, hegemonic assertions of nationhood, statehood, and sovereignty; at the same time, these hegemonic assertions legitimize policies and practices that render migrants exploitable and disposable. From within transnational, postcolonial, hemispheric, and regional frameworks, migrants are conceived not within binary and linear logics that posit leaving one bounded nation-state for another or shedding one set of cultural norms for another, but as people whose migration was shaped by political, economic, and cultural flows across centuries and borders; as embedded in ongoing relationships that span national borders; and as navigating colonial, capitalist, racial, gender, and sexual hegemonies at different scales.
Borders and borderlands scholarship have also been critical by reconceiving borders not as self-evident lines on a map, but as materializations of histories of power and struggle that are tied to broad economic, social, and political dynamics at different scales involving multiple temporalities. Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) pathbreaking work, which theorized the United States/Mexico border as both metaphor and material site, has inspired dense explorations of borders as sites of power, inequality, struggle, dispossession, and world-making. Centering working-class, lesbian of color, border-dweller experiences and consciousness, Anzaldúa offered methods that refuse binary logics in favor of multiple, relational, and decolonial approaches. Scholars underscore that migration, and state strategies for governing migrants, continually challenge and reconstitute the nature and function of borders, including in the present moment.
The tools offered by affect theory are also increasingly used to theorize migrant lives, including those of lesbians.4 Migration scholarship has consistently engaged with feelings of love, loss, belonging, attachment, and desire that are associated with migration experiences (e.g., Mai and King 2009). Recent affect theories enable scholars to interconnect migrant subjectivities to structural dynamics in new ways, exploring relays of power and transformation. For instance, Jørgen Carling and Francis Collins (2018) use affect theory to rethink hegemonic explanations for why migration occurs. Explanations have remained polarized between those frameworks centered on imaginaries of sovereign individuals who make rational, calculated migration decisions, yet without addressing structural barriers, and frameworks that conceive migration as an outcome of histories and dynamics of colonialism and capitalism, yet without accounting for people’s agency. Using affect theory as a bridge, Carling and Collins argue that desire and aspiration, which are co-produced individually and socially, interact with the structural drivers of migration in a continually unfolding process that often defies linear logics and state-centric perspectives. Moreover, they argue that migration is not an end in itself, but a process through which people seek to become or to achieve aspirations, which may change over time.5
Recent work especially builds from Sara Ahmed’s (2010) insight that affect is not contained within individuals, but instead circulates among people and objects, materializing them in ways that build on historic inequalities and modes of dispossession, yet opening up possibilities for transformation. Accordingly, scholars have debated the connections between affective investments in Whiteness, carcerality, and empire on one hand, and increasingly exclusionary and punitive immigration policies on ...
