Most scholarship, policymaking, service provision, activism, and cultural work remain organized around the premise that migrants are heterosexuals (or on their way to becoming so) and queers are citizens (even though second-class ones). Where do queer migrants figure in these frameworks and activities? How do we conceptualize queer migration -which is at once a set of grounded processes involving heterogeneous social groups and a series of theoretical and social justice questions that implicate but extend beyond migration and sexuality strictly defined, and that refuse to attach to bodies in any strictly identitarian manner -in order to challenge and reconfigure the dominant frameworks? Queer migration scholarship, which has flourished since the 1990s, takes on these and other ambitious questions. 1 An unruly body of inquiry that is potentially vast in scope, queer migration scholarship participates in and contributes to wide-ranging debates that traverse multiple fields and disciplines. It has been fueled by the fact that international migration and related transnationalizing processes have transformed every facet of our social, cultural, economic, and political lives in recent decades. Sexuality scholarship has started to explore how "the age of migration" is centrally implicated in the construction, regulation, and reworking of sexual identities, communities, politics, and cultures. 2 At the same time, migration scholarship, which addresses immigration, emigration, transnationalism, diaspora, refugees, and asylum seekers, has begun to theorize how sexuality constitutes a "dense transfer point for relations of power" that structure all aspects of international migration. 3 Queer migration scholarship, which explores the multiple conjunctions between sexuality and migration, has drawn from and enriched these bodies of research -as well as feminist, racial, ethnic, postcolonial, public health, and globalization studies, among other fields.
Focusing on the U.S. campaign to secure recognition of same-sex couple relationships within immigration law, this article brings the scholarship about the social construction of undocumented immigration into critical conversation with queer studies. Challenging neoliberal representations of legal or illegal immigrant status as a sign of individual character, rather than as an outcome of multiple relations of power, the article highlights the central role of sexual regimes in constructing the distinction between legal and illegal. The article further explores, however, how sexual regimes always function in relation to crosscutting hierarchies of race, gender, class, and geopolitics. This suggests that the campaign for recognition of same-sex couples must address the multiple underpinnings of the il/legal distinction or else risk benefiting only the most privileged. The article then examines how recognized couple relationships provide the technology through which the state and its assemblages attempt to manage the risks associated with immigration and, over time, to transform legally admitted immigrants into “good” neoliberal citizens—while threatening those who do not measure up with potential illegalization. These dynamics raise important questions about citizenship, surveillance, discipline, and normalization that merit consideration by those struggling for recognition of same-sex couples within immigration law. They also enable us to further reconceptualize the legal/illegal distinction as an ongoing (rather than one-time) production, anchored in multiple relations of power that include, but are not limited to, sexuality. I conclude by questioning whether and to what extent sexuality may provide a locus for renegotiating the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants and its associated logics of violence.
This article examines the ways that state sexual regimes intersect with migration controls to re-make exclusionary nation-states and geopolitical hierarchies among women. I focus on two important Irish Supreme Court rulings: the X case (1992) and the O case (2002), respectively. X was a raped, pregnant, 14-year-old who sought an abortion in Britain. While the Supreme Court ultimately permitted her to procure an abortion, women's right to travel across international borders without government inquiry into their reproductive status came into question. The O case concerned a Nigerian asylum seeker who invoked the fact that she was pregnant in an effort to avoid deportation. The Supreme Court, however, affirmed that she could be deported, despite the Irish Constitution's pledge to protect the ‘right to life of the unborn.’ Considered together, these cases reveal how overlapping sexual/migration control regimes both reinscribe hierarchies among women based on geopolitical location, and rebound the exclusionary nation-state despite growing transnationalism.
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