Sexuality and borders in right wing times: a conversation

Abstract

In their prescient 2019 symposium on sexuality and borders, Billy Holzberg, Anouk Madörin and Michelle Pfeifer identified a deepening relationship between sexuality and mobility; they pointed to the increasingly important role of sexuality in the production and maintenance of border regimes, and how racialized border regimes in turn mediate expressions of sexuality. That is, they acknowledge sexuality as a dominant frame by which mobility is captured and regulated.The symposium made an important intervention, but then we were hit by the Covid19 pandemic and the effects of the many virulent, anti-immigrant, authoritarian and racialized regimes were made even more manifest. Instead of haunting us, right wing sentiment has materialized into a form of mass death of black and brown people and migrants -not just through the biopolitical logic of "letting die," but by actively exposing and cultivating infection in meat packing plants, prisons, detention centers as well as in front line workers. Holzberg, Madörin and Pfeifer anticipated that this would be furthered by its intersections with sexuality; and in our conversation, we explore how, specifically, with the idea that right-wing times have rendered these intersecting relationships both slightly different, but nevertheless all more urgent to understand.Those most vulnerable have borne the brunt of inadequate healthcare and housing, combined with newly invigorated forms of police and other forms of violence: perhaps top amongst these are trans people of color. The massive rally for Black Trans lives in Brooklyn, New York in June 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, acknowledged this vulnerability; with 15,000 people dressed in white, packed into the plaza in front of the Brooklyn Museum and spilling out into the transecting streets, people reacted to the many recent deaths of Black trans women, several of which came in the wake of rollbacks to transgender healthcare protections. Other murders occurred in prison or on the street. As Angela Davis (2020) stated in an interview, if we want to develop an intersectional perspective, the trans community is showing us the way; the trans community has taught us how to challenge our foundational sense of normalcy, and as Davis underscored, if we can challenge the gender binary, then we can resist prisons, and jails, and police. And, we would add, we can challenge the very idea of borders and nation-states.In what follows, we respond to prompts about the relationships between race, immigration, and sexuality, as these intersecting differences have been forced into the same frame by the violent practices of right-wing regimes, and brought into relief by Covid19. Even as we have long known that sexual politics are a way to govern bodies, and to distribute uneven states of vulnerability (Stoler 2010), we are seeing new incarnations of government. With the concepts of tolerance, multi-culturalism or integration, liberalism works to manage, govern and control difference. That is, it abandons and excludes those who exceed the bounds o...