Eithne Luibhéid

Queer/Migration: An Unruly Body of Scholarship

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.

Sexuality, Migration, and the Shifting Line between Legal and Illegal Status

Controlling unauthorized (“illegal”) immigration is now a top priority for nationstates around the globe.1 As that priority has become firmly intertwined with the “war on terrorism,” it has authorized the expanded criminalization, incarceration, and withdrawal of rights and due process for all migrants. Consequently, it has become urgent to raise fundamental questions about the historical processes and power dynamics through which various migrant populations become designated as legal or illegal. Focusing on the campaign to secure recognition for same-sex couples under U.S. immigration law, this article challenges neoliberal representations of legal and illegal status as “evidence” of individual character. Instead, I analyze these status distinctions as outcomes of contingent, changing relations of power, including sexuality (which is often framed through a discourse of family) as it intersects with hierarchies of race, gender, class, and geopolitics. The analysis invites us to consider whether and how sexuality may provide a locus for contesting and renegotiating the distinction between legal and illegal, including the multiple relations of power in which it is anchored. The article first historicizes how and why unauthorized migration occurs, in relation to larger structural factors. This historicization provides a basis for rethinking il/legal status as contingent, unstable, and the outcome of multiple relations of power. The next section explores how same-sex migrant partners remain shut out from accessing legal status on the basis of their relationship with a U.S. citizen or resident, with the result that they must consciously labor to become legal through other means. Their productions of legality, however, often remain precarious, short-term, and haunted by the possibility of becoming illegal in the future.

sexual regimes and migration controls: reproducing the Irish nation-state in transnational contexts

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, womens 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 Constitutions 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.

Irish Migration and Irish Sexuality Scholarship: Queering the Connections

Rich histories of Irish migration, and of Irish sexuality, have been set down on paper—frequently without acknowledging one another. What new questions, insights, lines of research, and political possibilities might emerge if we were to put Irish migration and Irish sexuality scholarship into critical conversation? Such a conversation would contribute to “queering” each area of scholarship. “Queering” refers to processes of interrogating epistemological and methodological boundaries that stem from, and further fuel, normalizing regimes of power and violence (Giffney and Hird, 2008; Somerville, 2000). Queer conversations between migration and sexuality scholarship promise to regenerate research agendas and political possibilities.