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Review of:

Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings edited by Eithne Luibhéid, Lionel Cantú Jr.
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2005

Reviewed By: Karen C. Krahulik
Reviewed in: Peace & Change
Date accepted online: 14/01/2008
Published in print: Volume 32, Issue 04, Pages 590-612
See all reviews for this journal

Book Reviews

In Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings, Eithne Luibhéid and the late Lionel Cantú Jr. accomplish the critical task of queering immigration studies. They do so by decentering the experiences of white, heterosexual, affluent male immigrants and instead interrogating the kinds of narratives and technologies that affect the movement of queer bodies to and from the United States. In delineating the scope of their edited collection, Luibhéid and Cantú make clear that they are interested in bringing questions of immigration and citizenship into direct conversation with sexuality as an analytical vector. What makes Luibhéid and Cantú's project queer, however, is not the already rehearsed marriage of sexuality with immigration, but instead the insistence that questions of sexuality and citizenship must also account for the theoretical and practical ways in which race, class, gender, and country of origin matter. The title of their project, Queer Migrations, reflects their methodological as well as geographical commitment to different vectors of border crossings.

Yet, this is not a project that spans the globe delineating queer migrations from multiple continents. Instead, it is more terse, looking mainly, although not exclusively, at migration from Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, and the Philippines. Readers ought not feel deprived, however, as Luibhéid and Cantú link a range of disciplinary fields-history, literary theory, cultural studies, queer and race theory, anthropology, women's studies, sociology, and the visual arts-with a coherent argument that bolsters the interdisciplinary strengths of immigration studies. Their argument is simple: that sexuality has played a vital role in shaping immigration policies, practices, and experiences in the United States. Yet it is underpinned by a complex set of commitments, including an insistence that scholars focus less on a binary model of citizen/alien and more on the experiences of citizens and aliens who are "multiply marginalized" while they negotiate nationhood and legal as well as cultural belonging. The essays Luibhéid and Cantú bring together speak to new frameworks for immigration studies, namely, those that seek to understand how border crossings constitute transnational rather than lateral movements.

While making a necessary intervention regarding the heteronormativity of immigration studies, Luibhéid and Cantú are also careful to contextualize sexuality more broadly within the technologies that have historically regulated the boundaries of the United States and its citizens. They introduce their project with an adept (queer) theoretical analysis, yet they follow this with a detailed historiography of the ways in which U.S. immigration authorities have excluded potential citizens based on gender, ethnicity, race, and class. For example, they remind readers of the 1875 Page Law, which excluded Asian women who were tagged as single, poor, and, therefore, "immoral." They discuss the premises supporting the 1882 Chinese exclusion act as well as the Immigration Act of 1924, which influenced Asians as well as Southern and Eastern Europeans. Immigrants who were read as white, affluent, and belonging to or at least potentially productive of nuclear, heteropatriarchal families received preferential treatment. Importantly, they note, gay and lesbian migrants are yet another cog in the wheel of U.S. border control.

The strength of Luibhéid and Cantú's volume lies in its ability to disrupt the liberationist metanarrative of U.S. immigration history that positions all immigrants as "freedom-seeking" opportunists who find that the United States is indeed a land of plenty. Queer Migrations exposes how this metanarrative obscures far more than it could possibly illuminate. Martin Manalansan's essay on Filipino gay immigrants in New York City illustrates how "everyday" experiences "trouble" heteronormative assumptions, leading, in his words, to a "cautionary hopefulness" about the fate of queer migrants. Alisa Solomon tells the "All-American" story of Christina Madrazo, a transsexual Mexican immigrant seeking asylum in the United States while encountering multiple levels of persecution from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to Miami's Latino gay community. Erica Rand adds a decidedly queer twist to the collection in her article on the Statue of Liberty, who, in Rand's words, "is one hot butch." Rand analyzes "meaning making in general," conceding, in the end, that although lady Liberty might not suit all fantasies, she does speak to the salience of race, class, and gender in immigration narratives. Horacio N. Roque Ramrez's essay is similarly refreshing in its centering of performance as the means of critical intervention. Highlighting two gay Latino plays written and produced in San Francisco, Ramrez exposes them as novel cultural "responses to systems of marginalization and exploitation" (p. 184) and as critiques "of the state, of citizenship broadly defined, and of queer bodies in transit between local and global histories" (p. 184).

A minor flaw in Luibhéid and Cantú's collection concerns the way they position their work as a project filling a critical gap in queer theory and immigration studies. They begin somewhat inaccurately by stating, "despite rich scholarship about the causes and consequences of international migration, there has been little consideration of how sexual arrangements, ideologies, and modes of regulation shape migration to and incorporation into the United States" (p. ix). Yet, as they concede just a few pages later, scholars from a number of disciplines, including history, literary theory, queer theory, political science, and legal studies, have made substantial progress during the past two decades in areas from transnational immigrant rights to citizenship exclusion based on HIV/AIDS. This move, like the title that suggests a project much broader in scope than the one undertaken, are unfortunate missteps, yet in no way do they take away from the important turn Luibhéid, Cantú, and their contributors have taken in moving us toward a more complex and less rigid understanding of border-crossing politics and experiences. By way of concluding, however, I ask that scholars remain mindful of the differences between queer methodologies and queer subjects, between queer migrations and queer migrants. Are gay and lesbian border crossers queer simply by virtue of being "out" as gay, of being transgressive in legal terms, or do they, like the authors that write about them, practice a queer politics that challenges normative narratives based on race, sex, or class preferences?