Queer Migration and Critical Trafficking Studies: Notes on and Beyond Containment

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Acknowledgments

This essay would not have been possible without the support and generosity of Annie Hill and Karma Chávez as critical interlocutors at crucial points. I am grateful to them both for holding space open for these ideas. Ani Mukherji, Jennifer Musial, and John Andrews also provided helpful feedback and suggestions.

Notes

1 On “methodological nationalism” see White (2014) and De Genova (2013). By “imagined community,” I am gesturing toward Anderson’s (1983/2006) pivotal book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, in which he defines the “nation” as an “imagined community” composed of strangers one will never meet or come to know but with whom one shares a sense of kinship or belonging. Within our scholarly fields, we often do meet and come to know those whom we cite in our work, but I am gesturing here to the ways that citational politics carve out “nations” of interlocutors, not unlike the way that the printing press—in Anderson’s study—produced the possibility of a sense of shared, territorialized belonging.

2 I identify gender, women’s, and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and American studies as interdisciplinary disciplines because each of these fields of critical inquiry offers a freestanding doctorate degree. As a cofounder (2014) and outgoing cochair (2014–2017) of the Gender, Women’s, and Feminist Studies (GWFS) PhD Interest Group at the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), I find myself in an apparently paradoxical position that warrants explication. In that role and in my scholarship on field formation in GWFS, I am firm in my conviction that GWFS be recognized as a distinct field of inquiry—that is, as an interdisciplinary discipline.