Migrant and refugee lesbians: Lives that resist the telling

Abstract

This essay introduces the special issue on “Migrant and Refugee Lesbians: Lives that Resist the Telling.” It discusses the stakes involved in silence about migrant lesbian lives that permeates scholarship; reviews published works that address migrant lesbians; and highlights theoretical traditions that promise to enable further scholarship. The essay then critically explores multiple meanings associated with the terms “lesbian” and “migrant,” and reviews common colonialist binaries and linear narratives that condition im/possibilities for “telling” about lesbian migrant lives. It concludes by describing the essays in the special issue, including their contributions to enabling forms of telling by highlighting multiple relations of power, and possibilities for intervention and transformation.

Keywords:

• Lesbian
• migrant
• queer
• asylum
• refugee
• silence
• nonheteronormative

Acknowledgments

Warmest thanks to Esther Rothblum for inviting this special issue and her guidance throughout the process; Karma Chávez and Annie Hill for practical and insightful suggestions that greatly improved the introduction; and the Latino Research Initiative for a generous fellowship during which this special issue was completed.

Notes

1 Loyd, Mitchelson and Burridge (2013) speak of the urgency of developing “organizing strategies that don't depend on winning one set of (apparent) privileges through reinforcing someone else's oppression” (9).

2 This review of scholarship is intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive, since the conversations span so many disciplines and locations.

3 See also the invaluable collection of Alexander’s essays (2005).

4 I follow Fortier by using affect to “designate a generic category of emotions and feelings including embodied and sensory feelings through which we experience the world, and through which worlds, subjects, and objects are brought forth” (2016, 1039).

5 Sexual/gender identifications (by everyone, including lesbians) can be understood as involving desires and aspirations that are unfolding but never fully accomplished; and that interact with migration systems and processes in continually evolving ways. These desires and aspirations are neither reducible to nor separate from drivers of migration that include capitalism, colonialism, and military interventions.

6 However, those who seem to approximate dominant sexuality logics enjoy the benefit of having their beings and records less subject to scrutiny and doubt; contrarily, those who do not match are continually asked to prove and explain their sexualities and beings.

7 For a brief explanation of the hukou system, see https://projectpartner.org/poverty/hukou-system-explained-chinas-internal-passport/

8 Amit’s study is based on interviews with 42 people, of whom 19 identified as women, 22 identified as men, and one identified as F2M (xvi).

9 See https://www.unhcr.org/lgbti-claims.html.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eithne Luibhéid

Eithne Luibhéid is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona (UA). She holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her research focuses on the connections among queer lives, state immigration controls, and justice struggles. She served as the Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at UA from 2007–2011. Luibhéid is the author of Pregnant on Arrival: Making the “Illegal” Immigrant (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (University of Minnesota Press, 2002). She is the editor of “Queer Migrations,” a special issue of GLQ (2008), and the co-editor of Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of “Illegalization,” Detention and Deportation (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming); A Global History of Sexuality (Wiley Blackwell, 2014); Queer Migrations: Sexuality, Citizenship, and Border Crossings (University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and “Representing Migrant Women in Ireland and the E.U.,” a special issue of Women’s Studies International Forum (2004). Luibhéid’s current book manuscript explores how deportability is being extended and resisted through queer intimate ties.