Forthcoming Special Issue of GLQ on Queer/Migration

Eithne Luibhéid, editor

The centrality of sexual and migration control regimes to contemporary practices of empire, war, and the security state in the context of globalization and neo-liberalism has been individually theorized from varied perspectives. But what are the connections, overlaps, and points of articulation between both sexuality and migration regimes within these larger frameworks? This special issue of GLQ seeks to address these questions, and in the process to extend the growing interdisciplinary body of scholarship that critically examines the interface between queer and migration theories.

Historically, state-controlled immigration regimes emerged as a tool of nation-building in the context of empire. Practices of identification, surveillance, detention and expulsion, which differentially produced and policed or expelled migrant subjects, developed accordingly. Sexual norms have always been central to these practices, and remain so today in ways that demand interrogation. In particular, increasing reliance on information technology-based surveillance including biometrics (with which individuals must "voluntarily" cooperate in accordance with neo-liberal logics of subject formation and governance), continued militarization, and the growing prison-industrial complex extend but rework earlier practices of sexual surveillance, which were thoroughly imbricated with racial, gender, colonial, and class logics at different scales. Moreover, these re-workings of border control are intimately connected to, draw on, and reinforce the policing of "domestic" populations in relation to empire, patriotic nationalism, post-industrial capitalism and enduring warfare. In these scattered sites and assemblages through which borders are continually reproduced, sexuality serves as a double mechanism through which some populations become refashioned into "proper" self-governing subjects for the state, while others are "differentially excluded" (Espiritu), enduringly subalternized, or expelled.

Through a distinctly queer feminist of color genealogy, Borderlands Studies has emerged as a vibrant field of study engaged in conversation with migration theories as well as contemporary social justice questions. Among other contributions, Borderlands Studies challenges concepts that are framed by trajectories of evolutionary development within the boundaries of the nation-state and instead pays attention to contradiction, relationality, and transnational and transcultural dynamics, and makes efforts to undo binaries, theorize liminal positions, resituate the border as a contact zone, connect material conditions to subject formation processes, and rethink immigrant agency and resistance-while always emphasizing multiple, interlocking equalities at various scales. Emma Perez has called for the further development of Borderlands Studies within a decolonial queer framework.

The questions raised by Borderlands Studies and issues of immigration control are powerful examples of the larger problem of governing mobility which confronts the modern nation-state. Empire, capitalism, and liberalism historically require not simply to pre-empt or prevent mobility by certain individuals or populations, but equally, to foster varied forms of "appropriate" mobility by others. Thus, the interface between queers and migration must be considered at this larger scale, too, in relation to multiple modes of mobility that the nation-state and capital seek to foster/prevent, including immigration, tourism, business travel, and war-making. In particular, where and how sexuality figures into fostering/preventing multiple forms of mobility-and how this articulates racial, heteropatriarchal, bourgeois, and imperial logics-demands consideration both from a queer perspective and in relation to queer populations. The extent to which queers may become not only subalternized but also complicitous with dominant relations of rule, through sanctioned mobility, must also be addressed.

These histories are being extended and reworked in the present, in the context of mutating practices of empire; the so-called "war on terror"; the nation-state emphasis on security with associated practices of surveillance, detention and abrogation of the law; and neo-liberal economic and cultural practices, policies and forms of subject making. Thus, this special issue seeks contributions that address the conjunctions, intersections and articulations between sexual and migration control regimes, as these participate in and are transformed by the larger context. The editor particularly seeks essays that address queerness not solely in relation to sexuality, but rather, in terms of how sexuality at once structures and is restructured by race, gender, culture, class, and colonial logics. Essays that consider possibilities of resistance, challenge and transformation are also particularly welcomed.

The editor invited proposals that addressed such questions as:

1. What are the points of conjunction, articulation, and contradiction between the regulation of sexuality and the regulation of migration by the state and by capital, historically and at present (including in the context of the so-called war on terror, practices of empire, patriotic nationalism, and global capitalism)? What possibilities for contestation do these present? How can queerness (as identity, subjectivity, practice, and/or politics) disrupt or transform these regimes of governance?

2. How do strategies, technologies, knowledge formations, and/or assemblages that are deployed to monitor both sexuality and migration extend but rework earlier institutional arrangements and intellectual genealogies, and how are these being negotiated or contested?

3. How are queer migrants surviving and transforming regimes of state, capital, family, and community governance? How are queer migrants negotiating and building relationships with established queer, racial, gender, and/or cultural communities and organizations, and with what results?

4. How should we document and theorize "queer immigrant acts" (Roman), identities, cultural performances, and politics within and across multiple borders?

5. How do regimes of governance designed to foster heteronormativity intersect with the demand for migrant assimilation? How are these being refashioned by, while at the same time serving as a crucial support for, dominant state, neo-liberal, and imperial policies and practices? How do migrant communities variously negotiate this intersection (including through complicity, resistance, resituating the demands to a transnational or diasporic sphere, and/or hybrid/mixed strategies, as shown by histories of "ethnic" beauty pagents and struggles for publicly funded housing to shore up domesticity)?

6. What are the connections between state regimes for governing sexuality, migration, and potential terrorism? What strategies are developing among queers of color, migrant queers, and others for surviving and challenging these connections?

7. How does racialized heterosexuality, which has typically been understood as representing the apex of development, articulate with teleologies of "civilization" that are driving empire and war-and how does this play out in relation to both fostering and preventing certain kinds of mobility?

8. How have neo-liberalism, war, and empire transformed the terrain of queer politics, and where and how do queer migrants fit in?

9. When and how are immigration, transnationalism, and/or disapora frameworks most useful in the study of queer histories, theories, politics, and cultures? In what ways do these frameworks, as well as the lived histories of migrant queers, necessitate a transformation of foundational concepts, methodologies, assumptions, and standards of evaluation in queer/sexuality studies?

10. Equally, how does centering queer histories, cultures, politics, practices and labor necessitate revision to standard immigration, transnationalism, and/or disapora scholarship?

11. In what ways can Borderlands Studies be further queered, and for what purposes should this occur?

12. How are "family values" deployed to structure both sexuality and migration, and to foster hegemonic political projects and coalitions-and how can and do queers, including queer migrants, challenge, resituate, transform, and/or become abjected by these regimes?