Imagining a Field

This book offers an impressive collection of essays and visual materials by activists, academics, and artists from different areas of expertise. The essays share a critical disposition that denatures heteronormativity and cisnormativity while tackling how these forces create displacement and punish subalternized subjects who dare cross international borders. Contributors offer a wide range of cases, concepts, and critiques that chart rich theoretical possibilities for the burgeoning field the editors name “queer and trans migrations.” They do so while also disputing the terms on which so-called migrant and refugee crises are constructed in dominant discourses. That is, the volume grapples with how the true crisis concerns “an increase in processes of migrant illegalization, detention and deportation” rather than the raw fact of the “arrival and presence of large numbers of migrants” (1–2).The volume provides the reader with a wealth of concepts with powerful methodological implications. Beginning with the introduction, Karma R. Chávez and Eithne Luibhéid discuss the terms queer and trans, underscoring their value as “analytic rubrics” and not merely as identities (7). Through them, they name critical interventions that reveal the historicity, normalization, and ideological inflections of identity categories, as well as the possibilities for transformation that may emerge from them. An effective illustration of such critical interventions is chapter 16 by Chávez and Hana Masri, which analyzes the rhetoric surrounding the Central American “child migrant crisis” of 2014 using a queer migrations lens. In their analysis, the authors reveal the “collusion” of “protective” and “punitive” (213) forms of attention given to migrant children in liberal discourse, while also unveiling the dangers of reproducing tropes of “vulnerability” and “innocence” in the immigration rights movement (210).Similarly expansive, other chapters demonstrate the interpretive edge of queerness and transness in the critical study of migrations. Chapter 1 by Luibhéid delves into “heteronormativity” and its attendant production of “sexual and gender subalterns,” including but not limited to LGBTQI subjects (20–21). Meanwhile, Fadi Saleh suggests in chapter 5 the notion of “humanitarian-asylum complex” (75). This term designates a variety of practices and discourses—beyond those of Western governments—that reproduce “queer exceptionalism” by disciplining not only queerness but also citizenship (76). In turn, chapter 10 by Myrto Tsilimpounidi and Anna Carastathis employs “photografia” as an intellectual praxis that contests logo-centric epistemologies (139) as well as presentist, heteronormalizing representations of refugees (140) that are prevalent not only in “nation-state projects” but also in “counterhegemonic social movement discourses and endeavors” (137). These contributions thus exemplify the larger significance of queer and trans migrations as a burgeoning field. The volume appeals to a broad audience by demonstrating “how sexual and gender regimes do not affect just nonnormative subjects but everyone” (7).At the same time, the editors underscore the specific analytical purchase of “trans” as irreducible to “queer.” They acknowledge the distinct meaning of gender nonconformity and the critical thrust of transing and not just queering the field (7). The chapters by Elif Sari, Ruben Zecena, and Jack Cáraves and Bamby Salcedo as well as the visuals by Rommy Torrico, Matice Moore, and Maria Inés Taracena are particularly apt in approaching trans migrant experiences, refusals, and life-affirming practices. In them, contributors present solid theorizations of “waiting” as a punitive technique of migration management starkly experienced by trans asylum seekers (chapter 6 by Sari), and “shameless interruptions” by trans migrants as more than sheer survival strategies (chapter 13 by Zecena). They reflect on trans “resilience” (Torrico), light/darkness (Moore), confidence and/in resistance (Taracena), and the integration of trans activism, research, and scholarship (chapter 12 by Cáraves and Salcedo). Although the volume does not exhaust what it means to trans critical migration scholarship, this thread in the book opens possibilities, critical sensibilities, and new imaginaries.In addition to the conceptual and methodological contributions of the volume, its historical content helps rebut simplistic tropes about the causes of migration. Contributors examine how empire has been implicated in dispossessing, displacing, and inflicting pain and death across transnationalized frontiers, bringing to the fore the global processes and structural forces at play in producing “dynamics of illegalization, detention and deportation.” In this sense, in chapter 4, Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda critiques the “monolithic essentialized” culturalist narratives produced and demanded by the asylum regime (72). Likewise, Tsilimpounidi and Carastathis take aim at the widely circulated heteronormative imagery “welcoming” refugees in Europe (141). Chapters 1, 2, and 7 by Luibhéid, Julio Capó Jr., and Rafael Ramírez Solórzano, respectively, along with the closing roundtable featuring Leece Lee-Oliver, Monisha Das Gupta, Katherine Fobear, and Edward Ou Jin Lee further substantiate this perspective while unpacking how capitalism, racism, and settler colonialism intersect with homophobia, transphobia, and patriarchy in different settings.Another set of claims from individual chapters adds to the empirical and theoretical richness of the book by assessing the possibilities and limitations of the politics of solidarity and coalition making in struggles for migrant justice. Tackling intersectional solidarities, chapter 9 by Jamila Hammami features the activism of the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project, calling for a coalitional politics that, bridging immigration justice and prison abolition, is able to respond to the disproportionate criminalization and punishment of queer and trans migrants (135). The piece also offers a welcome critique of “sanctuary cities,” asserting the need to rely on “community control” rather than local authorities in the fight for migrant safety, especially for queer and trans migrant communities as the most marginalized (134).Regarding the challenges associated with building solidarity across subalternized communities and privileged allies, chapters 3 (Sasha Wijeyeratne), 14 (Yasmin Nair), and 15 (José Guadalupe Herrera Soto) offer incisive critiques. Building on their own activist experience within the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA), Wijeyeratne provides an account of coalition-making “experiments” by queer and trans Asian Pacific Islanders fighting for Black liberation that sits alongside a critique of “white allyship” models of solidarity based on privilege and nonshared struggles (59). From a related perspective, Herrera Soto shares his father's experience of illegalization and his own struggles trying to support him. By interrogating the burdens of drawing on the support of privileged liberals, Herrera Soto brings to the fore the limitations of an allyship that is not willing to give up privilege and that lacks accountability (200–201). As well, Nair posits the “queerwashing” of labor in the US immigration rights movement. She warns against the overly celebratory embrace of “Undocuqueers” by “scholars, journalists and activists” and by “liberals, progressives and the left” alike (197). Nair ultimately claims that the political significance and “radical potential” of “queer” is never a given (199).Finally, the volume offers a subtle balance between richness of detail, a higher level of abstraction, and a political investment in deconstructing as well as transforming the political realities of illegalized migrants. Individual chapters achieve this balance through different argumentative styles and interpretive frameworks. Apart from the ones that directly address activism and struggle as discussed above, chapter 11 by AB Brown uses the notion of “fantasy” to highlight the “dissonance” of queer desire in the context of asylum, indeed the contradictions facing queer African refugees resettled in the United States as they navigate both refusal and assimilation (161). Chapter 8 by Ryan Conrad offers a sharp analysis of the Canadian barring of “HIV-positive would-be immigrants,” revealing the global inequality that welfare states reproduce, and the spuriousness of arguments such as that of “excessive demand” that rich countries mobilize to justify their exclusions (128). These two chapters illustrate the ways in which the edited collection combines the micro and macro levels of analysis to offer nuanced understandings of “dynamics of illegalization, detention and deportation.”In sum, Queer and Trans Migrations is an obliged reference, an edited collection of compelling pieces of writing and visual materials, including the beautiful book cover. It delineates a distinct scholarly realm that queers and transes critical engagements with migration by providing a semantic field, suggesting a set of questions and interrogating simplistic tropes about displacement, vulnerability, humanitarianism, and solidarity, among others. One of the strongest contributions of the volume is how it demonstrates the larger significance of the field beyond specific identities. Contributors' critical engagements with questions of activism and migrant agency are also insightful and generative. The book's multiple conceptual, methodological, historical, and theoretical contributions are articulated by diverse voices in this interdisciplinary field. I highly recommend this volume to students, scholars, and practitioners, and I look forward to following the work of all the contributors.

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