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Queer Migration K—K Lab 2018

Notes

Thank you
A big thank you to the hard-working crew that worked very hard to put together something excellent:
Amanda Niemela, Anusha Ghosh, Bernard Medeiros, Jack Walsh, Joseph Entner, Joshua Leffler, Julianna
Fabrizio, Miles Luce, and Stephen Wilson.

There is no universal definition of ‘queer’, but one of the primary authors offers this in
describing a queer migration politics in opposition to normative visions of citizenship:
“queer” describes “a practice of identity (de)construction that results in a new type of diasporic
consciousness neither grounded in ethnic identifications nor referencing a mythical homeland, instead
using the tension of living supposedly exclusive identities and transforming it into a creative potential,
building a community based on the shared experience of multiple, contradictory positionalities.

See: Chavez, 13 – Karma, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Mexican American & Latino/a Studies @ University of Texas-Austin. Queer Migration Politics: Activist
Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, University of Illinois Press, p. 105-109 – walsh

This K works especially well against;


-- Soft left affs

-- Family immigration affs

-- Most policy affs

This K might struggle against;


-- Afro-pessimism (it could perhaps be a ‘coalitions good’ argument, but I am not sure that this is the
most persuasive neg route)

-- Other affs without plans that do not defend traditional notions of legal inclusion or belonging

Blocks
The first task for anyone interested in pursuing this further is to do additional blocking re; overviews,
framework, impact extension, etc. There is more than enough stuff in here to make this happen, but the
file does not contain excessive pre-scripted blocks in the interest of challenging debaters to produce
their own scholarship.
1NC
Queer Migration K—1NC (General)

Calls to increase legal immigration necessitate violent exclusion through


heteronormativity and homonationalism – queer worldmaking must constantly rage
against normative inclusion
Chávez, 17 – Karma R., Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Mexican American & Latino/a Studies @ University of Texas-Austin. “Homonormativity and Violence
against Immigrants,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 4.2 (2017): 131–136, Michigan State
University Press, Project Muse – klab/br

Yep’s 2003 landmark article on the violence of heteronormativity and the promise of queer
worldmaking, along with the powerful 2003 collection Queer Theory and Communication, which Yep co-
edited with Karen Lovaas and John Elia, opened immeasurable space in the field of communication for
the study of gender and sexuality. From the time I was a graduate student to now as a more senior
scholar, I have tried to fill that space and open it further, a project I continue in this brief article. One
thing that struck me in rereading Yep’s piece was that although Yep names the different sources and
sites of heteronormative violence, and argues for the necessity of an intersectional approach to the
study of gender and sexuality, he does not address questions of citizenship and immigration.

These questions are important because I believe addressing them can help us understand what queer
worldmaking can look like in an era when citizen queers have allegedly obtained their full citizenship
through being granted access to legal gay marriage, open military service, and protected status in hate
crime law. I am compelled to ask a question that emerges directly from the current political moment:
how do we think of queer worldmaking in light of these violences of homonormativity and
homonationalism, especially as produced by the 2013 and 2015 Supreme Court decisions legalizing gay
marriage? One way to consider both the violence and the possibility of queer worldmaking is through a
discussion of immigration politics in a post-gay marriage United States. <131>

Although certain immigrants—those in partnerships with U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents who
qualify as sponsors—have gained access to legal immigration as a result of gay marriage, the reality for
most immigrants in the United States, has stayed the same or gotten worse. Anti-immigrant sentiment
has reached a fevered pitch—a fact that affects all immigrants, and legal pathways to regularizing status
for the unauthorized remain nonexistent. This matters to queer worldmakers, regardless of their
immigration status, because the struggle for immigration justice has been most visibly led by
“undocuqueer” leaders, illuminating the fact that immigration is a queer issue. It also matters because
the narrow way the relationship between LGBT politics and immigration politics has been framed by
powerful actors has explicitly and implicitly exerted violence on migrant and queer migrant
communities.

Homonormative Violence in Immigrant Communities

With the 2013 Windsor Supreme Court decision, which rendered the federal Defense of Marriage Act
unconstitutional, U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents in binational same-sex relationships who
lived in states with legal marriage became eligible to sponsor their partners for immigration purposes
(provided they met all the other eligibility requirements). After the 2015 Obergefell decision, which
legalized gay marriage nationally, this benefit extended to people living in all states and U.S. territories.
As I have written about elsewhere, and as commentators/activists like Yasmin Nair have argued, the
question of the immigration benefit was in some corners of the mainstream gay and lesbian rights
movement a critical reason for the necessity of legalized gay marriage.1 Of course, as Nair and others
argued, as with marriage in general, the benefit for binational same-sex couples would only help the
most privileged few. Furthermore, this focus distanced those in binational same-sex couples from the
broader struggle for immigration justice, a distancing that would further exacerbate inequalities among
different kinds of immigrants.

While activists like Nair, and organizations like the Audre Lorde Project and the now-defunct Queers for
Economic Justice worked tirelessly in advance of the 2013 and 2015 decisions to show that the
relationships between queer politics and immigration politics were far more intertwined and
complicated, as predicted, immigrant partners in certain binational same-sex couples have now been
elevated above other immigrants. The struggle for the immigration benefit through legal gay marriage
has proven to be separate from other immigration struggles. In fact, in the months following the 2013
decision, the leadership team from Immigration Equality, the leader in the struggle for binational same-
sex <132> couples, jumped ship. Those who departed included executive director Rachel Tiven, legal
director Victoria Nielson, policy director Julie Kruse, and Tom Plummer, the binational couples and
litigation staff attorney.2 Tiven noted that she had made her decision to leave prior to Windsor because
she was confident that the marriage win would happen. She added that if it didn’t, Immigration Equality
would need new leadership anyway, affirming its narrow focus on this singular issue.

Although the leadership departure may seem of little consequence, it reflects the way the gay and
lesbian movement relied on the immigration movement to achieve its ends, but then abandoned
immigrants not connected to U.S. citizens as the broader struggle for immigration overhaul continues.
Another example can be found by looking at the National LGBTQ Task Force’s 2016 Creating Change
conference. Although the Task Force has repeatedly made nominal offers of support for the immigration
justice struggle,3 when the 2016 conference schedule was released, it included a panel featuring
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the entity responsible for record numbers of detentions
and deportations and that therefore strikes fear in immigrant communities. When queer migrant
leaders, most notably, Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, expressed outrage at the invitation of
ICE, the Task Force eventually withdrew ICE from the panel and issued an apology. In the apology,
Executive Director Rea Carey and Deputy Executive Director Russell Roybal stated the following:

We know the decision to accept a proposal from ICE for a session at our Creating Change Conference
was the wrong decision and that it has caused hurt and pain to communities and individuals we deeply
care about. The decision also could have created a situation where the conference would not have felt
like a safe space—a vitally important component of what makes the conference special—for
undocumented immigrants, immigration activists and allies. Our commitment to immigrant rights and
reform has never wavered, but we know community trust in our commitment has been damaged. We
made a mistake and we deeply regret it and with our whole hearts apologize. We own this mistake and
as allies to and members of the immigration reform movement, the Task Force will learn from it and
endeavor to do better moving forward. We appreciate being held accountable and look forward to
continuing this work with immigrant rights colleagues and activists.4
Although it is likely that some accepted this error as simple oversight, Familia and allies refused to
accept the apology. Instead, they responded: “The National LGBTQ Task Force and Creating Change have
caused significant harm and have deeply hurt our community. We have a right to feel outraged at the
negligence and poor planning in inviting ICE to be part of a space that supposedly <133> centers all
LGBTQ people. To that end we are laying out initial thinking and demands from our community as
follows:

• Include a “Fighting Against Deportations” plenary with trans immigrant leaders;

• Make space available on the agenda to include more LGBTQ immigrant rights workshops; and,

• Ensure all LGBTQ undocumented immigrant attendees are supported financially throughout the
conference (meals, lodging, registration, travel, etc.).”5

It appears none of these demands were met for the 2016 conference. The disconnect between the
apology and the refusal of the apology is profound. Although the Task Force is certainly more
progressive than other national organizations, such as the Human Rights Campaign, the privilege of
citizenship is blatant in Carey and Roybal’s response. In focusing their apology on the matter of safety at
the conference, they ignore the broader context of the violence of ICE’s actions against immigrant
communities. Carey and Roybal claim the label ally while locating the violence they’ve participated in in
isolation from other kinds of violence named in the refusal—deportations, financial insecurity, and
invisibility of LGBTQ immigrants.

One way to read the Task Force’s choice to invite ICE to participate is to say that in general, the
mainstream LGBTQ movement has framed the relationship among the movements so narrowly
(binational same-sex couples) that to think more broadly about the intersections has evaded serious
consideration. Even if you, reader, find this to be a stretch, I ask you to entertain the possibility that the
mainstream movement for gay and lesbian rights with its focus only on access to citizenship, and
especially marriage, has refused to understand how citizenship and immigration must be at the center
of struggles for LGBTQ people if our movements are to represent all those they purport to. Anything
else is nothing less than homonormative violence.

Toward Radical Queer Worldmaking

In their provocative and timely book, Against Citizenship, Amy L. Brandzel argues, “there is nothing
redeemable about citizenship, nothing worth salvaging or sustaining in the name of ‘community,’
practice, or belonging . . . it is a violent exclusionary operation, one that relies upon and reproduces a
multipronged, gatekeeping apparatus that works to create, retain, and imbue citizenship with meaning
at the direct expense of the noncitizen.”6 To take this critique and the charge it implies seriously
requires us to radically rethink how we understand <134> the project of queer worldmaking. In my view,
we might do well to understand and enact some of the following:

• Sexuality and gender have long been central to the way that the immigration apparatus works.
Immigrant gender and sexuality have long been under state scrutiny, and continue to be so even after
the legalization of gay marriage. Knowing this history can help us learn how we want to understand the
centrality of immigration and naturalization to queer politics.7
• Legal status privilege is a very real thing, especially in the ways that it intersects with racial, ability, and
class privilege. Following the lead of queer and trans immigration activists who address the systemic
ways immigration regulation in the forms of raids, detention, and deportation (to name a few) can help
us to support and create queer politics that doesn’t reinforce those very systems.

• In a post-gay marriage era, it is time to focus on the needs of those most marginalized at the
intersections of gender, sexual, race, class, ability, and citizenship oppression. Becoming accomplices in
the movements led by those who suffer at multiple intersections must be our priority.

• Domestic struggles are always connected to struggles outside of national borders, and LGBTQ rights
are increasingly held up in the service of a host of bad policy decisions. This homonationalism and
queer necropolitics must be challenged even in work that seems separate from places like Israel or
issues like immigration.8

• Rage against the normative. Always and at all costs.

I believe that the post-gay marriage era opens up worlds of possibility to make queer worlds that were
not possible when the community was fixated on the issue of marriage and the struggle for normative
citizenship. We have an opportunity to make queer worlds against the violences of heteronormativity,
homonormativity, and homonationalism, but this opportunity requires rigorous analysis, and for those
of us with the most privilege, a willingness to step back and let those with less be our guides. Yep’s work
opened so many of these doors for us at the turn of the century, and it is our task to continue to assess
what lies before us, and to move into worldmaking that does no violence.

Citizenship normalizes and sustains anti-Blackness, settlerism, and anti-queer


violence. Affirm an uncompromising critique which refuses restorative visions through
inclusion – radical political analysis can torch citizenship’s foundations
Hill, 18 – Annie, Assistant Professor in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies @ University of
Minnesota. “Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative by Amy L. Brandzel (review)” QED: A
Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 2018, p. Project Muse – klab/br

The cover of Amy L. Brandzel's Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative bears a spray-painted
image of the Statue of Liberty, head in hands and without the famous torch meant to enlighten the
world. The cover captures Brandzel's argument against the promise represented by the Statue of Liberty
to extend freedom to all citizens of the United States. After the Civil War, Lady Liberty was erected,
standing on a broken chain, to symbolize that universal freedom could become a reality and oppression
could be overcome. If book covers can communicate the tenor of a text, then Against Citizenship
delivers on its promise to draw searing illustrations of U.S. citizenship built not on progressive waves of
inclusion, but on the perpetual exclusion of non-normative groups.

A must-read for scholars and students interrogating U.S. policies and power, Against Citizenship
presents three case studies to examine how the United States uses anti-intersectional logics to divide
and concretize identities and identity politics. Focusing on hate crime legislation, same-sex marriage,
and Native Hawaiian sovereignty, Brandzel argues that inclusion into citizenship secures some rights for
nonnormative groups, but requires anti-intersectional trade-offs that set categories of race, gender,
indigeneity, and sexuality in opposition to each other (34). According to Brandzel, U.S. citizenship enacts
a "perpetual refusal to allow for, consider, or acknowledge the mutuality and contingency of these
categories of difference" and requires "challenges to the norms of citizenship be articulated in simple,
single axis formulations" (4–5). Thus, Brandzel tracks anti-intersectional logics and strategies across
three chapters to show how single axis formulations undermine intersectional identities and shore up
staggered inclusion as the bedrock of U.S. citizenship. Against Citizenship provides the analysis we now
need to fight the spike in hate crimes, attacks on reproductive rights, the immigrant travel ban, and so
much more under President Donald Trump. For example, undergraduates in my classes, who claimed to
be afraid or "allergic" to [End Page 151] theory, readily drew on Brandzel's concept of "anti-
intersectionality" to grapple with the killing of nine black people in a Charleston church, discriminatory
bathroom bills, and the normalization of sexual violence in this time of nostalgic rhetoric to "Make
America Great Again."

Against Citizenship's introduction announces its central thesis that U.S. citizenship is founded on and
continues to operate as a normativizing project and the "process of demanding inclusion reproduces
and extends the violent subjugations of exclusion" (15). To support these claims, chapter 1 details how
hate crime legislation recognized violence based on race or sexual orientation, but initially excluded the
category of gender because its inclusion risked flooding the system with sexual violence cases. This anti-
intersectional logic frames homophobic violence as exceptional and warranting legal intervention, yet
violence against women is seen as not exceptional enough to meet the standard of a "hate crime."
Furthering their inquiry into how one category of difference can be deployed to dismiss another,
Brandzel turns to governmental debates on hate crime and the depiction of violence against African
Americans as bygone and benchmark, at once invoking a narrative of racial progress and referencing
blacks as America's emblematic hated group. This anti-intersectional logic frames violence against gays
and lesbians as a contemporary problem, whereas racist violence becomes a relict that only occasionally
rises again. Thus, Brandzel contends, hate crime legislation protects some groups, but also reproduces
the normative violence of citizenship: groups are forced to compete for protection and the state-as-
protector maintains a "dangerous discontinuum" that detaches hate crime from state violence against
people it is called upon to protect (28). These anti-intersectional trade-offs constitute U.S. citizenship,
ensuring its endurance and enabling the state to claim the inclusion of nonnormative groups.

The second chapter focuses on same-sex marriage and anti-intersectional anxiety that gender, sex, and
sexuality are not divisible categories the state can control. As a mechanism for managing citizenship,
marriage arranges categories of difference by aligning people with each other and the state. In United
States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry, the Supreme Court supported same-sex marriage rights
and effected "the legalized absorption of sexual difference, here gay and lesbian coupledom, into
heteronormative, class-based, racialized citizenship" (143). Referencing the earlier error of racial
segregation (as if its de jure demise erases its de facto endurance), the Windsor decision places racial
discrimination in the past and gay rights are presented as evidence of progressive inclusion. Inclusion of
same-sex unions did not alter marriage in the way proponents of "family values" feared because the
value of family remained tied to the state's determination of which relationships matter. Brandzel
argues that [End Page 152] same-sex marriage rights were secured through "the past tensing of
racialized discrimination and settler colonialism and the alignment of gay and lesbian relationships with
heteronormative reproductive futurity" (143).

Chapter 3 focuses on the Supreme Court decision in Rice v. Cayetano to explicate how narratives of
Hawaiian history construct an origin story that promotes "the potential of law and multicultural liberal
democracy as a means for redemption" from its white settler past (113). For Brandzel, the case pivots on
two anti-intersectional points: whether Native Hawaiians' exclusive voting rights on sovereignty
constitute discrimination against white Hawaiians and whether the state should correct racial
discrimination or settler colonialism, but never both. The Supreme Court responds by protecting the civil
rights of whites and settler colonialism "is circumscribed to the past and assuaged in the multicultural
present and future" (113). Rice v. Cayetano enacts a form of "colorblind colonialism" that obscures how
citizenship advances and apologizes for settlement in colonial nation-states (109). This refusal to
recognize racism and Native Hawaiian racialization carries on colonialism as birthright citizenship
expands settlement and expropriates indigenous land and sovereignty.

Brandzel's uncompromising critique may be attacked as offering no alternatives to the promise of


citizenship. Yet the conclusion turns to diverse examples of political activism that challenge the
normative logics of U.S. culture and politics. Brandzel imagines a politics that refuses "futurity-as-
inclusion as well as retroactive and restorative political visions of the past, in order to enact a
coalitional, intersectional, and decolonial politics in and of the present" (138). Against Citizenship asks
us to direct energies away from single-issue activism toward a politics of the present that joins the
"prison abolitionist movement, divestment organizing against border militarizations, queer economic
justice work, decolonial activisms against border patrol violence, migrant activisms in defense of
Indigenous sovereignties, Black-led coalitions against police assassinations, queer youth of color
reclaiming access to public spaces, and radical feminists of color-led organizing against violence" (146).
This list calls readers to coalitional, intersectional, decolonial work in the making and Brandzel pinpoints
connections across different types of political activism and, just as important, the urgency of the present
moment.

Against Citizenship documents how single axis formulations determine who receives hate crime
protections, the right to marry, and voting rights. The book opens space for politics that do not assume
citizenship's logic and legitimacy and jettisons the idea that fractional inclusion fulfills the promise of
freedom. Instead of offering scholarship that attempts to salvage or redeem citizenship, Brandzel's
trenchant analysis mobilizes intersectional theory, queer critique, and [End Page 153] indigenous studies
to chip away at citizenship's foundations and torch its anti-intersectional frames. [End Page 154]

Calls to address material violence are reasons to vote neg – calls for inclusion within
the law necessitate the worse forms of widespread violence. An abolitionist, anti-
racist, anti-settler colonial ethic is a better route to disrupt material suffering
Levitt, 13 – Rachel, Professor @ University of New Mexico, “Normal Life: Administrative Violence,
Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law by Dean Spade (review),” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ
Worldmaking, Inaugural Issue, Fall 2013, p. Project Muse – klab/br

In Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, Dean Spade offers
readers a map for what critical trans politics can do to combat the violence done by the uneven
distribution of life chances under social programs and legal practices. The book opens with a reflection
on his work with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, after which Spade recounts the story of two people, Jim
and Bianca, whose trans identities intersected with multiple systems of oppression. These multiple
systems police, punish, and do violence to those who are already vulnerable. According to Spade, Jim
and Bianca’s cases are far from unusual. Most of Spade’s trans clients have had their lives marred by a
legal system that at best could not fathom their existence and at worst actively punished them by
depriving them of access to basic social supports like jobs, medical care, education, public spaces,
shelter, and state sanctioned identity documents (11). The kind of violence enacted on trans subjects,
according to Spade, is a combination of overt transphobia and system-wide double binds. To be sure,
those that are the most vulnerable to violence are afforded the least protection from it, meaning poor
trans populations of color are the most likely to die because of the way social structures allocate
resources and truncate life chances. At its core, Normal Life explores the role of law in these deadly
dynamics and envisions better solutions to the problems limiting the life chances of trans people.

Step one for Spade involves understanding the social and political landscape we presently occupy that
allows for this kind of violence. This requires learning how deeply embedded neoliberalism is in creating
the policies, conditions, and attitudes that govern the social realm. Because of neoliberalism’s profound
impact, the character of mass mobilization efforts for social change that typified organizing efforts in the
1960s and 1970s has shifted to a nonprofit, short-term, goal-oriented business model that echoes both
the values of neoliberalism and [End Page 215] the violence it enacts. Spade calls on readers to move
away from the rights strategies often deployed by lesbian and gay nonprofit organizations, and instead
engage in a more profound challenge to “the criminalization, poverty, and violence that trans people
face every day” (35).

Part of the problem, according to Spade, has been that transgender activism has begun to model itself
after the legal reform strategies that have dominated lesbian and gay rights activism in the last few
decades. Focusing on anti-discrimination and hate crime law should not be what guides trans struggles
against social violence. These types of legal reforms focus exclusively on inclusion and representation
within the law. As an alternative to the strategy of including gender-identity in the laundry list of legally
protected identity categories, Spade focuses on the material affects the law has on people’s lives. This
emphasis demands that readers approach political problems from an ethic of abolitionist trans
liberation. Such an ethic requires emphasizing trans existence and using that existence and the
conditions of possibility that underwrite the violence done to trans subjects as the basis on which we
build our tactics for change.

Drawing on critical race theory, intersectional feminism, disability studies, Native studies, abolition
studies, and the work of theorists like Foucault, Spade argues a critical trans politics requires an
understanding of power that is not invested in an equality model of legal intervention but, instead, is
committed to challenging the administrative violence the law creates. Spade presents examples of
how the law exacerbates conditions of violence by using categories like race, gender, and ability to
regulate social resources and exclude those who do not comport themselves to these normative
configurations. In addition to creating these conditions of violence, the law does not protect poor queer
populations of color from vulnerability. In other words, Spade suggests seeing the law as the problem
rather than the solution. Spade considers government administration and the legal system as the
ultimate perpetrators of anti-trans violence. Critical trans politics does not center law reform, but it
does take into account the legal mechanisms that do violence to trans populations, like: prisons,
poverty, health-care exclusions, deportations, and racial profiling. It works toward mass mobilization
efforts by drawing on “The Four Pillars of Social Justice Infrastructure,” which was first articulated by the
Miami Workers’ Center. The pillars include working to change policies, political attitudes, approaches to
direct service, and the distribution of power (180 –181). In addition to changing the way mobilization
happens, a trans politics that takes up an abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-settler colonial ethic would reject
the kinds of police intervention, criminal punishment, and client/server approaches that presently
dominate LGBT politics. Instead of consumerist pride parades, critical trans politics focuses on the needs
[End Page 216] and experiences of queer and trans people of color subjected to poverty, immigration
policing, and ablest marginalization. It crafts community-based solutions to violence that do not rely on
the police. It resists cooptation, engages in direct support, and builds a critical base of trans leaders that
can speak to the complexity of the issues facing queer and trans communities.

Spade’s book is a “must-read” for those committed to social justice work, whether they are students in
ethnic studies courses, community organizers working to combat police brutality, or artists challenging
our gendered presumptions of who counts as human. Spade’s treatise on what a critical trans politics
has to offer is particularly useful for those working within a legal rights framework as well as those who
are seeking modes other than legal reform to make trans lives more livable. It is accessible enough for
an advanced undergraduate audience but rich enough in content for graduate students and legal
advocates to use as a roadmap to question the role of “rights” in state violence.

This book adds to the growing body of literature that pushes readers to work for deep social
transformation. It invites us to resist the temptation of recognition and inclusion, proffering instead a
vision of collective mobilizing that can make trans people less susceptible to violence. Ultimately,
Normal Life pushes us to reconsider trans-inclusive gestures, like being added to anti-discrimination
policies, that do so little to protect trans subjects from the physical, structural, and epistemic violence
that impacts so many of our lives. Spade’s work is a profound resource for social justice workers and
scholars willing to help build a radical trans resistance based in racial, economic, and gender justice.
[End Page 217]

Prioritize the rhetorical level of argument invention and rationales for action – our
intervention into the local imaginary is far more effective than their intervention into
the national imaginary
Chavez, 13 – Karma R., Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Mexican American & Latino/a Studies @ University of Texas-Austin. Queer Migration Politics: Activist
Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, University of Illinois Press, p. 145-150 – klab/br

The activist rhetoric of queer migration politics has provided an appropriate lens to view and understand
the complexity and variety of coalitional moments. The rhetoric has also supplied a way to witness the
possibilities that coalitional moments engender for practicing and envisioning politics and making lives
more livable. The level of inventing arguments and creating rationales for action and publicly
pronouncing positions—the rhetorical level—is an ideal site to examine how activists respond to
national social imaginaries. National social imaginaries, themselves rhetorical constructions, frame and
create the parameters for the possibility of belonging, being, and change. Within the coalitional
moments discussed here, activists draw upon a host of rhetorical and ideological resources. These
resources range from utopian longings and inclusionary strategies to radical analyses of intermeshing
and interlocking oppressions and systems of power, as well as the innovative approaches to
relationships found in queer and feminist politics and communities. Activists develop and deploy
rhetorical visions such as the differential vision of the queer migration manifestos and Yasmin Nair’s use
of radical interactionality. Activists also manufacture and adopt tactical strategies such as migrant youth activists’ appropriation and
extension of coming out or CDH’s and Wingspan’s everyday practices and processes of rationalizing and
engaging in coalitional politics. A number of implications of these analyses exist for politics, theory, and
possibility. First, it is important to explicate the implications of offering coalition in place of
normative/inclusionary and utopian politics. More than anything else, coalition features the messiness,
the impurity, and the multiplicity of subjectivity, agency, and politics that these two approaches often
miss. Coalition is always in our vision, and yet as a horizon it is simultaneously beneath our bodies.
Horizons are temporally and spatially tangible, and yet as thresholds between two potentially divided
things they are sites of tension; they are queer. Coalition cannot be easily categorized, fit into an
identity, or fixed on a map. Coalition is not comfortable. It is not home. It is scary and unpredictable.
Unlike those subjects invested in inclusionary politics, coalitional subjects refuse to accept normative
aspirations as the only channel for belonging and life. Like some of those espousing inclusionary politics, coalitional subjects
recognize that compromise might be necessary, reform is a part of revolution, and small victories are worth celebrating. Unlike those
inviting us to take up utopian politics, coalitional politics is oriented toward the present, emphasizes
realms that are not only aesthetic, and refuses what cannot be practiced—while expanding the very
limits of the practicable. As with utopian politics, coalitional subjects believe in the vitality of broadening
imaginaries that will open possibilities for livable life. As Judith Butler remarks, “Possibility is not a
luxury; it is as crucial as bread.”2 Coalition offers a way to rethink subjectivity, agency, and possibility. Aimee Carrillo Rowe writes,
“The sites of our belonging constitute how we see the world, what we value, who we are becoming. The formation of the subject is never
individual, but is forged across a shifting set of relations that we move in and out of, often without reflection. The politics of relation is a placing
that moves a politics of location through a relational notion of the subject to create a subject who recognizes and works within the coalitional
conditions that creates and might unmake her—and others.”3 This has been a book about people who can be described as coalitional subjects,
those people produced by their various belongings to see issues, systems of oppression, and possibilities for a livable life as inextricably bound
to one another. Every action, every political choice, every coalition entered into expands the coalitional subject’s understanding of how power
works and how people’s issues are intermeshed. For instance, Nair’s radically interactional rhetoric reveals a method for accessing the complex
roots of problems in order to invite others to reorient their politics and agendas to provide more life chances, to use Dean Spade’s words, for
more people. Nair’s imperfect methods, which come off as polemical or insensitive, do not negate her critique of the dangers of affect and
personal narrative in these neoliberal times. Nair, as a queer woman of color, an immigrant, a grassroots and cyber activist, a trans-
generational and transracial organizer, a person with a PhD who lives in a small apartment in Chicago—among her other sites of belonging—has
had her subjectivity and her political orientation produced, reproduced, and altered from within those diverse spaces. Furthermore, through
the difficult coalitional moments that are her interactions with supporters of the UAFA and the rights of binational same-sex couples above
other migrants, Nair is also produced, reproduced, and altered as a coalitional subject. Coalition and the perspectives that coalition enables are
not simple and easy. They are laborious but worthwhile. The development and constant refinement of coalitional subjectivities reflects a
profound commitment to present possibility, to the creative resources of people with whom we share space, and to refusing to give over to
despair. Second, examining coalitional moments through the lens of queer migration politics leads to several interesting implications for
thinking about politics and theory. Because of the way queer migration politics have exploded onto the discursive scene in the early twenty-first
century, they supply a plethora of diverse coalitional moments, junctures that point to other possibilities. Coalitional subjects have animated
some of these coalitional moments when queer migrants have inserted themselves in key ways into the public sphere. Some of these
coalitional moments reflect the unlikely coalescence among those identifying primarily with queer politics and those who mostly work on
behalf of migration politics. Still others have advanced a queer approach to migration politics. Within the rhetoric analyzed here each kind of
coalitional moment supplies a different glimpse into how migrants, queers, or queer migrants are imagined to belong. The rhetoric of queer
migration politics further indicates what activists see as the conditions for their belonging and the creative resources they use to challenge
those parameters. Emphasizing activist rhetoric, including publicly available texts such as speeches, blogs, statements, and posters, alongside a
look at the argumentative rationales that activists create for their work, has been especially useful in understanding the myriad ways activists
offer persuasive appeals and effect change. Analyzing the rhetoric of queer migration politics also lends insight to
concerns such as audience—imagined or real—and argumentative invention. Assessing these
dimensions of the politics also returns to the significance of coalition and coalitional moments. As has been
seen, each activist envisions a different audience for their rhetoric. Some, like the DREAM activists, target lawmakers.
Others, such as Nair and some of the manifesto authors, primarily speak to specific groups of activists.
Still others, such as Wingspan and CDH, look to influence the communities in which they are embedded.
These envisioned audiences lead activists to use markedly different kinds of arguments and modes of
communication in order to effect change. But it is also important to remember that these envisioned
audiences do not manifest from thin air; instead, they emerge from the resources that activists have at
their disposal, the conditions that activists seek to change, and the actors who can help them meet
those outcomes.4 Having access to an audience results from the coalitions an activist or activist organization has and creates. These
relationships open doors and opportunities that are otherwise unavailable. As suggested above, relationships and work with diverse people
who have diverse ideas can lead activists to the development of coalitional subjectivities. As activists begin to understand the interactions and
intersections between their issues and identities and others, thereby creating coalitional subjectivities, activists have more resources for
rhetorical invention. This fact serves as a call to be drawn toward others and their struggles not necessarily because we affectively want to be
but because we know we politically must be. We coalesce to increase access, to alter our ability to make arguments, to broaden the resources
for rhetorical invention within our reach in order to challenge imaginaries and make people’s lives, our own and others, more livable.
Additionally, understanding social movements, protest, and activism in the public sphere warrants a
robust connection between people’s lives and the theories designed to explain and enable improvement
of them. Queer women of color feminist approaches help to facilitate such seeing because those
theories, with rare exception, are not interested in utopia or liberal notions of progress and change
emerging from evolution. Queer women of color feminist approaches begin from the flesh to explicate
the present conditions of material and symbolic oppression. From that realistic place, those explications
aid in using available material resources and available means of persuasion to enact social change.
Toward this end, Lugones advocates what she calls “street walker theorizing.” Street walker theorizing
simultaneously privileges the experience of walking in the streets—hanging out with people whose
worlds we write about in their own worlds, and the experience of “walking the streets”—drawing
knowledge from those, like prostitutes and hustlers, normally considered outside the bounds of
intellectual production.5 From these spaces of intermeshed bodily, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual
experience, we begin to fully understand the need for an analysis of intermeshing and interlocking
oppression to improve people’s worlds and the tactical strategies people are already deploying to
achieve such ends. People’s lives are not comprised of singular identities or concerns, as so many studies
of social movement would lead us to believe. Similarly, the ways belonging is rhetorically imagined in
the United States is not a simple equation of exclusion and inclusion based on discrete identities. As
queer women of color feminists have always shown us, oppression and privilege, power and identity,
domination and liberation are experienced in people’s lives in vastly complicated ways. We need equally
complicated understandings of how people who are committed to social change work to confront these
material and symbolic conditions. We also need to think about the courses of action that people have
available to them, on the ground, as the starting points for theoretical analysis. This book provides one example.
Finally, coalitional moments have the most radical potential when the rhetoric used does not request
national belonging from within the confines of existing premises. Every coalitional moment in this book
was animated by dissatisfaction with existing legal conditions within the United States. Clearly,
coalitional subjects speak within the nation, even as a part of its system. But coalitions or coalitional
moments with only nationalist aspirations inevitably fail, or if they do not fail in terms of their stated
objectives, they often reinscribe exclusionary norms with long-term impacts for people who should
have supposedly benefited from the coalition in the first place. Moreover, in the context of queer
migration politics, very often the national legal objectives were not the primary part of their work, nor
even most interesting part. Instead, the most important thing evidenced in nearly all of these cases is
the development of political orientations and modes of belonging that point toward other political
possibilities. Coalitions of those strangers who threaten security and are scapegoated for the existence of a host of ills are inevitably
negated, excluded, and precluded from national belonging. When activists focus on coalitional orientations and modes
of political belonging rather than the goals of legal national belonging and demand radical intervention,
they may still be excluded. But they imagine something different, so while the intervention at the
national imaginary may be negligible, the intervention into people’s local imaginations is unbounded.
Given the state of LGBT immigration politics in the United States, and the exclusions it continues to
perpetuate, such unbounding could not come at a more crucial time. This “victory” for US LGBT
immigration politics, with which I opened this conclusion, reminds me of something my friends have
been repeating lately and that the radical trans activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is often credited
with saying: “Our dreams have become so small.” I hope Queer Migration Politics can be part of what
changes the size of our dreams and our present possibilities.
Queer Migration K—1NC (Family)

The narrative structure of ‘family’ immigration inevitably drives a violent form of


kinship defined by heteronormative roles – this turns the aff because it shapes policy
development
Lee, 13 – Catherine, Associate Professor in Sociology and Faculty Associate at the Institute for Health
and the Center for Race and Ethnicity @ Rutgers University. Fictive Kinship: Family Reunification and the
Meaning of Race and Nation in American Immigration, Russell Sage Foundation Press, p. 121-123 --
klab/br

Regardless of the diversity of arrangements and actual lived experiences of individual families, the
narrative structure or framework of family has offered immigration stakeholders a way to make sense of
the unfamiliar, to talk about related concepts of race and nation, and to shape policy development. The
structure includes a story line about family members, their roles and functions, and family’s purpose.
Immigration stakeholders’ discursive action around family helped to generate unexpected family
support from otherwise excludable immigrant groups (chapter 3) as well as restrictions against
immigrant families during a time of immigration expansion (chapter 5). Family narrative is malleable; the
particular details of the narrative are diverse and open to varying interpretations. Different groups at
different times, for example, can be thought of as meritorious or deserving of family unity (chapter 4). In
addition, the narrative structure offers a language for articulating the meaning of relatedness and the
various affective roles attendant to those relations. More specifically, this framework provides the
language for communicating family’s two crucial elements: “relationship” (ties or connection) and
“natural substance” (putative blood or genes), which become foundations or codes of conduct. These
are the building blocks and elements of other forms of kinship like race or ethnicity and nation, and we
often use the language and structure of forms. The apparent interchangeability between family and
other forms of kinship lend to the symbolic strength and significance of family. The idea of family
constitutes the nature of relations between individuals, and it also delineates the boundaries of those
relations. Clarifying the meaning or characteristics of those elements is therefore highly consequential.
We talk about families in order to specify and to understand how we are related, what that relatedness
means, and what privileges and responsibilities are conferred by our relations. Actors can refer to or
borrow from this family narrative structure to understand and give meaning to new immigrants.
Immigration stakeholders have assessed whether immigrants’ familial ties are legitimate and whether
the substance that connect family are real. Their evaluations help determine if immigrants are “like one
of the family,” and hence, a member of the nation, or instead are too different or deviant and
inassimilable. Immigration policy that focuses on family and is born out of family ideation constrains the
meanings that actors can attach to the goals, functions, or roles of immigration. Quite simply, the
narrative structure of family is inherently conservative and thereby limits the potential framing and
storytelling of immigration—that is, the story of what purpose immigrants and immigration should serve
and how. The conservative of family ideation inheres not only in the possibility that individuals
themselves have conservative beliefs about who and what constitutes a family but also in the point that
family is a form of kinship. The two elements of “relationship” and “natural substance” are reproduced
by gendered bodies, which are dictated by patriarchal and heteronormative rules. Thus, the “strange
bedfellows” coalition of immigration advocacy groups and conservative family-based organizations is
not so strange after all. Both groups gain by advocating a family-based immigration system. For
immigrant advocacy groups, maintaining a system that brought its constituents into the United States
ensure the continued immigration of future members. For conservative religious organizations, support
for family reunification in immigration provides them with a large and public arena in which to advocate
traditional family forms and gender relations. The experiences, claims, and values of nontraditional
families may speak in direct opposition to such patriarchal and heternormative rules, but these families
exist in a world in which such ideas dominate. Thus, for example, many queer activities have long
criticized the mobilization for recognition of same-sex marriages for gays and lesbians in the belief that
the political goal of state recognition of gay marriage will validate heteronormative ideals and a straight,
mainstream definition of normalcy while further marginalizing queer lifestyles and relations.
Nonetheless, many gay and lesbian activists and organizations understand that state-recognized
marriages confere real and important benefits and privileges. Thus, for example, gay and lesbian
activists and liberal organizations have legally challenged the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), passed
by Congress in 1996, which declared marriage to be between one man and one woman. In addition to
issues such as inheritance and government spousal benefits, gay and lesbian activists have challenged
the constitutionality of DOMA over their rights to sponsor spouses for family reunification. Although the
Obama administration announced on February 23, 2011, that it would not defend DOMA in federal court
challenge, it stated that it would continue to enforce the law. This means that same-sex married couples
are unable to sponsor spouses for immigration through family unity provisions that are available to
heterosexual married couples. Whether or not they support the institution of marriage, the legal
claimants challenging DOMA understand that the way family is officially defined and officially recognized
by the state is central to their efforts—not only to collect spousal survivor benefits from the government
or to sponsor their gay spouses to join them in the United States, but also to gain full incorporation into
the nation as members whose rights are not limited by their sexuality. Whether conservative or liberal,
immigration policy—which, like so many other social policies, hinges on the meaning of family—has to
confirm or validate the elements of relationship and natural substance. Defenders and critics of family
unity policy provisions for siblings or same-sex married couples may believe that there is a vast gulf of
difference in opinion about the meaning of family between them. However, fundamentally, both sides
are seeking to extend the right to immigrate to people who can validate their ties and natural substance.
Thus, reform efforts that seek to limit a family preference system to spouses and children as well as
those that would also include siblings on the same policy plane that limits options about who is eligible
to immigrate to individuals who can be identified to be “like one of the family.” This policy orientation
restricts the range of possibilities for granting of immigrant rights and privileges, identifying new or
different goals of immigration, and constructing the family writ large—the nation.

Liberal rallying cries against family separation merely reauthorize conservative


gendered, racialized immigration politics – only challenging the notion of
homonormative family kinship can disrupt migrant subjugation
Chávez, 17 – Alex E., Assistant Professor of Anthropology @ Notre Dame. “Intimacy at stake:
Transnational migration and the separation of family,” Latino Studies, April 2017, Volume 15, Issue 1, pp
50–72, p. Springer Link – klab/br

The issue of ‘‘separation of families’’ has emerged as a highly visible component in the current political
debate over undocumented immigration into the US. The impact of deportation on families through
federal immigration enforcement programs like Secure Communities (now retooled as the Priority
Enforcement Program) has risen to such prominence that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) issued a statement to ABC News that ‘‘ICE is sensitive to the fact that encountering those who
violate our immigration laws may impact families.’’1 Keeping in mind policies that impact families and
migrants writ large, this article surfaces the ways in which solidarities and bonds of intimacy formed
across the US-Mexico border are integral to ‘‘tactical maneuvers for creating selves and creating
relationships’’ amid the challenging pressures of transnational mobility (Manalansan 2005, p. 147). As a
rallying cry against current immigration policies, decrying the ‘‘separation of families’’ is by far the safest
argument for a political figure to make because it appeals to ‘‘American family values.’’ In doing so, this
mainstream critique of immigration reform relies on a strictly biological idea of family, often invoking
the image of a child separated from its mother, and more concerned with nuclear than extended family
units. Lifting up family in this way plays into a type of conservative politics at odds with how Latinos
experience family beyond blood. The ‘‘separation of families’’ argument can instead be understood as
antithetical to a broader critical discursive effort to disarticulate common and damaging tropes
because it comes at the expense of those who don’t fall into a traditional family context. In other words,
the image of the ‘‘family’’ privileged in this national discussion mobilizes a highly gendered, racialized,
and monolithic portrayal of the ideal US Latino family unit (as a heteropatriarchal nuclear family) to the
exclusion of the many relationships forged in the context of transnational migration—in this case among
migrants across the USMexico border—which are not limited to those of ‘‘nuclear families.’’ The
‘‘separation of families’’ can only disrupt the everyday subjugation of migrants if its definition extends
more deeply into everyday relationships between individuals who are family to one another, who are
tied to one another by choice or through shared experience, who ‘‘heavily invest’’2 in each other. I turn
to the concept of ‘‘chosen families’’ as a way of conceptualizing the vernacular theorizing migrants
engage in to form complex relationships of intimacy and thus reproduce the social structures otherwise
denied them. The theoretical insights threaded throughout these pages are drawn from years of
ethnographic research among transnational Mexican migrants from central Mexico working and living in
the US, primarily the states of Texas and Mississippi. During my research, I conducted ethnographic
interviews as a way to contextualize the experiences of my interlocutors as both transnational migrants
and music practitioners of huapango arribeno—a form of vernacular string music that hails from the
central Mexican states of Guanajuato, Quere´taro, and San Luıs Potosi. During the course of research I
examined poetic discourses generated in contexts of performance. This involved attending social
gatherings where I observed huapango arribeno performances firsthand in both Mexico and the US and,
as a musician myself, participated in music-making alongside huapango arribeno practitioners. Thus, I
was privy to the intimate workings of social relationships and kinning in daily life through performance
for several years. I connect this body of fieldwork to subsequent experiences living and teaching in
Chicago at the height of migrant youth activism, where I became connected to the organizing of both
students and local community efforts at the intersection of immigration policy, reproductive justice, and
youth issues regarding access to improved education and antiviolence.

For instance, in 2013 I attended an event called Papa’s Day that was organized and led by a multiracial
group of Chicago youth, aged 14–24, that included undocumented youth; youth from mixed-status
families; and queer, transgender, and gender nonconforming youth. They presented their participatory
action research project, designed and implemented in the same year in which they forged the following
applicable definitions: a ‘‘given family’’ means ‘‘the family you live at home with and/or the family you
were born into such as your parents, grandparents, siblings, etc.,’’ a ‘‘chosen family’’ is defined as ‘‘the
supportive community you put together outside of the family you were given. This can sometimes
include friends, but also adult allies’’ (ICAH Report 2013).3 Their results showed that 80% of youth
surveyed had formed chosen families for these reasons: (1) trust; (2) a bond forged; and (3) ability to
talk about life struggles (2013). One youth observed that chosen families are a resilience strategy,
commenting that ‘‘a lot of chosen families are made as a survival mechanism.’’ Simply knowing that
chosen families are a survival strategy for some casts new light on the rallying cry of ‘‘separation of
families’’ that has emerged in the current debate over undocumented migration—particularly in
discussions around the impacts of deportation programs like Secure Communities. While Kath Weston’s
seminal work on queer kinship in Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (1991) certainly
anticipates the present argument, my understanding of chosen families emerges specifically from the
recent vernacular theorizing migrant youth and youth of color have engaged in on their own terms— an
understanding attentive to the political economy of undocumented migration, which is absent from
Weston’s account. In other words, the primary concern of the present article is to consider how the
social location of migrants shapes discourses and practice of kinning and choice—both of which
challenge the genealogical grid integral to hegemonic understandings of kinship—and in turn critique
the ‘‘politics of family’’ central to the contemporary corrosive context of anti-immigrant cultural and
legal logics.

Viewing chosen family as an individual and community resilience strategy is crucial in augmenting the
public debate, where notions of the Latina/o migrant ‘‘family’’ are tied to essentialist and racializing
narratives. Common tropes include Latinas as hypersexual/overly fertile, Latina/o children as anchor
babies, Latino men as a threat to public safety, and the general notion that overly large families
contribute to the corrosive ‘‘browning of America’’—all of which are axial in the contemporary social
construction of the targeted group ‘‘illegal immigrants.’’ One might consider then Republican
presidential candidate Donald Trump’s nowinfamous campaign speech, claiming that all Mexican
migrants are ‘‘rapists’’—an egregious characterization that encapsulates all of the above stereotypes.4
As political commentary veers toward the continued dehumanization of migrants, a severing of intimacy
also comes to pass, both figuratively and materially. I don’t mean to imply that by severing proximity
with family the border is capable of severing familial bonds. But I do argue that the intent of
immigration policy is to sever human connection, to alienate migrants so that they can exist as cheap,
exploitable, and deportable labor, as De Genova (2002) has elsewhere described in terms of ‘‘illegality.’’
This metaphorical severing process is both economic and juridical, designed to: (a) make life unbearable
by restricting migrant networks of support, protection, reciprocity, and care so that they are forced to
leave or can only stay on the terms of their employers; and (b) criminalize migrants by making it illegal
to cross the border. Even so, the separation of families by a material border is never fully accomplished,
because it may be thwarted by intimacy between people even over distances and by the reclaiming of
familial intimacy through chosen families.

Kinship is founded by and sustains anti-Black violence – instead of a political project


calling for family reconciliation, we affirm Christina Sharpe’s call to lose your kin. The
aff rends the fabric of the kinship narrative, imagines otherwise, and remakes the
world
Sharpe, 16 – Christina, Associate Professor @ Tufts University. “Lose Your Kin,” The New Inquiry,
https://thenewinquiry.com/lose-your-kin/ -- klab/br
SLAVERY is the ghost in the machine of kinship.” Saidiya Hartman’s concise articulation gets to the
heart of the ways that chattel slavery continues to animate the present: transatlantic chattel slavery’s
constitution of domestic relations made kin in one direction, and in the other, property that could be
passed between and among those kin. This is the ghost in the machine of contemporary U.S. life and
politics. We can trace this through the examples of U.S. Senator James Henry Hammond (1807-1864)
and U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond (1902-2003) and into the present. Hammond claimed ownership over
other people of what he called that “inferior race,” and Thurmond, a Dixiecrat, declared: “All the laws of
Washington and all the bayonets of the army cannot force […] the southern people to break down
segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and
into our churches.’’ Both were residents of Edgefield, South Carolina and both “fathers” of Black
women, slave and free, whom they never claimed as kin in the ways that they would claim their white
children. The laws of U.S. chattel slavery and Jim Crow made white kinship (legally, familially, and
politically). These modes of recognizing white kinship and refusing to recognize Black personhood
endure into the present; they make and unmake persons and families, and assign human beings value in
and of themselves, or not. Thurmond’s declaration encompasses not only Black people, but Latinx,
Muslim Americans and more. White kin in one direction, “property” in another. Whiteness, then, is a
political project. It is distinct from, but often acts in concert with, the political projects of making and
sustaining nation, ethnicity, and ethnic nationalisms. Whiteness is a political project and it is also a
logic, by which I mean it is a calculus, a way of sorting oneself and others into categories of those who
must be protected and those who are, or soon will be, expendable. It is this calculus that allowed Dylan
Roof to sit, for one hour or more with the welcoming members of a Bible study and prayer group at the
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal in South Carolina (the oldest AME church in the South), and then
to show them his gun, to rise from his seat, to slaughter most of them, and to spare three so that they
could “tell everyone what happened.” It is this logic that allowed Dylan Roof’s friends to say nothing.
Those friends noted that he seemed changed and “angry” but they asked him no questions when he
repeatedly broadcast his homicidal intentions in the weeks before he massacred six Black women and
three Black men. The logics of whiteness allowed him to be captured alive (by kin) and then taken to a
Burger King and fed because he said he was tired and hungry. That whiteness and white supremacy are
logics of making the human also means that it is expected that the survivors of the massacre will offer
Roof their forgiveness. White supremacists are angry; those who claim that title and those who do not
but who act in the interests of white supremacy. Not only are they angry, but also “we” are told that
their anger must be understood–that “we” must make room for it. This “we” is across race, sex, class,
gender, and geography. This unmoral, unethical anger has the full support of the state. It is the only
anger that the state recognizes; the only anger not criminalized or met with deadly brutal force. It is the
anger of Ryan and Ammon Bundy and the understanding of the jury of their all-white peers that found
them not guilty of the illegal occupation and armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. It
is an unmoral anger that hits in the register and the grammar of violence, in the logics of law and order,
in electoral victories and the grammar of reconciliation with kin by any means. Many white people are
struggling to figure out if they should speak and what they might say to their white kin now, in this
moment. (Kin here means, all of those recognized by the self–in some fundamental, indelible way–as
being like the self.) They are wondering if they should be silent or if they should broach the election with
their intimates, with the people who are closest to them and who occupy different points of view, who
voted differently, who apprehend the world in ways they self-report as deeply antithetical or inimical to
their own. They acknowledge that the lives of people, not them, are at stake. They take to the streets to
protest, and yet some speak this fear of potential loss of kin into the same ether as their co-workers,
friends, and colleagues who are marked (as Black/Muslim/refugee/Latinx/immigrant/LGBTQI/differently
abled/Asian and Native American/undocumented) and are in imminent danger. They equivocate at the
thought and reality of losing kin, and at probable discomfort and pain; and in that interjacent space of
equivocation, they reconstitute and re-enflesh that ghost of a past that is not yet past. White people are
searching for ways to show solidarity to people of color and some have landed on the performative
symbol of wearing a safety pin. Symbols are important and a safety pin is not enough. A safety pin is a
temporary fix for a rend in the fabric. One must be willing to say this is abhorrent. One must be willing
to be more than uncomfortable. One must be willing to be on the outside. One must refuse to repair a
familial rift on the bodies cast out as not kin. Slavery is the ghost in the machine of kinship. Kinship
relations structure the nation. Capitulation to their current configurations is the continued enfleshment
of that ghost. Refuse reconciliation to ongoing brutality. Refuse to feast on the corpse of others. Rend
the fabric of the kinship narrative. Imagine otherwise. Remake the world. Some of us have never had
any other choice.

Liberal immigration reforms are founded upon interminable anti-black violence – the
only hope is the alt’s call for epistemological catastrophe
Malaklou, 18 – M. Shadee, Assistant Professor of Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College and Mellon
Faculty Fellow of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. “'Dilemmas' of Coalition and the
Chronopolitics of Man: Towards an Insurgent Black Feminine Otherwise,” Theory and Event, 21:1,
January, p. 224-8, Project Muse – klab/br

Certainly, some junior partnerships are more dangerous than others, and reports of antiblack violence in
SWANA communities are plentiful.46 Ours is not just a libidinal violence in which we reproduce
antiblack viscera, guts, and instincts to remove our own racialized bodies from humanism's flesh-making
project; we also reproduce liberalism's political-economical violence. The International Organization for
Migration reports that the slave auction itself survives in some SWANA countries—like Libya, where
African migrants from Senegal, The Gambia, and the Sub-Sahara are kidnapped on their way to Europe
(Libya is a major exit point for boat travel to Europe) and sold in public squares to Arab locals.47 It is the
task of this essay to intervene in how the junior partnerships Wilderson describes are made—in effect,
to jam the fallacious logic whereby nonblack persons of color and especially SWANA persons are
incentivized to believe that they share more in common with Spencer et al. than with the black Africans
they accumulate and kill, if not literally (as in Libya), then in the realm of the imagination, as a fantasy
that coheres their own claims to humanity. Liberalism's discourse of inclusivity goads nonblack persons
of color to make "bad faith" claims48 to white personhood (i.e., to the supposed universality of a human
imago); it sets up antiblack sentimentality as the litmus or naturalization test for the "structural
adjustment" that induces their "borrowed institutionality". Which is to say, it is liberalism's seemingly
pluralistic plentitude that enlists nonblack minority [End Page 224] populations as coconspirators in
white supremacy. Their junior partnerships activate what Sexton describes as a plasticity in which civil
society as the guarantor of social life stretches to invite nonblack minority populations to the seat of
human community by "[expanding] the boundaries of whiteness…whose only conditional limitation is
the exclusion of racial blackness."49 The political-economic violence of antiblackness, proceeded and
structured—Hartman teaches us—by antiblack sentimentality or its libidinal economy, is the price of
admission for a human recognition in which nonblack minority populations transcend their own
racialization, or the body's designation as flesh. As a "political arithmetic" and (as) "racial calculus,"50
racial blackness is the constant that allows us to measures Man's movements, functioning to vest
nonblack persons of color with the capacity for movement, or social life.

I argue that the white supremacy Spencer evinces, in which nonblack persons of color can be
contributing members of human community, reinforces the constitutive exclusion of racially black
persons from the Historical frame. The rub is that Spencer is not wrong. Racially black persons cannot
be-in-time because as pre-human artifacts—the trace of humanism's race/ism or cut—they bear the
weight of Man's ontological anxieties. The promise of a universal human imago implores nonblack
persons of color to make room for themselves not in a vacuum, but in an Historical world (wound)
adhered by racial hierarchies, such that by activating the plasticity of racial whiteness as a human
recognition, they entrench the constitutive exclusion of racially black minorities from human
be(com)ing. To refuse to capitalize on this plasticity, to refuse to reproduce the antiblack sentimentality
and violence of Enlightenment Europe would consent to arriving to the table of human civilization too
soon—at the dawn of Man, which is how Martin characterizes the African continent—and too late,
failing altogether to qualify for the recognitions and protections reserved for human subjects of a civil
polity. To be sure, civil rights necessitate human recognition because "civil society" is but a placeholder
for the discursive and material organization of Man (i.e., Man's racial myths and legal categories), and
because the political economy of liberal humanism is generated within and through libidinal
antiblackness.

The episodic and contingent violence that nonblack persons of color experience (for example, in Trump's
America) is the affective lever civil society operates to demand generalized loyalty, obscuring for
nonblack minorities the choice whereby they consent to make themselves the instruments of white
supremacy. The mechanism through which that loyalty is elicited is not (just) the state's demand but
liberal—libidinal—humanism's demand for a collective, planetary distancing from and rejection of racial
blackness. A white qua not-black human imago is at once the subject of Alt-Right claims to exclusivity
and liberal [End Page 225] humanism's claims to inclusivity. Ours is a world in which those who enjoy
what Frantz Fanon describes as "ontological resistance"51 (i.e., human qua white recognition)
experience, in Trump's as in Obama's America, the ebb and flow of human community (i.e., social life),
while the excommunicated, or in Wilderson's hauntingly apt analogy for racially black persons, the
"cows"52—as the raw material that makes and sustains our human world-making—are indiscriminately
and senselessly, without stipulation or explanation, "accumulated and, if need be, killed,"53 in order to
cohere the collective unconscious of our human community and to engender its social markers of Man.

Same shit, different day

I have already suggested that Trump's simulated inclusivity betrays the continuity of the office of the
American president and that his arrival to the White/Master's House coheres and testifies to a paradigm
sutured by unremarkable and interminable antiblack violence, even or especially as nonblack minority
populations experience new violations in Trump's America. The contingent and selective recognition of
nonblack persons of color as white-cum-human beings absolves—gives cover to—the enduring
violence whereby the black as a subject-that-is-not-one is defeated by the protections liberal
humanism's political machinery—civil society—erects to safeguard Man in his most vulnerable iterations
(i.e., "worker, woman, […] gay, lesbian, and so on").

While racialized violence reduces the nonblack body (of color) to flesh, nonblack persons of color and
racially black persons do not occupy comparable space-time coordinates and/or structural
positionalities, because humanism's flesh-making project or race/ism is essentially an antiblack violence.
Afro-pessimism teaches us that racially black persons occupy a structural position analogous, if at all, to
non-human animal beings54, which like the slave acquire value in/as death—as a meaty carcass
consumable/consumed for its parts, including skin, hair,55 bones, organs, and (the story of Henrietta
Lacks teaches us) cells. It is for this reason that Wilderson uses the analogy of a meat-packing plant to
replace the "negro question" with the "cow question,"56 and why Sexton describes the "paradigmatic
condition of black existence in the modern world" as "a perpetual and involuntary openness"57 to the
tearing apart and looting of black flesh. Hortense Spillers names the hyper-vulnerability of the
unsignified/unsignifiable black flesh to remain from humanism's cut as a "hieroglyphics." She clarifies
that the "anatomical specifications of rupture" assigned to black flesh invite "the objective description of
laboratory prose"58—"eyes beaten out, arms, backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle, punctured;
teeth missing, as the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives… the bullet."59 Surely, this is not the
representational regime of a body [End Page 226] typified by cohesion. Wilderson's, Sexton's, and
Spillers' interventions are Afro-pessimistic60 insofar as they dissuade the reader from holding her breath
for a political metamorphosis that might finally recognize black humanity. Black fungibility like animal
fungibility (perhaps too, like earth-matter fungibility61) will abate only after an epistemological
catastrophe disorganizes our relational capacities and dissolves every frame of reference, obliterating
the chronopolitical grammar through which those who can become Man, that is to say, who can ascend
to the top of a racial hierarchy that is also or primarily a food chain, do so.

Franco Barchiesi elaborates the Afro-pessimistic position to remind us that "the shift from multicultural
liberalism to nationalistic supremacism" in the hour of Trump "is a change only in the form of Black
subjugation."62 Black persons categorically denied human recognition as a fact and not (just) as an
inconvenience of their being "do not merely confront [the] violence"63 nonblack minority populations
like immigrants, indigenous persons, and nonblack gender non-conforming persons experience as an
event—for example, as a travel ban or the dismissal of marriage and bathroom rights. Rather, black
Others as a people forged, Audre Lorde explains, "in the crucibles of difference,"64 are "actually
constituted by [violence] through processes of depredation, coercion, and enslavement."65 Barchiesi's
incisive reading of Wilderson's "Gramsci's Black Marx" (2003) makes it clear that Trump's presidency
does not qualify as an historical node, which is to say, does not signify the end of times or a new
time/beginning, but rather, evidences the longue durée of black social death as a world-ordering
structure, more to the point, as the structure for our be(com) ing-human. It is precisely "the inhumanity
of Blackness [that] allows White humans"66 including nonblack persons of color to build institutions,
ideologies of freedom, images of rights, and ethical meditations on democracy. Such political and
cognitive capacities posit [black] bodies as their inert, "socially dead," Wilderson writes, yet sentient
objects, or outlets of white fantasies of coercion, improvement, imagination, violence, and healing. The
inhumanity of [blackness], or the fundamental antagonism between White life and [black] death, is
ultimately the condition of existence for the political conflicts, moral dilemmas, and social emergencies
of civil society, as well as its aptitude to experience and narrativize history as a succession of events.67

To argue that antiblack violence is paradigmatic—a structure and a constant—is to suggest that reforms
to civil society will not abate the violence black Others necessarily must endure to make civil society,
more to the point, to make or conceive of a social polity—an "us"—in the first place. Wilderson's
intervention, abridged by Barchiesi to clarify our present moment as altogether typical, insists that the
reorganization [End Page 227] of civil society's parts will not de-escalate the rates at which black persons
are indiscriminately maimed and murdered, because black life is not contingently fungible but
essentially so, and because the metaphysics and/as metapolitics of black fungibility are not just
essential for the making of a socially dead black Other. They are principally and foremost essential for
the making of a non-fungible or white-passing "us".68 The story of that be(com)ing, of a human subject
that is "semantically-neurochemically" programmed to enact antiblack "individual and collective
behaviors,"69 is located in the hearts and minds of those eligible for human recognition, as a libidinal
economy.

Insofar as Trump and his henchmen (i.e., Spencer) use liberalism's seemingly capacious parachute to
trap the rights of nonblack minority populations, they mobilize not an American nightmare but one
instance in the "ongoing disaster"70 of "the soc ial" that is mobilized by the American Dream. Trump's
hate-mongering is our price of admission not just for a model of the social organized by/as civil society,
but for the making of human community (i.e., the "social"), that is to say, for epistemology and ontology
itself. Recall Hartman's argument that "the very effort to pry apart the Negro question and the social
question exposes their enduring entanglements"71 as a private relation. Libidinal interests, untouchable
by the law but which determine the law72, "[shape] the emergence of the social in the United States"73
as a racially unified site in which the immigrant and savage find the civil rights that correspond with
human recognition. While nonblack minorities in Trump's America are being made to experience, albeit
irregularly and provisionally, what Michael Harriot describes as "the America black people have always
lived in,"74 which denies human recognition to revoke civil rights, for the black Other who lives in this
nowhere or "sunken place,"75 it matters not who steers the American ship. Hillary Clinton's presidency
like Barack Obama's before hers would have (at best) activated the elasticity whereby nonblack
differences (in Obama's America, gay and trans rights especially) are accommodated by entrenching the
constitutive antagonism of racial blackness (such that the hour of the first black presidency testified to
the fact that black lives don't or can't matter).76

Prioritize the rhetorical level of argument invention and rationales for action – our
intervention into the local imaginary is far more effective than their intervention into
the national imaginary
Chavez, 13 – Karma R., Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Mexican American & Latino/a Studies @ University of Texas-Austin. Queer Migration Politics: Activist
Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, University of Illinois Press, p. 145-150 – klab/br

The activist rhetoric of queer migration politics has provided an appropriate lens to view and understand
the complexity and variety of coalitional moments. The rhetoric has also supplied a way to witness the
possibilities that coalitional moments engender for practicing and envisioning politics and making lives
more livable. The level of inventing arguments and creating rationales for action and publicly
pronouncing positions—the rhetorical level—is an ideal site to examine how activists respond to
national social imaginaries. National social imaginaries, themselves rhetorical constructions, frame and
create the parameters for the possibility of belonging, being, and change. Within the coalitional
moments discussed here, activists draw upon a host of rhetorical and ideological resources. These
resources range from utopian longings and inclusionary strategies to radical analyses of intermeshing
and interlocking oppressions and systems of power, as well as the innovative approaches to
relationships found in queer and feminist politics and communities. Activists develop and deploy
rhetorical visions such as the differential vision of the queer migration manifestos and Yasmin Nair’s use
of radical interactionality. Activists also manufacture and adopt tactical strategies such as migrant youth activists’ appropriation and
extension of coming out or CDH’s and Wingspan’s everyday practices and processes of rationalizing and
engaging in coalitional politics. A number of implications of these analyses exist for politics, theory, and
possibility. First, it is important to explicate the implications of offering coalition in place of
normative/inclusionary and utopian politics. More than anything else, coalition features the messiness,
the impurity, and the multiplicity of subjectivity, agency, and politics that these two approaches often
miss. Coalition is always in our vision, and yet as a horizon it is simultaneously beneath our bodies.
Horizons are temporally and spatially tangible, and yet as thresholds between two potentially divided
things they are sites of tension; they are queer. Coalition cannot be easily categorized, fit into an
identity, or fixed on a map. Coalition is not comfortable. It is not home. It is scary and unpredictable.
Unlike those subjects invested in inclusionary politics, coalitional subjects refuse to accept normative
aspirations as the only channel for belonging and life. Like some of those espousing inclusionary politics, coalitional subjects
recognize that compromise might be necessary, reform is a part of revolution, and small victories are worth celebrating. Unlike those
inviting us to take up utopian politics, coalitional politics is oriented toward the present, emphasizes
realms that are not only aesthetic, and refuses what cannot be practiced—while expanding the very
limits of the practicable. As with utopian politics, coalitional subjects believe in the vitality of broadening
imaginaries that will open possibilities for livable life. As Judith Butler remarks, “Possibility is not a
luxury; it is as crucial as bread.”2 Coalition offers a way to rethink subjectivity, agency, and possibility. Aimee Carrillo Rowe writes,
“The sites of our belonging constitute how we see the world, what we value, who we are becoming. The formation of the subject is never
individual, but is forged across a shifting set of relations that we move in and out of, often without reflection. The politics of relation is a placing
that moves a politics of location through a relational notion of the subject to create a subject who recognizes and works within the coalitional
conditions that creates and might unmake her—and others.”3 This has been a book about people who can be described as coalitional subjects,
those people produced by their various belongings to see issues, systems of oppression, and possibilities for a livable life as inextricably bound
to one another. Every action, every political choice, every coalition entered into expands the coalitional subject’s understanding of how power
works and how people’s issues are intermeshed. For instance, Nair’s radically interactional rhetoric reveals a method for accessing the complex
roots of problems in order to invite others to reorient their politics and agendas to provide more life chances, to use Dean Spade’s words, for
more people. Nair’s imperfect methods, which come off as polemical or insensitive, do not negate her critique of the dangers of affect and
personal narrative in these neoliberal times. Nair, as a queer woman of color, an immigrant, a grassroots and cyber activist, a trans-
generational and transracial organizer, a person with a PhD who lives in a small apartment in Chicago—among her other sites of belonging—has
had her subjectivity and her political orientation produced, reproduced, and altered from within those diverse spaces. Furthermore, through
the difficult coalitional moments that are her interactions with supporters of the UAFA and the rights of binational same-sex couples above
other migrants, Nair is also produced, reproduced, and altered as a coalitional subject. Coalition and the perspectives that coalition enables are
not simple and easy. They are laborious but worthwhile. The development and constant refinement of coalitional subjectivities reflects a
profound commitment to present possibility, to the creative resources of people with whom we share space, and to refusing to give over to
despair. Second, examining coalitional moments through the lens of queer migration politics leads to several interesting implications for
thinking about politics and theory. Because of the way queer migration politics have exploded onto the discursive scene in the early twenty-first
century, they supply a plethora of diverse coalitional moments, junctures that point to other possibilities. Coalitional subjects have animated
some of these coalitional moments when queer migrants have inserted themselves in key ways into the public sphere. Some of these
coalitional moments reflect the unlikely coalescence among those identifying primarily with queer politics and those who mostly work on
behalf of migration politics. Still others have advanced a queer approach to migration politics. Within the rhetoric analyzed here each kind of
coalitional moment supplies a different glimpse into how migrants, queers, or queer migrants are imagined to belong. The rhetoric of queer
migration politics further indicates what activists see as the conditions for their belonging and the creative resources they use to challenge
those parameters. Emphasizing activist rhetoric, including publicly available texts such as speeches, blogs, statements, and posters, alongside a
look at the argumentative rationales that activists create for their work, has been especially useful in understanding the myriad ways activists
offer persuasive appeals and effect change. Analyzing the rhetoric of queer migration politics also lends insight to
concerns such as audience—imagined or real—and argumentative invention. Assessing these
dimensions of the politics also returns to the significance of coalition and coalitional moments. As has been
seen, each activist envisions a different audience for their rhetoric. Some, like the DREAM activists, target lawmakers.
Others, such as Nair and some of the manifesto authors, primarily speak to specific groups of activists.
Still others, such as Wingspan and CDH, look to influence the communities in which they are embedded.
These envisioned audiences lead activists to use markedly different kinds of arguments and modes of
communication in order to effect change. But it is also important to remember that these envisioned
audiences do not manifest from thin air; instead, they emerge from the resources that activists have at
their disposal, the conditions that activists seek to change, and the actors who can help them meet
those outcomes.4 Having access to an audience results from the coalitions an activist or activist organization has and creates. These
relationships open doors and opportunities that are otherwise unavailable. As suggested above, relationships and work with diverse people
who have diverse ideas can lead activists to the development of coalitional subjectivities. As activists begin to understand the interactions and
intersections between their issues and identities and others, thereby creating coalitional subjectivities, activists have more resources for
rhetorical invention. This fact serves as a call to be drawn toward others and their struggles not necessarily because we affectively want to be
but because we know we politically must be. We coalesce to increase access, to alter our ability to make arguments, to broaden the resources
for rhetorical invention within our reach in order to challenge imaginaries and make people’s lives, our own and others, more livable.
Additionally, understanding social movements, protest, and activism in the public sphere warrants a
robust connection between people’s lives and the theories designed to explain and enable improvement
of them. Queer women of color feminist approaches help to facilitate such seeing because those
theories, with rare exception, are not interested in utopia or liberal notions of progress and change
emerging from evolution. Queer women of color feminist approaches begin from the flesh to explicate
the present conditions of material and symbolic oppression. From that realistic place, those explications
aid in using available material resources and available means of persuasion to enact social change.
Toward this end, Lugones advocates what she calls “street walker theorizing.” Street walker theorizing
simultaneously privileges the experience of walking in the streets—hanging out with people whose
worlds we write about in their own worlds, and the experience of “walking the streets”—drawing
knowledge from those, like prostitutes and hustlers, normally considered outside the bounds of
intellectual production.5 From these spaces of intermeshed bodily, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual
experience, we begin to fully understand the need for an analysis of intermeshing and interlocking
oppression to improve people’s worlds and the tactical strategies people are already deploying to
achieve such ends. People’s lives are not comprised of singular identities or concerns, as so many studies
of social movement would lead us to believe. Similarly, the ways belonging is rhetorically imagined in
the United States is not a simple equation of exclusion and inclusion based on discrete identities. As
queer women of color feminists have always shown us, oppression and privilege, power and identity,
domination and liberation are experienced in people’s lives in vastly complicated ways. We need equally
complicated understandings of how people who are committed to social change work to confront these
material and symbolic conditions. We also need to think about the courses of action that people have
available to them, on the ground, as the starting points for theoretical analysis. This book provides one example.
Finally, coalitional moments have the most radical potential when the rhetoric used does not request
national belonging from within the confines of existing premises. Every coalitional moment in this book
was animated by dissatisfaction with existing legal conditions within the United States. Clearly,
coalitional subjects speak within the nation, even as a part of its system. But coalitions or coalitional
moments with only nationalist aspirations inevitably fail, or if they do not fail in terms of their stated
objectives, they often reinscribe exclusionary norms with long-term impacts for people who should
have supposedly benefited from the coalition in the first place. Moreover, in the context of queer
migration politics, very often the national legal objectives were not the primary part of their work, nor
even most interesting part. Instead, the most important thing evidenced in nearly all of these cases is
the development of political orientations and modes of belonging that point toward other political
possibilities. Coalitions of those strangers who threaten security and are scapegoated for the existence of a host of ills are inevitably
negated, excluded, and precluded from national belonging. When
activists focus on coalitional orientations and modes
of political belonging rather than the goals of legal national belonging and demand radical intervention,
they may still be excluded. But they imagine something different, so while the intervention at the
national imaginary may be negligible, the intervention into people’s local imaginations is unbounded.
Given the state of LGBT immigration politics in the United States, and the exclusions it continues to
perpetuate, such unbounding could not come at a more crucial time. This “victory” for US LGBT
immigration politics, with which I opened this conclusion, reminds me of something my friends have
been repeating lately and that the radical trans activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is often credited
with saying: “Our dreams have become so small.” I hope Queer Migration Politics can be part of what
changes the size of our dreams and our present possibilities.
2NC
2NC—Framework (Top)

Evaluate the debate at a rhetorical level and force the 1AC to defend the invention of
their original arguments and rationales for action – that’s the 1NC Chavez evidence,
the only piece of comparative evidence in the context of radical migration politics –
she says the alternative’s intervention into people’s local imaginations is unbounded,
whereas the aff’s intervention into the national imaginary is negligible.

Even if they win studying the national imaginary, i.e. the plan, is good, it’s irrelevant –
we’ve impact turned the plan: citizenship is bad – it’s a normativizing project that
authorizes the worst forms of unending violence
2NC—Alt (Top)

Refuse all calls for citizenship as they exist today – citizenship is always a divide-and-
conquer strategy of international system of population management that reproduces
settler colonialism, racism, sexism, and heterosexism – we open a new politics of
alliance
Yorukoglu, 16 – Ilgin, Assistant Professor of Sociology @ City University of NY-Queens, “Review of
Brandzel, Amy L., Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative,” H-Net Reviews July,
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46908 – klab/br

No Intersectionality, No Justice, No Peace There are obvious incentives to advocate for “either-or”
perspectives on social issues, especially in studies seeking to influence sociopolitical change and policy.
It will be easier to publish articles and books that are either for or against a position. If you are a public
intellectual, your chances of gaining supporters for your cause will be greater when you come down
strongly on one side of the discussion. The same logic generally applies for theorists. Against
Citizenship's great merit is that it attempts to outline specifically, and in some detail, the danger in
approaching social issues from this “either-or” perspective. Amy Brandzel asks: “How can we imagine a
transformative politics for queer studies, one that creatively inhabits both a skeptical demeanor and a
reparative affiliation with the political agencies and actors that we so often criticize in our work?” (p. xi).
Brandzel’s Against Citizenship thoughtfully reveals the danger of false dichotomies through a series of
case studies. It argues that citizenship, inherently a normativizing project, produces many false
dichotomies. Citizenship disciplines, regulates, and includes the excluded only “once they are marked as
deserving” (p. 5). Said more simply, it “divides and conquers” populations. Through anti-
intersectionality, it makes populations compete against one another for recognition. The inclusion and
recognition of some will mean the vulnerability and disenfranchisement of others. Indeed, “the ever-
lingering promise of citizenship has been one of the most resourceful tools for producing and
maintaining anti-intersectional, anti-coalitional politics” (p. 4). For Brandzel, citizenship is not only “a
biopolitical and disciplinary mechanism of governmentality” but also a “moral and ethical value system”
(p. 16), and those marked outside of the normative citizenship are “second-class citizens” at best. What
is more, citizenship does not only work on a local/national level; it also works on a global scale, “as an
international system of population management that renders global populations governable by
dividing them into discrete subpopulations of particular nation-states” (p. 11). On either of these scales,
inclusion works to reify the boundaries of exclusion (i.e., “I am not like those 'undeserving' people,” I
cry, in order to make my claim of acceptance, knowing that it is either them or me). This is why the state
welcomes anti-intersectionality, as “projects that segregate categories of identity while simultaneously
marking them as valuable or debased, legitimate or improper, human or inhuman, and worthy of life or
abandoned for death” (p. 23). The three legal case studies in Against Citizenship—same-sex marriage
law, hate crime legislation, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty and racialization—expose how citizenship,
as an anti-intersectional project, confounds and obscures the mutual processes of settler colonialism,
racism, sexism, and heterosexism. Brandzel starts with a well-crafted and insightful exploration of hate
crime legislation and the surrounding debates in the United States. Since I teach in a criminal justice
program and my work relates to Muslim identity and migrants in the post-9/11 world, the first chapter
was particularly compelling to me. Brandzel looks at what the rhetoric of hate crimes legislation does: it
helps tie hate crimes to the extraordinary, the heinous, and the past, while obscuring the everyday
violence of structural racism (e.g., governmental in/actions or police violence). She attends to the
selective enforcement of the law and to how the term “hate crime” seems to point directly toward
nongovernment actors, so that state actions like police brutality are rarely, if ever, marked as a hate
crime. To a certain extent, all this has been said already (and the author’s literature review provides
ample evidence). However, once again, what is most original and compelling here is Brandzel’s
thoughtful case against the either/or perspective. Rather than discarding hate crime rhetoric altogether,
Brandzel reminds us of the important ways in which community groups use such legislation as a means
to critique the state itself. These groups strategically use the language and laws of hate crime to hold
the state accountable as a central perpetrator of violence, so the “hate crime legislation is both a
dangerous, yet valiant, response to the everyday experiences of violence” (p. 35). What she refers to as
“comparative anti-intersectionality” is particularly helpful as a terminology (p. 63). This is a rhetorical
maneuver which is deployed by actors across the political spectrum. One category of identity (usually
race) is used to deny or demean another (usually sexuality or gender identity) by arguing that one of the
categories is more worthy of inclusion within hate crime legislation than another. This way, by
promoting competition for recognition, coalition strategies for radical transformation are prevented.
The second case study focuses on same-sex marriage rights. This was my least favorite chapter because
her critique of either-or thinking stalls a bit here. She convincingly critiques claims of sameness,
practices of normativity, and assimilation of same-sex marriage in a world that increasingly struggles
over radicalized citizenship. Marriage remains a tool of governance, for sure, as Carole Pateman taught
us regarding “the sexual contract.”[1] In particular, marriage has never been separate from ethnic and
racial hierarchies. Women’s citizenship was often linked to their marital status and their husbands' racial
identity. Benefiting from her intersectional approach, Brandzel gives the example of a 1888 law which
“ensured Native women who married U.S. citizens would lose their tribal citizenship while being granted
the 'gift' of U.S. citizenship” (p. 75). This chapter also gives a wonderful chronology of important legal
cases surrounding the issue, revealing how the courts often equated sexual orientation to skin color and
fixed racial discrimination as a 'thing in the past' to ignore current violence. Thus, we are reminded that
the recognition of same-sex marriage has come at a substantial cost of exacerbated violence targeting
the poor and racial and ethnic minorities. In this case study, however, we fail to see a fully developed
“both/and” approach Brandzel advocates for. As communities appropriate hate crimes rhetoric to reveal
state violence, is there no way for queers to strategically deploy the official recognition of same-sex
marriage? Brandzel claims that same-sex marriage has severely wounded, if not eliminated, the
monstrous queer; do we always have to depend on the “queer monstrosity” to disrupt normativity (p.
73)? Why limit “monstrosity” to queer communities? Can we not use this moment to reveal diversity
within the institution of marriage in general—even the traditional kind, whatever that refers to? Is there
only one type of straight marriage? Are not there monstrosities, or queerness, if you will, in the sense of
strangeness or deviance, in what is assumed to be “normal”? Second of all, are we being fair to the
queer communities, which are as diverse as any other community, when we always expect monstrosity
from them? The recent massacre in Orlando has shown how certain spaces are still considered to be
sanctuaries by members of the LGBTQ communities and for good reasons. Can we not fight against
normative citizenship while simultaneously celebrating the right to what straight people always take for
granted? We know that hate crimes against LGBTQ people go up when there is a debate about the rights
of LGBTQ people. However, lawmakers are determined to not take any responsibility whatsoever. Is
there a connection between the laws they are making and the massacres we keep witnessing? Asked
about the House Bill 2 of North Carolina, which requires transgender people to use the restrooms in
government buildings that correspond to the gender on their birth certificate, rather than their gender
identity, Republican Representative Julia Howard suggests that “We can’t control what everybody says
or what everybody thinks.” She even “expressed doubt that shooter Omar Mateen targeted LGBT
people on purpose”![2] Pat McCrory, on the other hand, who is the Republican governor of the state
and who signed the discriminatory bill into law, expressed sympathy on social media, as if their bills and
laws and narratives and debates do not contribute to the culture of hate and agressive masculinity. Take
another example: Florida Senator Marco Rubio not only expressed his sympathy but also drew attention
to the shooter's and Isis's hatred toward homosexuality. One cannot help ask if this is not the same
Rubio who raised money for a backer of antigay “conversion therapy.” Did he not consistently oppose
gay marriage, so much so that he was nicknamed the champion of “real marriage”? Does he not oppose
the right of LGBTQ couples to adopt because “children shouldn’t be part of a social experiment”?[3] In
light of all this hypocracy, what we must do is use this moment to demand responsibility from
lawmakers. Instead of rejecting marriage equality altogether, we must benefit from it by drawing
attention to what law does. We must build on the work of the activists who made marriage happen, and
demand more. In the final case study chapter, Brandzel uses a US Supreme Court case involving a white
citizen’s challenge to Native Hawaiian representation to explore how race and coloniality are set up as
oppositional, anti-intersectional politics. The challenge deploys the divide-and-conquer strategy through
legal and historical discourses to prevent an alliance between antiracist and anticolonialist activisms and
politics. Particularly insightful is the section on “apologetic liberalism.” This liberalism is more ready to
accept US colonialism but sees this politics as a “mistake that is written in history, at a time when the
United States did not know any better” (p. 113). Therefore, this “apologetic liberal discourse” ignores or
veils current colonialist policies or gives them a different name. This narrative also deploys the
framework of recognition. Recognition of 'difference' becomes a prize which inevitably suggests a
competition with other 'differences' while simultaneously showcasing the liberal nationhood. Following
this vein, civil rights becomes a negotiation of who can be included within the American polity and how
to have a 'right' to US citizenship. This does not mean that we should abandon the civil rights discourse
altogether. It does mean, however, that we should resist any either/or rhetoric and expose the
codependence of racism and colonialism. Finally, Brandzel juxtaposes all three case studies within an
anti-intersectional framework that contributes to the divide-and-conquer strategy of normative
citizenship. We must reveal and always remind ourselves the danger of anti-intersectionality. Race,
indigenous, and sexual rights are all connected to one another. Especially in the aftermath of the
Orlando massacre, we must remember this. There is no other way. Against Citizenship is against
practical politics as they exist today. It is a call for a politics of alliance. Bringing together feminist and
queer studies with critical ethnic studies and indigenous studies, it calls for not only alliance against
citizenship but also alliance among various analyses, fields, and disciplines. Therefore, this thoughtful,
energizing, and inspiring work should be commended for scholars and activists alike who are engaged in
sociopolitical critique.
2NC—AT: Perm (Top)

You must affirm an uncompromising critique against citizenship – that’s the Chavez,
Hill and Yorokoglu evidence above – a direct quote – “there is nothing redeemable
about citizenship, nothing worth salvaging or sustaining”

The burden is on them to totally disprove the link, not just to mitigate it – there is no
tolerable level of settler, heteronormative or anti-black violence

Legal inclusion through citizenship requires anti-intersectionality – the alt can produce
broader forms of belonging that solve the aff, but the aff is always exclusive with the
alt
Spade, 17 – Dean, Associate professor at the Seattle University School of Law, “Against Citizenship:
The Violence of the Normative by Amy L. Brandzel (review),” Feminist Formations, Volume 29, Issue 3,
Winter 2017, pp. 212-215 –klab/br

At the center of Against Citizenship is a question that many scholars and activists have examined: how
does advocacy for inclusion in citizenship reproduce the violences of the terms of citizenship itself?
Brandzel sheds new light on this inquiry through a mobilization of critical paradigms from several radical
intellectual traditions and the use of particularly demanding sites of investigation. The result is a book
that exposes some of the most straining tensions these questions place on social movements seeking
transformation. As Brandzel describes in the preface, many scholars who take up the critique of
inclusion-focused efforts by activists undertake that critique aggressively, taking precious little time to
inquire about the nuances of decisions to pursue such aims and sometimes openly mocking the naïveté
of inclusion-focused advocates. Brandzel refuses such an approach, raising an important set of ethical
inquiries for critical scholars and suggesting that a more careful examination of inclusion advocacy can
accompany rigorously critical engagement rather than undermine it. Taking seriously the pressures that
propel social movement actors toward inclusion strategies, and examining how those actors navigate
them closely, can provide a more full account of the causes and results of such strategic choices.
Brandzel’s humility and care is refreshing and significant, bringing nuance and reflection at every turn to
the application of various critical tools to moments of purported inclusion that reveal vital insights about
the shape and operations of US citizenship. Brandzel convincingly argues that citizenship is an
exclusionary project, and efforts at including more types of people in it inevitably reify its exclusive
nature and undermine opportunities to practice coalition among populations targeted for exclusion.
They make this argument with careful attention to the reasons why advocates and movements seeking
liberation are relentlessly attracted to harmful inclusion-seeking tactics. Brandzel argues that in the
wake of September 11, 2001, an anxious nationalism stirred longpresent anxieties about the possibility
of retaliation by nonnormative subjects. They describe, with great clarity, the discourses of normative
citizenship and justified exclusion of the nonnormative that have shaped recent decades and come into
particularly sharp relief in the last year. They use the term “cultural defense” as a way of understanding
connections between a range of racist and colonial discourses that produce logics justifying the
exclusion of non-normative populations from citizenship and the targeting of those populations with
state violence. They write,

[T]he cultural defense utilizes the fear that the violent machinations of citizenship and the privileges
they afford the normative will create the conditions in which the nonnormative will rise in retaliation for
their experience. This fear is rarely described directly, as if naming it would bring it into fruition; rather,
this fear is . . . [c]ouched in terms of tendencies (such as the tendency for criminality, the tendency for
dependency on state resources, the tendency for border crossing, the tendency for sexual
lasciviousness, and so forth). (4)

Brandzel argues that “the ever-lingering promise of citizenship has been one of the most resourceful
tools for producing and maintaining anti-intersectional, anti-coalitional politics”(4).1 They assert that
intersectional, coalitional politics is what is “most threatening” to violent systems of control (4). The US
nation state maintains these systems by requiring “that challenges to the norms of citizenship be
articulated in simple, single-axis formulations” (5). Brandzel suggests that left organizations and
academics also reproduce anti-intersectionalities. In particular, academic work focused on citizenship
frequently, even when engaging some critique, maintains an investment in the idea of an inclusive
citizenship that prevents a necessary rupture with the anti-intersectional approaches that such
inclusion requires.
2NC—AT: Perm (Family)

Such family ideation forms the basis for policies of exclusion writ large, even when it
appears to be beneficial to certain groups of immigrants
Lee 15 (Catherine, Associate Professor in Sociology and Faculty Associate at the Institute for Health and
the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University, “Family Reunification and the Limits of
Immigration Reform: Impact and Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act”, Sociological Forum, Vol. 30, No.
S1, June 2015, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/socf.12176)//JSL

Although these features of Chinese immigrant regulation seem at odds with one another—that is, an
official respect for family and
coverture that emphasized gender privilege versus administrative practice that exercised ethnic
exclusion—they were both part of family ideation that helped to spell out notions of gender and sexual
propriety, class ideals, and racial fitness and desirability. This family ideation was crucial for the
characterization of the Chinese as inassimilable and a threat to the nation even as gendered ideals of
family opened up opportunities for some individuals who possessed other attributes of fitness. Thus,
politicians regularly referred to what they considered to be deviant about Chinese immigrants,
especially their supposed connection to prostitution and bachelor communities, in efforts to push for
their exclusion. For example, Charles Wolcott Brooks was an American who worked for the Japanese government and was the former
Japanese consul in San Francisco. He testified before the Special Committee on Chinese Immigration convened by the California State Senate in
1878 and argued, "The Chinese are bad for us, because they come here without their families. Families are the centers of all that is elevating in
mankind, yet here we have a very large Chinese male population. The Chinese females that are here make this element more dangerous still"
(California Legislature 1878:16). Similarly, Senator
James Blaine (R-ME) spoke on the Senate floor in 1879 in debates
over whether the United States ought to abrogate the Burlingame Treaty, which had enabled Chinese immigration
thus far, in a step toward making Chinese exclusion possible. He declared, "The Asiatic cannot go on with our population and make a
homogenous element." He further claimed that
the Chinese had "no regard to family," did not "recognize the
relation of husband and wife," and did "not have in the slightest degree the ennobling and civilizing
influences of the hearthstone and the fireside" (Congressional Record 1879:1301). In the explicit message that
Chinese immigrants did not care about family was an implicit message that their kinds of families
were unwanted and could also threaten our kinds of families.

Family reunification policies serve only as a tool by the state to grant the perception of
rights to those meeting other characteristics
-Such policies allow the government to extend reunification to people who meet its idea of a good
immigrant, enabling racial and other discrimination

Lee 15 (Catherine, Associate Professor in Sociology and Faculty Associate at the Institute for Health and
the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University, “Family Reunification and the Limits of
Immigration Reform: Impact and Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act”, Sociological Forum, Vol. 30, No.
S1, June 2015, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/socf.12176)//JSL

As a matter of political reform, the emphasis on family could ultimately undermine support for
vulnerable families. The focus on family in immigration can limit the meaning of responsibility and rights
to paternalistic relations between citizen and state. The parent—child relationship demands the former to provide and
obligates the latter to behave in exchange for benefits. By talking about immigration rights in familial terms,
immigration stakeholders can reduce the complex process of migration to one in which the nation-
state confers special rights to individuals and families who act responsibly and are deemed legitimate.
In this sense, migration and the right to move across national borders to reunite with families becomes
less a human right and more a state-sanctioned privilege for a select group (Freeman 1998; Guiraudon 1998; D.
Jacobson 1996; Morris 2003; Soysal 1995). Before, during, and after passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, political
elites' conception of family and their perception of immigrant groups as "like one of the family" and
therefore, assimilable into the nation, engendered family unity provisions. During periods of exclusion,
gendered claims about family opened up liminal space for lucky individuals who possessed
appropriate class attributes even as their racial or ethnic status made them excludable. Family ideation
provided immigration stakeholders a way to make sense of the change and challenges associated with immigration. Likewise, as domestic and
international demands created new urgencies and as shifting political alignments provided new legislative opportunities in the post—World
War II era, political leaders again turned to talk of family to debate and articulate what role immigration should play in the United States. Their
meaning construction helped to push forward reform efforts that led to the replacement of national origins policy with family reunification. By
examining the complicated history of family reunification in American immigration, this article has shown that family
unity provisions
have resulted from political compromise. They have also been the unintended consequences of political
rhetoric stated in defense of prejudice in the immigration system. This suggests family reunification is not
simply the touchstone piece of a new democratically liberal immigration policy as the Hart-Celler Act has been
largely celebrated. Instead, the meaning of family and family reunification in American immigration is
complicated, and our understanding of it requires a longer historical lens and critically nuanced
attention, particularly as we evaluate the legacy and impact of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and work toward comprehensive
immigration reform.

Their framing of immigrant families always configures membership through exclusion


and can never be reconciled with the alt
Chávez, 17 – Alex E., Assistant Professor of Anthropology @ Notre Dame. “Intimacy at stake:
Transnational migration and the separation of family,” Latino Studies, April 2017, Volume 15, Issue 1, pp
50–72, p. Springer Link – klab/br

When it comes to conceptualizing the place of migrants in the imaginative sociology of ‘‘America,’’ the
continued use of ‘‘immigrant’’ frames migration linearly. While past studies have dispelled the notion of
straight-line assimilation in favor of a more segmented, fractured, and complex process (Portes and
Zhou 1993; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Alba and Nee 2003; Kasinitz et al. 2006), mainstream
understandings of ‘‘immigrant’’ families in the US are often tied to a linear narrative of incorporation, in
which a number of assumptions reign: (1) the idea of the ‘‘immigrant’’ landing in the US and staying
amid conditions of isolation and stranger-hood; (2) the sending country is where a sense of ‘‘home’’
resides and therefore exists as a past-tense ‘‘homeland’’; (3) the nuclear family is understood as the
undercurrent of desire for economic and labor activities that migrants undertake. These assumptions
unwittingly embrace the popular ethos of ‘‘America’’ as a ‘‘nation of immigrants’’ in search of the
‘‘American dream’’—a chronotopic framing that configures social membership in the space of US
nation-state with adherence to an aspirational/forward-looking ethic grounded in civic duty, hard work,
and a broadly conceived ‘‘American creed’’ of enterprise through which people can achieve middle-class
status. And while the chant of America as a ‘‘nation of immigrants’’ is routinely mobilized to inscribe this
national essence onto an idealtypical ‘‘rational actor’’—or the ‘‘immigrant’’ who takes full advantage of
the unfettered opportunity abundantly available—the primordial subject at the center of this narrative
represents a specific ‘‘ethnonational lineage,’’ or white Europeans (Dick 2011, p. 231). This scripting
underplays the sociohistorical contexts that have produced second-class citizens on the basis of race
and therefore casts Latinas/os (as a whole) as both imprudent subjects and ‘‘forever foreign’’ (Lipsitz
2006). In the end, no matter how much Latina/o migrants assimilate or ‘‘succeed’’ in search of the
‘‘American dream,’’ race and cultural difference are equated with an unwillingness to integrate into US
society. In a sense, the ‘‘American dream’’ will never be for them because they are not ‘‘real
Americans’’—they are too culturally endowed, to invoke Rosaldo (1989).
2NC—AT: Perm 2x Bind

Perm double bind doesn’t make sense – the alternative is a refusal of citizenship – it
doesn’t invent a new narrative structure that can ‘overcome’ the damage of the aff’s
inclusionary citizenship model
2NC—Methods

The alternative functions as a queering of traditional methodologies used in the


immigration process, creating a new politics of representation that challenges
hegemonic representative orders of normativity.
Di Feliciantonio and Gadelha 16 [Cesare, Kaciano, “Affects, Bodies, and Desire: ‘Queering’
Methods and Methodologies to Research Queer Migration”, published 2016, accessed 06/27/18] BBro
In this paper we have discussed the main methodological issues raised by our research on Italian queer migration to Berlin as they interrogate
the (im)possibility to develop a queer methodology, or better to queer methods and methodologies. Starting from an
understanding of queer migration as a personal, peculiar bodily movement as theorised by Gorman-Murray (2007,
2009) in opposition to the hegemonic narrative of the ‘coming-out journey’ (Lewis 2012), we have considered the
body as the primary vector of our research methodology. Following the many insights originated within the international debate about queer
methods and methodologies, we accorded a central role to our bodies, emotions, desires and affects in shaping
the fieldwork, thus emphasising the situated nature of knowledge and the need to critically discuss our
positionalities. Such a non-normative perspective allowed us to enter the field, recognising it as resulting
from the complex interactions between human and non-human actors; this way, ‘participant observation’ became
‘observant participation’, involving bodies and affects reframed queer migration within a geography of
becoming, this being maybe the real essence (if any) of queer itself. In the same vein, we explored the role of body performance to
understand queer migration through the case of Tumulto since it highlights the tensions between the ‘archive’ and the ‘repertoire’ discussed by
Taylor (2003). Such a reconceptualisation of migration through queer(ing) methodologies and methods has
involved the need to consider the relations linking mobilities, affects and desire as they shape the
experiences of the ‘nomadic subjects’/’desiring machines’ representing the ‘object’ of our research project. Throughout this
methodological adventure the tight connection between affects and queerness gets unveiled and the non-
identitarian character of queer thought results reinforced. This way, queer methods and methodologies,
as well as queering methods and methodologies, emerge as a new politics of representation
contesting those hegemonic ‘representative orders’ defining bodies and desires. This implies a process
of becoming-other-than the hetero/homonormative order, even though it is in the realm of
normativities that queerness gets shaped. These concerns call for the need to think of queer as an
undefined positionality, as becoming-other, affective device for new cartographies of desire. Nevertheless, as
shown by Braidotti (2013), individual cartographies are always embedded within power geometries, so the exercise of positionalities is not
always a possible task within the research process. Here we challenge the increasing institutionalisation of the politics of positionalities as it has
become a sort of compulsory requirement for scholars to be recognised as ‘critical’ enough; for instance, Vanderbeck (2005, p. 389) has noticed
how ‘ostensibly reflexive fieldwork narratives often afford male researchers the opportunity to publicly affirm their masculine prowess’.
Through recalling different situations experienced when conducting research with adolescents, his account reveals how positioning yourself in
fieldwork can be painful, harmful and even dangerous if you do not embody a hegemonic social model. This goes far beyond a sense of failure
that is perceived by the (queer/feminist) researcher when writing about reflexivity and positionalities (Rose 1997), although failure can
represent a familiar feeling for queer subjectivities (Halberstam 2011). However ‘calls for researchers to write reflexively about gender,
positionality and performance essentially ask those who deviate from hegemonic gender norms to disclose uncomfortable details about their
interactions. Within the context of a masculinist and heterosexist discipline, this is a risky proposition, and one which deserves a far wider
discussion than has been the case to date’ (Vanderbeck 2005, pp. 398–399). So the methodological
openness and the politics
of becoming featuring queer theory must be conceived as opening up new perspectives and possibilities
that challenge normative binary orders without hiding the (relative) privilege implied by the exercise of
positionalities, as people embodying non-hegemonic social models not always can afford it.
We need queer modalities of thought in order to counter the nationalisms and
homonormativity of our times. Dismantling the representational structures that
render queerness visible and allow it to be examined under the light can be done
through reading events as assemblages – resisting static catagories for a political
strategy that emphasizes relational, spatial, temporal, and bodily converagances
Puar 07. Jasbir Puar, “Terrorist assemblages” professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers
University, Duke University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 204

These are queer times indeed, temporal assemblages hooked into an array of enduring modernist
paradigms (civilizing teleologies, Orientalisms, xenophobia, militarization, border anxieties) and
postmodern eruptions (suicide bombers, biometric surveillance strategies, emergent corporealities,
counterterrorism in overdrive). With its emphasis on bodies, desires, pleasures, tactility, rhythms,
echoes, textures, deaths, morbidity, torture, pain, sensation, and punishment, our necropolitical
present-future deems it imperative to rearticulate what queer theory and studies of sexuality have to
say about the metatheories and the realpolitik of empire, often understood, as Joan Scott observes, as
“the real business of politics.” Queer times require even queerer modalities of thought, analysis,
creativity, and expression in order to elaborate upon nationalist, patriotic, and terrorist formations
and their imbricated forms of racialized perverse sexualities and gender dysphorias. Throughout this
book I allude to queer praxes of futurity that insistently disentangle the relations between
representation and affect, and propose queerness not as an identity nor anti-identity, but an
assemblage that is spatially and temporally contingent. The limitations of the intersectional identitarian
models emerge progressively—however queer they may be—as I work through the concepts of affect,
tactility, and ontology. While dismantling the representational mandates of visibility identity politics
that feed narratives of sexual exceptionalism, affective analyses can approach queernesses that are
unknown or not cogently knowable, that are in the midst of becoming, that do not immediately and
visibly signal themselves as insurgent, oppositional, or transcendent. This shift forces us to ask not only
what terrorist corporealities mean or signify, but more insistently, what do they do? In this conclusion, I
review these tensions between affect and representation, identity and assemblage, posing the
problematics of nationalist and terrorist formations as central challenges to transnational queer cultural
and feminist studies. I propose the assemblage as a pertinent political and theoretical frame within
societies of control. I rearticulate terrorist bodies, in particular the suicide bomber, as an assemblage
that resists queerness-as-sexual-identity (or anti-identity)—in other words, intersectional and
identitarian paradigms—in favor of spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and
rearrangements. Queerness as an assemblage moves away from excavation work, deprivileges a
binary opposition between queer and not-queer subjects, and, instead of retaining queerness
exclusively as dissenting, resistant, and alternative (all of which queerness importantly is and does), it
underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations. This foregrounding of assemblage
enables attention to ontology in tandem with epistemology, affect in conjunction with
representational economies within which bodies interpenetrate, swirl together, and transmit affects
and effects to each other. It also aids in circumventing the fatigued “temporal differencing” of resistant
identity paradigms of the Other that Chow problematizes. Invariably, Chow argues, poststructuralist
self-referentiality produces alienating temporalities of “non-coincidence.” Mystification exoticizes the
Other through a referential inward-turning “temporality as self destruction” that refuses continuity
between the self and other, producing difference as a complete disjuncture that cannot exist within the
same temporal planes as the Self. Concomitantly, futurization occurs where “temporality as
allochronism” produces the Other as the “perpetual promise” that is realizable, but only with a lag time,
not in the present. Both Hansen and Chow hint at the ends of identity. Chow suggests that attending to
the specificity of others has ironically become a universalizing project, whereas Hansen implies that
othering itself is no longer driven by the Hegelian self-other process of interpellation. While the
language of “misrecognition” problematically harks to an older Marxian model of false consciousness,
Hansen avers that taking up the position of the other only capitulates to state and capitalist modes of
domination and surveillance. Affect, Race, and Sex Representational analyses, identity politics, and the
focus on rights-bearing subjects are currently being complemented with thinking on affect and on
population formation that recognizes those who are living not only through their relation to
subjecthood, but are coming under control as part of one or many populations, not individuals, but
“dividuals.” Norma Alarcon intimated as much in her brilliant 1990 essay “The Theoretical Subject(s) of
This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism.” In this essay she asks, “Do we have to make
a subject of the whole world?” suggesting that the modern subject is exhausted, or rather that we have
exhausted the modern subject. We have multiplied it to accommodate all sorts of differences (i.e., a
politics of inclusion), intersected it with every variable of identity imaginable, split it to account for the
unknown realms of the subconscious, infused it with great individual rights (the rights-bearing subject).
Foucault’s own provocations include the claim that sexuality is an intersection, rather than an
interpellative identity, of the body and the population. We an read both of these pronouncements as
attempts to highlight what Rey Chow calls “categorical miscegenation”: that race and class are for the
most part not only indistinguishable and undifferentiable from each other, but are a series of temporal
and spatial contingencies that retain a stubborn aversion to being read. While Foucault’s formation
hails the feminist heuristic of “intersectionality,” unlike intersectional theorizing which foregrounds
separate analytics of identity that perform the holistic subjects’ inseparableness, the entities that
intersect are the body (not the subject, let us remember) and population. My own reliance upon calls to
intersectional approaches not withstanding, the limitations of feminist and queer (and queer of color)
theories of intersectionality are indebted in one sense to the taken-for-granted presence of the subject
and its permutations of content and form, rather than an investigation of the predominance of
subjecthood itself. Thus, despite the anti-identitarian critique that queer theory launches (i.e.,
queerness is an approach, not an identity or wedded to identity), the queer subject, a subject that is
against identity, transgressive rather than (gay or lesbian) liberatory, nevertheless surfaces as an object
in need of excavation, elaboration or specularization.
AT: Inclusion Good—2NC

Queer migrants are held to global gay discourse as a standard for admission for
inclusion—hyper sexualization and visibility are pre-requisites to admission to the
western sphere or homonormativity which submits queerness to a regime of
encodability
Sharif 2015 (Raihan,"White Gaze Saving Brown Queers: Homonationalism Meets Imperialist
Islamophobia" Professor of cultural studies at Washington university,
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4598/b7e90f468d513167230d280a5e14d2fea582.pdf)
K and R, two Bangladeshi gays in Australia had to fight almost ten years to receive political asylum status. This unusually long duration and the
asylum process itself demand a scrutiny which can be twofold: first, the
legal procedures and practices in these cases show
a pattern of racial and sexual stereotyping, especially in terms of the appearance of typical gays, in and
through foregrounding global gay discourses both by adjudicators’ attempts to fit into precedents and
the applicants’ struggle to prove themselves ‘gay enough’. But in such procedures of fulfilling requirements, there is a
blind spot that precludes consideration of the politics of visibility Bangladeshi queers must negotiate within their home countries. This blind
spot will be illustrated through the following cases. In the first case, K (32) and R (51), residents of southwest Sydney, fled Bangladesh in 1999
after being subjected to stoning, kicking and other frequent violent attacks, both verbal and physical. In
their first hearing, K and R claimed that they lived monogamously in respective heterosexual relationships for fourteen years. Later, K and R had
lived together for four years in Bangladesh. During their gay life in Bangladesh, they had experienced a variety of violent and harassing incidents
and they expressed their fear that they would encounter similar persecution if they went back. The tribunal expressed serious reservations
about the applicants’ credibility and did not believe a number of their claims of experiences of persecution. The
tribunal disbelieved
K’s evidence that he had complained to the police of harassment on the basis that it was ‘not plausible’
that he would have sought police assistance in the first place, ‘given the attitudes towards homosexuals
in Bangladesh’. While the tribunal accepted that the couple was genuinely gay and in a long-term cohabiting relationship, they did
not believe that this gay couple had any reason to face harassment in Bangladesh. On the basis of these findings,
the tribunal concluded that the applicants did not have a well-founded fear of persecution as they had
lived together for over four years without experiencing any more than minor problems with anyone
outside their own families. They lead a discreet life style and would be able to continue with the same if
they went back to their own country. The tribunal also used country evidence and found that there are
no openly gay men or lesbians in Bangladesh. It added that gay men having relationships usually do not
to live together. Public places like parks are available to have discreet male–male sex though gay
partners are likely to experience police bashing and extortion. The tribunal categorically mentioned that
men can easily continue male to male sex if they conform outwardly to social norms, most importantly
by marrying women and having children while keeping their homosexuality secret. The tribunal concluded that:
[i]t is clear that homosexuality is not accepted or condoned by society in Bangladesh and it is not possible to live openly as a homosexual in
Bangladesh. To attempt to do so would mean to face problems ranging from being disowned by one’s family and shunned by friends and
neighbours to more serious forms of harm, for example the possibility of being bashed by the police. However, Bangladeshi men can have
homosexual affairs or relationships, provided they are discreet.18 Analysis: In case 1, the
tribunal’s argument that Bangladeshi
gays can continue with homosexuality by hiding their sexual orientation is problematic in that the queer
relation in this case has been conceptualized by confining it only to sexual orientation. This assumes that
K and R would not need any social life or public culture of their own choice. Such a reduction of queer
identity to the sex act shows how the west uses homonationalism as a script to define and control
homosexuality for brown queers. Such racialized considerations are further made obvious by distorting facts in the original appeal
made by K and R: that they were openly ‘nonconforming’ as they were cohabiting as a gay couple. A localized understanding of
conformity/non-conformity would have accelerated the case in a proper direction. That understanding would have revealed that maintaining a
discreet gay relationship forever within the heterosexual spheres of family, society, and state is almost impossible in Bangladesh. There is a
constant fear of physical assault, criminalization through fatwa if homosexuals live in the remote areas, fear of seclusion from the family and
different ranges of psychological and social harassment and abuse by neighbours and acquaintances. That K and R have maintained their
relationship for four years is no guarantee that they would be able to do the same for the rest of their lives. The prescription to maintain a
discreet life is indifferent to local realities and societal norms, which often deviate from the common patterns of such socio-cultural formation
in western countries. In the Bangladeshi socio-cultural environment, it is almost impossible to lead a discreet life as social atmosphere formed
in one of the densest demographic formation necessitates close interaction between family members, neighbours, and other community
members. It is worth noting that because of the problematic approaches to the ‘discretion’ requirement applied in case of Bangladesh, one
man in a gay couple received refugee status while his partner has been denied the same.19 Worse, a subsequent tribunal told K and R that ‘you
don’t look like homosexuals’. This is
evidence of how the politics of visibility marginalizes nonwestern queers.
Even in the context of western queer formation, identifying visible markers of sexual orientation is
problematic: not all queers necessarily follow the same life style, wear distinctive dress or carry any
other fixed visible markers of their sexual identity on their bodies. The adjudicators are not so naïve as
to be ignorant of this, but the logic of visibility has still been routinely applied, and is underpinned by
their racialised perception of non-western queers, which is further reinforced by global gay discourse
and the teleological development narrative. The same tribunal also used an anonymous phone call to contest the men were
brothers, a claim later disproved by DNA testing. In deciding the asylum status, using the anonymous phone call without any requirement to
contest its reliability once again constitutes a racial discrimination against K and R. At this K and R became frustrated and in a submission they
appealed: ‘we are prepared to have an adult witness view us engaged in an act of homosexual intercourse and then attest before you to that
fact.’ This is how the demand for visible proof has been stretched to harassment and sheer absurdity in the name of undeniable evidence.
Furthermore, in a 2007 hearing, the tribunal asked K ‘if he and the second applicant have sex in the
morning’ and ‘if they used a lubricant.’ The 36-year-old K said he had been ‘too embarrassed to answer the personal questions’,
but this refusal was later used as proof he was a not a credible witness. This shows how the tribunals tend to ignore the
difficult psychological conditions brown queers experience. By asking personal questions, they
infiltrate the private sphere and deny applicants dignity, as though dignity were necessary only for
heterosexual people. The tribunals consider both honour and dignity as heteropatriarchal
prerogatives. Furthermore, questions like these are symptomatic of the pathologized queer body,
which in this case has also been hyper-sexualized. The refusal to answer embarrassing questions is not convincing proof of
their deceitfulness. It appears that adjudicators often do not consider queer asylum applicants deserving of delicate or sympathetic treatment,
even though they are often in the process of recovering from trauma caused by the stigmatization and criminalization of their sexual
orientation in their home countries. They also fear future miseries either in home or host countries, as homophobia is still endemic all over the
world. Instead of being shown a caring attitude, queer asylum applicants are verbally forced to infiltrate self-esteem or dignity as if these are
heteropatriarchal prerogatives. The questions K and R were asked were offensive. In a hearing held in 2007, an asylum tribunal asked K and R if
they had sex in the morning and if they used a lubricant. Questions like these were really offensive to K and R. Their lawyer Bruce Levet also
believed that the tribunal’s conduct was disgraceful and added ‘I was ashamed to be a lawyer.’ 20 For Levet, witnessing how a legal procedure
can be offensive and self-degrading for asylum applicants was embarrassing to say the least. According
to Levet, because K and R
had lived monogamously for 14 years and neither frequented gay bars nor taken any active part in the
gay community, they had struggled to convince the tribunals of their sexuality claims. Clearly, the ‘nexus
with group’ requirement – a reinforcement of global discourses – in this case has been shown
unfulfilled. This ignores the fact that not all gay people maintain group affiliation or visit gay bars. In
Bangladesh, for example, there are no gay bars and gays don’t openly organize because of fear of persecution. Similarly, the legal requirement
that there should be either a record of persecution or a provable threat of such persecution is sometimes difficult to fulfil. Unfortunately, this
does not mean that gays in Bangladesh are not persecuted.
AT: Institutions Good—2NC

recognizing and confronting difference is central to coalition building, and allows one
to enrich visions and more effectively combat struggles. Institutions use facile
differences to divide movements and prevent questioning of broader oppressive
structures. This coalitional politics resists homogeneity and strengthens individual
struggles, allowing for greater political potential.
Chavez, 13 – Karma, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Mexican American & Latino/a Studies @ University of Texas-Austin. Queer Migration Politics: Activist
Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, University of Illinois Press, p. 126-128 – walsh

Difference is central to coalition building. It should be wrestled with and confronted rather than denied,
destroyed, or diverted. Lorde writes, “Now we must recognize differences among women who are our
equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others’ difference to enrich our visions
and our joint struggles.” 47 As discussed in relation to the manifestos analyzed in chapter 1, the
centrality of difference to coalition work and politics generally is directly opposed to divide-and-conquer
politics. Engaging in political work does not mean that people cannot use other master’s tools to achieve
goals, but it does mean that differences should not be used to destroy community; people must discover
ways to turn them into sites of strength and empowerment. 48 As with “gray politics,” Patricia Hill
Collins notes in her explication of what Italian feminists coined as “transversal politics” that coalition
building necessitates rejecting the binary logics such as “us” and “them” that have long been central to
all kinds of oppression. 49 At the same time, such politics resist homogeneity, instead pointing toward
dialogue across differential positionings. 50 As fe minists (and others) have long argued, the best
diversion tactic is to maintain divisions, 51 and it is imperative that Wingspan and CDH work to
challenge divisive tactics that can come from the community. Kat purports, “If you’re divided by your
suffering rather than what’s causing your pain, that’s a really ingenious distraction from questioning the
system. That’s like the best diversion ever. And, you know, if you’re buying into that shit . . . you paid in
full fo r a piece of crap.” 52 The frankness of Kat’s metaphor highlights the necessity of gray politics that
confront the diversion tactic of division. One of the main reasons that both CDH and Wingspan can
coalesce is because they publicly and privately challenge divisions by redirecting diversions. In part,
confronting such tactics occurs through the construction of the rationale for their coalition, which
reframes differences as similarities. But resisting diversion tactics also occurs in activists’ micro-
practices. One main way that each group challenges these tactics is by promoting the belief that rather
than diluting one’s struggle by acknowledging someone else’s struggle, joining another’s struggle
strengthens one’s own. This is not to suggest that either group is without its share of community
members (and perhaps even activists/volunteers) who privately believe in the divisions among suffering
communities and that joining another weakens one’s own. For example, some of those in the migrant
and Latin@ communities CDH represents feel uncomfortable thinking of themselves in community with
queer people. Usually these instances that CDH activists report emerge from a very narrow definition of
who counts as part of the community. As a result, CDH activists very often attempt to redefine the
community so that its rich diversity shows through. Kat, for example, happened to mention to a Latino
friend that she was going to write the Tucson Weekly commentary with Cathy, and she relates the
following about his reaction: He was, like, “No, don’t. Don’t do that, come on, what are you doing? Don’t
do that, don’t go with them, what the hell are you doing?” And I was so shocked because I would never
have thought of him as a homophobic person, but I couldn’t think of any other way to identify it when
he was thinking, like, “Why are you doing that, don’t do that to us,” and I was thinking, Who are you?
What do you mean us? What’s an “us”? And in his mind, LGBT people are in this little box, and he
doesn’t realize that they cross over all these other things—the poverty issue, the race issue, the class
issue—all there, and you can’t take that out. 53 Kat’s example indicates how queer people can be
completely removed from the discourse of what it means to be Latin@ or migrant. Feminists such as
María Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa have similarly argued how nationalist logics within such
communities function to erase queer belonging. Kat went on to say, “It’s close-minded, but I’m willing to
challenge that within my own people—like tell him, you know what, that’s stupid of you, what the hell
are you talking about?” Kat’s example not only demonstrates the problems with divisive thinking, but it
also shows how she directly confronted her friend and tried to redefine who counts as a part of “us.”
Alexis affirms this definitional narrowness among some community members when she notes that there
is “a widespread ignorance in the migrant community about LGBT issues, about homophobia, how that
impacts people. There’s a lot of silence around that. And likewise, in [the] LGBT community, there’s a lot
of ignorance again of issues, because everyone’s being subject to the same racist, homophobic media
and school system.” 54 Alexis and Kat both contend that people are raised in relation to the same racist
and homophobic discourse, so it is not surprising that people have these views of one another. Kat’s
questioning of “What’s an ‘us’?” however, demonstrates her commitment to developing a coalitional
subjectivity. It shows how she wants to talk about herself and her identity as inextricably bound to
others with whom she may be in coalition at the same time that they may be dissimilar. Kat’s
questioning pushes her friend and others around her to challenge how people understand themselves
and how they construct and treat each other. These tactics are imperfect, but the activists’ commitment
to challenging divisiveness provides an opportunity for different constructions of queers, migrants, and
discourses of race, gender, and sexuality more generally. Though the impacts may be minimal, as a
queer person of color who functioned for a short time as a liaison between CDH and Wingspan, I believe
the importance of redefining belonging through the confrontation of diversions is difficult to overstate.
Such tactics made me feel like a valued activist. They also afforded me the confidence to feel as though I
belonged in CDH and to speak publicly to Wingspan and others about the seriousness of CDH’s
commitment to coalescing with Wingspan and queer rights and justice more generally. W orking to
sustain the belief in interlocking struggles through privilege checking and confronting diversions is
essential to the development of coalitional subjectivities. 55 A coalitional subjectivity that is always
already in relation undoubtedly furthers the ability to respond to the call of the ethical, which values
another on her terms. Her terms will never become another’s terms, but her terms are now woven with
and productive of one’s own. Even as activists undoubtedly fail at always responding to the call of the
ethical, the public commitment continues to position that call as an expectation and desired objective.
Link
Link—Anti-Intersectionality

Citizenship demands anti-intersectional logics of division that sustain anti-Blackness,


settlerism, and anti-queer violence. Our uncompromising critique refuses restorative
visions and imagines a radical new politics opening space for new analysis that torches
citizenship’s foundations
Hill, 18 – Annie, Assistant Professor in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies @ University of
Minnesota. “Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative by Amy L. Brandzel (review)” QED: A
Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 2018, p. Project Muse – klab/br

The cover of Amy L. Brandzel's Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative bears a spray-painted
image of the Statue of Liberty, head in hands and without the famous torch meant to enlighten the
world. The cover captures Brandzel's argument against the promise represented by the Statue of Liberty
to extend freedom to all citizens of the United States. After the Civil War, Lady Liberty was erected,
standing on a broken chain, to symbolize that universal freedom could become a reality and oppression
could be overcome. If book covers can communicate the tenor of a text, then Against Citizenship
delivers on its promise to draw searing illustrations of U.S. citizenship built not on progressive waves of
inclusion, but on the perpetual exclusion of non-normative groups.

A must-read for scholars and students interrogating U.S. policies and power, Against Citizenship
presents three case studies to examine how the United States uses anti-intersectional logics to divide
and concretize identities and identity politics. Focusing on hate crime legislation, same-sex marriage,
and Native Hawaiian sovereignty, Brandzel argues that inclusion into citizenship secures some rights for
nonnormative groups, but requires anti-intersectional trade-offs that set categories of race, gender,
indigeneity, and sexuality in opposition to each other (34). According to Brandzel, U.S. citizenship enacts
a "perpetual refusal to allow for, consider, or acknowledge the mutuality and contingency of these
categories of difference" and requires "challenges to the norms of citizenship be articulated in simple,
single axis formulations" (4–5). Thus, Brandzel tracks anti-intersectional logics and strategies across
three chapters to show how single axis formulations undermine intersectional identities and shore up
staggered inclusion as the bedrock of U.S. citizenship. Against Citizenship provides the analysis we now
need to fight the spike in hate crimes, attacks on reproductive rights, the immigrant travel ban, and so
much more under President Donald Trump. For example, undergraduates in my classes, who claimed to
be afraid or "allergic" to [End Page 151] theory, readily drew on Brandzel's concept of "anti-
intersectionality" to grapple with the killing of nine black people in a Charleston church, discriminatory
bathroom bills, and the normalization of sexual violence in this time of nostalgic rhetoric to "Make
America Great Again."

Against Citizenship's introduction announces its central thesis that U.S. citizenship is founded on and
continues to operate as a normativizing project and the "process of demanding inclusion reproduces
and extends the violent subjugations of exclusion" (15). To support these claims, chapter 1 details how
hate crime legislation recognized violence based on race or sexual orientation, but initially excluded the
category of gender because its inclusion risked flooding the system with sexual violence cases. This anti-
intersectional logic frames homophobic violence as exceptional and warranting legal intervention, yet
violence against women is seen as not exceptional enough to meet the standard of a "hate crime."
Furthering their inquiry into how one category of difference can be deployed to dismiss another,
Brandzel turns to governmental debates on hate crime and the depiction of violence against African
Americans as bygone and benchmark, at once invoking a narrative of racial progress and referencing
blacks as America's emblematic hated group. This anti-intersectional logic frames violence against gays
and lesbians as a contemporary problem, whereas racist violence becomes a relict that only occasionally
rises again. Thus, Brandzel contends, hate crime legislation protects some groups, but also reproduces
the normative violence of citizenship: groups are forced to compete for protection and the state-as-
protector maintains a "dangerous discontinuum" that detaches hate crime from state violence against
people it is called upon to protect (28). These anti-intersectional trade-offs constitute U.S. citizenship,
ensuring its endurance and enabling the state to claim the inclusion of nonnormative groups.

The second chapter focuses on same-sex marriage and anti-intersectional anxiety that gender, sex, and
sexuality are not divisible categories the state can control. As a mechanism for managing citizenship,
marriage arranges categories of difference by aligning people with each other and the state. In United
States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry, the Supreme Court supported same-sex marriage rights
and effected "the legalized absorption of sexual difference, here gay and lesbian coupledom, into
heteronormative, class-based, racialized citizenship" (143). Referencing the earlier error of racial
segregation (as if its de jure demise erases its de facto endurance), the Windsor decision places racial
discrimination in the past and gay rights are presented as evidence of progressive inclusion. Inclusion of
same-sex unions did not alter marriage in the way proponents of "family values" feared because the
value of family remained tied to the state's determination of which relationships matter. Brandzel
argues that [End Page 152] same-sex marriage rights were secured through "the past tensing of
racialized discrimination and settler colonialism and the alignment of gay and lesbian relationships with
heteronormative reproductive futurity" (143).

Chapter 3 focuses on the Supreme Court decision in Rice v. Cayetano to explicate how narratives of
Hawaiian history construct an origin story that promotes "the potential of law and multicultural liberal
democracy as a means for redemption" from its white settler past (113). For Brandzel, the case pivots on
two anti-intersectional points: whether Native Hawaiians' exclusive voting rights on sovereignty
constitute discrimination against white Hawaiians and whether the state should correct racial
discrimination or settler colonialism, but never both. The Supreme Court responds by protecting the civil
rights of whites and settler colonialism "is circumscribed to the past and assuaged in the multicultural
present and future" (113). Rice v. Cayetano enacts a form of "colorblind colonialism" that obscures how
citizenship advances and apologizes for settlement in colonial nation-states (109). This refusal to
recognize racism and Native Hawaiian racialization carries on colonialism as birthright citizenship
expands settlement and expropriates indigenous land and sovereignty.

Brandzel's uncompromising critique may be attacked as offering no alternatives to the promise of


citizenship. Yet the conclusion turns to diverse examples of political activism that challenge the
normative logics of U.S. culture and politics. Brandzel imagines a politics that refuses "futurity-as-
inclusion as well as retroactive and restorative political visions of the past, in order to enact a
coalitional, intersectional, and decolonial politics in and of the present" (138). Against Citizenship asks
us to direct energies away from single-issue activism toward a politics of the present that joins the
"prison abolitionist movement, divestment organizing against border militarizations, queer economic
justice work, decolonial activisms against border patrol violence, migrant activisms in defense of
Indigenous sovereignties, Black-led coalitions against police assassinations, queer youth of color
reclaiming access to public spaces, and radical feminists of color-led organizing against violence" (146).
This list calls readers to coalitional, intersectional, decolonial work in the making and Brandzel pinpoints
connections across different types of political activism and, just as important, the urgency of the present
moment.

Against Citizenship documents how single axis formulations determine who receives hate crime
protections, the right to marry, and voting rights. The book opens space for politics that do not assume
citizenship's logic and legitimacy and jettisons the idea that fractional inclusion fulfills the promise of
freedom. Instead of offering scholarship that attempts to salvage or redeem citizenship, Brandzel's
trenchant analysis mobilizes intersectional theory, queer critique, and [End Page 153] indigenous studies
to chip away at citizenship's foundations and torch its anti-intersectional frames. [End Page 154]

Prioritize the kritik’s intersectional analysis – only by accounting for the interaction of
complex identities and their roles in shaping oppression can we create appropriate
macro- and micro-political solutionary frameworks.
Terriquez et al. 18 [Veronica, Tizoc Brenes, Abdiel Lopez, “Intersectionality as a multipurpose
collective action frame: The case of the undocumented youth movement”,
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1468796817752558, published 2018, accessed 06/24/18]
BBro

- makes claims that intersectionality is key to access political change for people who cannot otherwise
access political change.

- makes claims that minorities accessing political change is possible in international framework.

- also says that understanding intersectionality is key to immigrant rights.

- I’m still not sure if this is an alt card or a framework card, but it’s an uber-wombo-combo that says that
the alt probably solves and also takes out affs that try to help minorities who cannot access the political.

- I would probably read this as a framing card after having read the Chavez evidence.

*edited for g-lang*

Intersectionality theory is an analytic framework and set of social practices that involve the
convergences of identities, complexity, and power (Hancock, 2016). While rooted in women of color’s intellectual production
and activism in the 1960s and 1970s, academics helped formally coin the term ‘intersectionality’ in the 1990s (Collins and Bilge, 2016). There
are many intersectional theories and practices, but they all share in common a conceptualization of the
relationships among categories of difference and insist that these categories cannot meaningfully
operate separately from each other. In short, intersectionality highlights the varying ways in which
overlapping social identity markers combine to shape different forms of social marginalization or
privilege (Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). It also envisions social change efforts as requiring attention to
multiple layers of social inequality. Intersectionality can function as a collective action frame that shapes
social movement dynamics. Goffman (1974) initially developed the concept of the frame as representing a ‘schemata of
interpretation’ that enables individuals to ‘locate, perceive, identify, and label’ experiences and events (p. 21). Building on this earlier work,
Snow and Benford (1992) explain that frames
simplify and condense ‘the “world out there” by selectively
punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of actions within
one’s present or past environment’ (p. 137). Furthermore, Snow and Benford explain that collective action frames
enable individuals to weave together diverse and sometimes disparate threads of information so that they
can become meaningfully interconnected and clearly articulated. In this regard, intersectionality theory offers adherents a
roadmap for articulating and drawing connections among various systems of oppression. According to Benford
and Snow (2000), frames can perform ‘diagnostic,’ ‘motivational,’ and ‘prognostic’ tasks to varying degrees (p.
615). Frames are diagnostic when they develop among activists a shared understanding of some problematic or injustice that needs to be
changed. They can serve a motivational purpose, or a ‘call to arms’ that inspires individuals to take
collective action. Frames can also be prognostic by articulating the strategies by which problems can be
addressed. In other words, collective action frames can help build consensus around what type of action is
necessary. Importantly, frames accomplish these interrelated tasks unevenly (Gerhards and Rucht, 1992). In this paper, we show that,
within the context of the immigrant rights movement, intersectional frames performed these three
tasks to varying degrees. Intersectionality offers a diagnostic framing by exposing different systems of
oppression, illuminating their interaction, and outlining how multiple identities relate to these oppressions. For example, within the
immigrant youth movement, young people who identify as [Latinx] might utilize intersectionality to
make sense of how a historical legacy of racism, contemporary institutionalized racism, and everyday racial microaggressions
connect with other aspects of their identities to constrain their life chances. Given that many [Latinx]
undocumented immigrants arrive to the U.S. with limited economic and human capital, intersectionality theory may help them
understand how capitalism and their class background also limit the economic resources at their
disposal. Further, it can help them comprehend how their undocumented status blocks economic mobility
options, excludes them from social services, puts them at risk for detention and deportation, and sometimes forces them and their families
to live in the shadows (Donato and Armenta, 2011). Adding to this, an intersectional diagnostic frame can heighten
awareness of how undocumented youths’ gender identities interact with their other identities to
circumscribe their self-expression, and to determine their risk of and exposure to different forms of violence. This diagnostic
framing can also aid activists in thinking about how an LGBTQ identity adds another layer of challenges.
LGBTQ immigrant activists may encounter discrimination from the larger LGBTQ White population (Iban˜ez
et al., 2009; Moore, 2010), exclusion from their own ethnic communities (Acosta, 2013; Ocampo, 2012), greater economic
precarity (Decena, 2008), an increased risk of deportation if their families and communities reject them (Terriquez, 2015), and
marginalization by immigrant rights groups tied to conservative religious organizations (Yukich, 2013). In
addition to prompting undocumented activists to diagnose the many hardships they experience, the concept of intersectionality
can also enable activists to understand their complex identities as a resource. As such, the diagnostic task
of intersectionality corresponds with its motivational and prognostic tasks of inspiring and guiding action
on behalf of the multiple identity groups of which activists are a part. As social movement research has long
demonstrated, the ways in which individuals make sense of their identities can determine their personal investment in and the types of roles
they play within a social movement (Polletta and Jasper, 2001). More specifically, an
awareness of systemic injustice inspires
resistance or a deep desire to collectively challenge domination and subordination (Mansbridge, 2001; Morris
and Braine, 2001). A recognition of multiple oppressions promotes the development of what can be
considered an intersectional consciousness (Frederick, 2010; Terriquez, 2015) in which individuals draw upon
more than one identity to motivate their activism. For example, women of color activists have been inspired to promote
gender equity while also demonstrating a commitment to fighting racism, labor exploitation, xenophobia, or other oppressive forces (Chun et
al., 2013; Collins and Bilge, 2016; Combahee River Collective, 1993; Milkman and Terriquez, 2012; Moraga and Anzaldua, 1983). As both a
theory and a praxis (Collins and Bilge, 2016; Hancock, 2016), an
intersectional prognostic frame can outline strategies for
both internal organizational and broader external structural changes. After all, scholars who have contributed to the
development of this concept call for political and social action that addresses multiple levels of marginalization (Collins and Bilge, 2016). For
example, in her classic essay examining violence against women of color, Crenshaw (1991) argues that reforms must not only focus on
addressing victims’ needs as women; they must also address poverty, lack of job skills, child care needs, and racially discriminatory housing
practices. Only
by accounting for multiple layers of discrimination and social inequality, as well as the
unequal and contextual distribution of privilege, can activists create transformative political solutions.
Intersectionality as a prognostic frame requires attention to the multiplicity of oppressions, and thus can define praxis in a range of ways. As a
prognostic frame, intersectionality
can inform the internal practices of organizations so that they operate as
inclusive spaces for members who occupy different marginalized identity categories. For example, prior research
indicates that social movement organizations can engage in ‘multi-identity work’ to create welcoming environments and buy-in from members
who occupy different social locations (Ward, 2008). Moreover, organizations may adopt various strategies to attend to the needs of
participants’ multiple identities through diversity trainings, separate spaces for specific identity groups, structures that ensure diverse and
horizontal forms of leaderships, cultural celebrations, and other activities (Chun et al., 2013; Clay, 2012; Kurtz, 2002; Pulido, 1996).
Intersectional framing may therefore provide guidance for how organizations can incorporate members’
diverse identities and can push for a more inclusive, community-driven action agenda. An intersectional
prognostic frame may also prompt activists to form coalitions in order to address several structures of
oppression at once (Collins and Bilge, 2016; Hancock, 2016; Moraga and Anzaldua, 1983). For example, the Combahee River Collective
(1993) called for strategies that were both anti-racist and antisexist in their struggles around abortion rights, domestic violence, sexual assault,
and health care. As feminists and lesbians, they specifically resisted fractionalization from Black men and worked with them to collectively fight
racism as they simultaneously challenged Black men’s sexism. Similarly, Sandoval (1991) notes how beginning
in the 1970s women
of color activists built coalitions across movements by acknowledging and attending to differences in
language, culture, ethnicity, race, and gender. Accordingly, intersectionality lends itself to addressing
different configurations of power and inequality. In sum, activists can deploy intersectionality as an
interpretive schema to achieve different ends. As a collective action framework, it can help adherents
understand interlocking systems of inequality, while also inspire and guide action to address multiple
forms of inequality. Because of its attention to multiple forms of oppression, it is likely to resonate with groups
encountering marginality based on more than one social identity.
Link—Asylum

The asylum process is complicit in imperialist domination – in order to be granted


protection, the queer migrant must tell of their own culture, downplaying the role of
colonialism in the creation of oppression and inequality. The affirmative becomes
another step in the fortification of the myth of American exceptionalism.
Cantú et al. 05 [Lionel, Eithne Luibheid, Alexandra Minna Stern, “Well Founded Fear: Political Asylum
and the Boundaries of Sexual Identity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands”,
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/32277, accessed 06/24/18] BBro

- asylum process constructs the U.S. as powerful and the ethnicized immigrant as weak

- forcing asylum seekers to frame their persecution around culture ignores the role the United States has
played in shaping their oppression – we think that allowing people to engage in our culture will fix them,
that’s probably colonialist as hell

- divorcing culture from the political economy sucks

- the middle section is not really specific to Mexico which makes it a pretty good link, but since it talks a
lot about asylum for Mexican queer immigrants, the first card is probably better.

For an asylum petitioner from Mexico to prove that he is immutably gay, and has been persecuted as a result, is an
undertaking fraught with contradictions. Much anthropological and sociological research, especially from the
19708 and 19805, argued that gay identity as understood in the mainstream U.S. sense did not exist in
Mexico. This literature, which continues to be referred to in asylum hearings today, certainly creates difficulties for
petitioners who must establish that they are essentially gay. According to scholars, the Mexican sex/gender
system is such that only men who assume the "feminized" position during sex with other men are
stigmatized as homosexual. Men who assume the "active" position can retain their masculinity and
heterosexual status. According to this schema, the quintessential Mexican gay asylum applicant is therefore an
effeminate man. There can be no doubt that effeminate men face discrimination and persecution that may reach life-threatening levels,
and their asylum applications should receive the most serious consideration.12 But the difficulties with the use of these
accounts of the Mexican sex/gender system in asylum hearings are that they often reinforce racist and
colonialist imagery and relations. Moreover, they may restrict asylum possibilities for those who do not
conform to the image of the effeminate gay man To understand how the reinscription of racism and colonialism occurs, one
must realize that asylum hearings are, as Sherene Razack says "encounter[s] between the powerful and the
powerless, and the powerful are always from the First World and mostly white, while the powerless are
from the Third World and nearly always racialized or ethnicized." The asylum process constructs Third
World asylum seekers "as either unworthy claimants or as supplicants begging to be saved from the
tyranny of their own cultures, communities, and men."13 To gain asylum, Third World supplicants must paint
their countries in racialist, colonialist terms, while disavowing the United States' role in contributing to
the conditions that they fled. If the U.S. government decides to "save" the supplicant by granting asylum, this easily reaffirms the
notion of the United States as a land of liberty and a bastion of progress. Cantu particularly noted that when persecution suffered by
applicants is attributed to "culture," understood in a reified manner that divorces it from other variables such as race, gender, class,
globalization, neocolonial relationships, and unequal U.S.-Mexico ties, these colonialist effects become realized. "Mexican
culture" becomes the prism through which the individual is understood and the sole source of problems
and repression in Mexico. Neocolonialism, economic exploitation, and other issues become irrelevant. In the cases
for which Cantu served as an expert witness, narratives of the Mexican sex/gender system, reduced to a
manifestation of "culture" conceived in ahistorical terms, were consistently produced. In those cases, the courts
heavily relied on reports written by Andrew Reding, director of the Americas Project of the World Policy Institute and
associate editor of Pacific News Service. Reding has published a series of reports about gays in Mexico: Democracy and Human Rights in Mexico
(!995); Mexico: Treatment of Homosexuals (1997); and Mexico: Update on the Treatment of Homosexuals (1999). Significantly, this last report
is part of a Question and Answer Series distributed to asylum officials to assist them in adjudicating asylum claims.14 The report offers an
analysis of the legal, political, cultural, and historical factors shaping the lives of gays in Mexico. Reding's reports maybe strategic, in the sense
of providing clear-cut explanations of cultural difference and oppression that resonate effectively within the logic of the legal system, but some
of their implications are troubling. Relying on prior scholarship, Reding
restates the argument that it is not all men who
have sex with men, but instead men who assume the feminized role who are stigmatized and
persecuted for being gay. He attributes their persecution to a "dominant cultural ideal of hypermasculinity,"
which he does not situate in material context, but rather treats as a timeless and hermetically sealed mainstream Mexican cultural
characteristic.15 According to Reding, "the potential for violence against homosexuals, especially effeminate men
and transvestites, is inherent in the culture of machismo" (emphasis added).16 In the report, culture is explicitly
separated from the political and legal realms, areas where significant gains have been made for gays,
Reding claims.17 This eviscerated model of Mexican culture is depicted as existing in a temporal sequence
that is anterior to mainstream U.S. culture. For instance, he describes "the strong attachments most Mexicans feel to their
families" as "comparable to those that prevailed in the United States a century ago."18 Reding also suggests that "exposure" to
U.S. culture can help to ameliorate "negative" tendencies in Mexican culture. For example, "with Mexican culture
highly resistant to change from within, the primary force for change is coming from international contact—primarily the influence of U.S.
culture."19 In these ways, the
United States is discursively constructed as enlightened, progressive, separate
from Mexico, and positioned to save Mexican gay men from "the tyranny of their [timeless] cultures,
communities, and men."20 Mexico, by contrast, emerges as backward and oppressive, as evinced by its sex/gender
system and treatment of effeminate men. In fairness, Reding does acknowledge that in terms of certain political and legal issues, Mexico is in
advance of the United States in providing for gays and lesbians.21 But since "culture" remains cordoned off from law and politics, these facts do
not alter his fundamental narrative of the United States as the savior of feminized brown men who are persecuted by macho men, specifically,
and Mexican sex/gender systems, generally, all of which are conceived as manifestations of some sort of essentialized Mexican culture. The
role of the United States in materially contributing to conditions in Mexico—including sex/gender
conditions as these interact with class and race—is not discussed. Neither is the fact that lesbians and
gays in the United States face significant discrimination and repression—and that Mexican gay
immigrants in the United States must deal with homophobia, racism, and often severe economic
exploitation and language barriers. As Cantu's research showed, "in their attempts to escape from one form of bigotry
[homophobia], most of the [immigrant] Mexican men I interviewed discovered that not only had they not entirely escaped it but they now
faced another [racism] ,"22 Thus, narratives
about Mexican culture generally, and about the treatment of gay
men specifically, which are produced in the course of asylum hearings, variously draw on and reiterate
racialist, colonialist imagery, particularly through the role that is attributed to "culture." This approach stands in
marked contrast to the ways that white middle-class gay sexuality tends to be understood. As Cantu writes, Among U.S. gay and lesbian
scholars in the late twentieth century, "gay" identities were understood as the socially constructed results of modernization This view of
homosexuality stood in stark contrast to that of less developed countries. Traditional anthropological explanations of homosexuality point [] to
"culture" to explain differences in how homosexuality was defined in "other," that is, non-Western, societies. Culture
becomes the
mechanism that reified difference and reproduced the imagined distance of "the others" in academic
discourse itself.... Why should our understanding of sexual identities in the developing world give
primacy to culture and divorce it from political economy?23 The grounding of Mexican homosexuality in a model of
"culture" that is divorced from social, economic, and political variables has multiple material consequences, including ignoring or naturalizing
inequality in relations with Latin America and discrimination toward Latinos in the United States.24 Moreover, this exclusive focus on
"culture" vis-a-vis sexuality both exoticizes and eroticizes Mexicans, an aspect of U.S.-Mexican relations that Cantu had
explored in his research on queer tourism in Mexico and its representation in the United States.25
Link—Desirable Categories

Discourse on immigration divides immigrants into the good and the bad. The good;
potential workers who follows the heteronormative family, and the bad; those
outside the “American way”.
Faucette 2017 (Avory, “Queering Immigration”, radicallyqueer.wordpress.com, queer feminist
activist, writer, and public speaker)

We get trapped in this narrative of the “good immigrant,” the “just like us” family with children escaping
a horrific situation in a country that is unquestionably “worse” than the good ole U.S. of A. This narrative
assumes that the immigrant is ready to fully renounce their country of origin, that they are in love with the idea of their new country, that
they will contribute fully to our capitalist system and that they are pure as the driven snow. The “good
immigrant” is often a child or a woman (hardly differentiated), definitely without criminal background,
preferably Christian and capitalist, but at least fitting into the norms of those value systems. In contrast are
the “bad eggs”—those with any criminal history whatsoever, single men, sex workers, activists, anyone with an
ideology outside the Amerikan way, etc. These “bad immigrants” are raced and classed, they are
“stealing our jobs,” “taking advantage of welfare,” etc. We talk about the bad immigrant the way we talk
about queers who refuse traditional family structures and are openly sexual, the way we talk about
Black U.S. citizens who can’t escape generational poverty (and especially Black women). In fact, this is not a
“nation of immigrants.” First and foremost, it’s a nation of settler colonialism. Weirdly, while this narrative excludes specific
stories, creating a group of “good immigrants” who “deserve” our charity and a path to entry, it also
paints a nation-building picture where “everyone was once an immigrant.” Even liberals in favor of more
lenience in accepting those at the margins of the “good immigrant” story tend to use the “everyone was
once an immigrant” argument to pull recent immigrants into the Amerikan story. Well, nope. In fact, this is not a
“nation of immigrants.” First and foremost, it’s a nation of settler colonialism. Those who did immigrate here voluntarily were not simply
immigrants, they were settlers. All
of us whose ancestors settled this country, whether recently or in the distant
past, are participating in active genocide. The “everyone was once an immigrant” narrative erases
Native people and their stories, as well as their ongoing valid claim to North American land. This
narrative also erases slavery, and the fact that many U.S. citizens’ ancestors arrived via forced migration,
not immigration. It ignores the fact that the structural barriers Black folks currently face in U.S. society have their roots in this history. It
also ignores present day and more recent trafficking, as well as transnational adoption—not everyone who comes to this country comes here
voluntarily.
Even those who do immigrate voluntarily often have a more complicated story. Refugees and
other immigrants may want to stay in their homeland, but be unable to do so, or may at least have a
more complex relationship to the U.S. than a simple whitewashed story suggests. There is No Legitimate U.S.
State image of a fist holding barbed wire reads When thinking about immigration, and in particular about the legacy of settler colonialism, I
can’t help but think about how problematic the very concept of “the state” is. Immigration rhetoric tends to focus either on protecting “our
state” or on enhancing it.
Conservatives speak of policing borders to keep bad elements out, and liberals talk
about the benefits additional workers bring to the capitalist machine. But either way, the state is key. To queer
immigration, we need to question whether there is any such thing as a legitimate U.S. state in the first place. I would argue that the answer is
clearly “no.” There is no such thing as a progressive argument for protecting this poisoned beast. Instead, we need to recognize that the state is
the problem. Even if you believe that a state could be a legitimate structure at all (and I’m not sure that I do), it’s clear that the U.S. is an
illegitimate one built on broken treaties, land theft, genocide, and slave labor. There is no such thing as a progressive argument for protecting
this poisoned beast. Instead, we need to recognize that the state is the problem. International law defines state sovereignty through
international recognition by existing states—those in power, in other words, get to decide who stays in power. Even if many states do recognize
a particular state, if the most powerful ones don’t, it’s very difficult for the state in question to get a foothold. We’ve seen the consequences of
this system with Palestine and with worldwide indigenous populations’ claims for sovereignty. So when politicians argue for the sanctity of
borders based on the concept of state sovereignty, I’d like to know why we should care about sovereignty in the first place. In fact,
international law does recognize this tension. Some of the key principles of international human rights—rights that are sacred and exist beyond
any state authority or even in the absence of any recognition at all—include self-determination, non-discrimination, and freedom of movement.
But in practice, these rights are rarely enforced when they come up against state power.
Queering immigration includes fighting
for these rights beyond state claims to sovereignty, and seeing border control as a threat to our innate
rights as humans. State sovereignty is an inherently problematic concept, and even more so given the specific colonial context in which
the U.S. rose to power. Queer Immigration, Queer Families drawing of a person with pink skin and multicolored butterfly wings reading art by
undocuqueer Julio Salgado One final thought I have is about the role of the family in immigration policy. I’ve talked about
queering so far as a lens or worldview that’s about smashing problematic foundational concepts, but here I want to turn to a topic more readily
recognized as “queer.” Because, of course, queer-identified people immigrate. And immigration rhetoric is
often about families—not only are heteronormative family structures the only ones that get “good
immigrant” status, but “good immigrants” are also presumed to follow certain gender and relationship
norms. When conservatives talk about anchor babies and overpopulation, they’re spreading a fear of
any sort of family structure beyond the white nuclear family. Extended families, communal care
structures, immigrants with disabilities migrating to be in community with others who can share
support, and queer immigrants are all a threat to the white heteronormative ideal. Families are
expected to assimilate to the Amerikan way of life, and to adopt white gender norms. Women in hijab,
folks whose gender doesn’t fit along a legible-to-white-peopl/e binary, and transnational adoptees who
resist total cultural assimilation are all suspect. I think this is fairly obviously bullshit. Migration requires support, and families
don’t look the same for everyone. This is the same rhetoric used to silence U.S.-born queers, polyamorous folk,
and people of color living in large extended family structures. This rhetoric looks familiar to anyone who’s been
following queer politics over the last ten years, as Democrats fell in line behind the “just like you” idea of gay marriage
and adoption but refused to support provisions that would benefit sex workers, trans people of color,
those with disabilities who’d been rejected by families of origin, and queer homeless youth. There’s an
acceptable queer just like there’s an acceptable immigrant. Hopefully, the opportunity for solidarity and organizing across
lines of difference is obvious here. I’d love to hear others’ thoughts about the ideas expressed in this post. What are some more ideas for
queering immigration? How can we work in solidarity to resist states and borders, and particularly U.S.-driven genocide? How can queers,
immigrants, Natives, folks with disabilities, and other communities work together in community organizing? Let’s tear this shit down one brick
at a time.
Link—Domestic Violence

Inclusionary domestic violence protections fail to account for non-normative spousal


violence
Murphy, 95 (Nancy E. Murphy, Queer Justice: Equal Protection for Victims of Same-Sex
Domestic Violence, 30 Val. U. L. Rev. 335 (1995). Available at:
http://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr/vol30/iss1/7 pgs. 336-339) AJN

These two cases are dramatic and their tragic endings extreme. They accurately reflect, however,
the significant disparity in legal and social responses to domestic abuse involving same sex couples
and similar cases involving heterosexual couples. If Konerak Sinthasomphone had been a young
woman, the Milwaukee police would have responded very differently, and five of Jeffrey
Dahmer's victims might have been spared.9 If Laura Venable's abusive partner had been male,
programs for assistance to battered women would have granted her readier access, and she
might have survived.' As this Note will show, victims of same-sex domestic violence do not
receive equal protection under the laws." Domestic violence involves both cultural and legal
concerns. 2 Abuse that occurs between intimate partners not only affects the individuals involved, but
has adverse effects on society as a whole. 3 Domestic violence can occur within households of any
racial, religious, ethnic, or socio-economic composition. 4 Although public awareness of
domestic violence has increased dramatically since the 1960s, it remains an often-
misunderstood phenomenon. 5 Legislatures have only recently begun to act on the problem of
domestic violence in our society.' However, legislative attempts to provide protection to victims of
domestic abuse have failed to the extent that they deny protection to certain segments of our society,
especially victims of abuse at the hands of a same-sex partner. 17 The form of domestic violence
that most readily comes to mind is that which occurs in an opposite-sex relationship where the
male is the abuser and the female is the victim.' 8 Because of the prevailing patterns of sexual
power in our society, 9 this relationship is in fact the one in which abuse most frequently occurs.'
In the United States each year, the number of women abused by past or present male partners
has been estimated to range from 1.8 million2' to four million.' Several explanations for the
disparity in these figures have been offered: the use of varying definitions of domestic violence,'
a general pattern of underreporting, u surveys that inadequately represent the experience of
disadvantaged women,2 and the failure of medical personnel to identify domestic violence as
the cause of injuries.' Studies show that gay men and lesbians are victimized by abusive partners
at rates proportionately comparable to those found among opposite-sex couples.' This Note will
demonstrate that domestic violeuce between same-sex couples is as serious a problem as
domestic violence between opposite-sex couples, but that present statutes provide victims of
same-sex violence with less legal protection, thus raising significant equal protection concerns .
Legitimate grounds exist for extending protection to victims of same-sex domestic violence and
this Note will propose model legislation that does so. Section II discusses the problem of
domestic violence within same-sex relationships.' Section m argues that current domestic
violence legislation violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment." Section
IV explains the policy considerations behind domestic violence legislation which distinguish it
from statutes regarding homosexual sodomy.' Finally, Section V contains model legislation that
would provide equal protection to all victims of domestic violence regardless of sexual
orientation.3
Link—Family (General)

The discourse surrounding all immigration reform is inextricably linked to assumptive


forms of family ideation
Lee 15 (Catherine, Associate Professor in Sociology and Faculty Associate at the Institute for Health and
the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University, “Family Reunification and the Limits of
Immigration Reform: Impact and Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act”, Sociological Forum, Vol. 30, No.
S1, June 2015, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/socf.12176)//JSL

Immigration policymaking confronts directly the question of which newcomers should be allowed to
enter and to join the nation. How do immigration stakeholders grapple with change and new challenges
that potential immigrants engender? They make sense and generate ideas and rationale for action by
engaging in family ideation—conceptualization of what family means, constitutes, and features in
terms of its idealized characteristics. I draw from the large and growing literature on narrative analysis and storytelling and show
that we can better understand how ideas shape opportunities for social and political change (Ewick and Silbey 1995; Franzosi 1998; Ingram and
Schneider 2005; Jasper 1997; Lakoff 2004; Newton 2008; Polletta 2006; Stone 1989). By
invoking family, politicians tell a story
about who we are, how we are related, and what roles we play or functions we fulfill. Stories of
relatedness or connection and claims about who among us is indeed "like one of the family" help to
confer both privileges and responsibilities (Collins 2001). Family is layered with values and assumptions and
makes available the building blocks for meaning construction. It provides a ready set of symbols and
reference points, allowing actors to use family as a metaphor or synecdoche for related kinship
constructs such as race or nation (Carsten 2002; Schneider 1977, 1980). Family can also serve as a frame for
interpreting how such structures operate (Collins 1998; C. Lee 2013). How actors talk about family—how they
engage in family ideation—creates opportunities for change by introducing ideas. In this sense, family
ideation in particular and an ideational approach more generally can illustrate the process of
immigration policymaking. Immigration

stakeholders talk about family as a form of strategy to convince through rhetoric, provide rationale for
a stated position, and make sense of new or unfamiliar conditions for themselves and their audience.
Sometimes, this created opportunities for family reunification for otherwise racially ineligible individuals during the exclusion era. During the
1960s, it provided a method for introducing new interpretations of immigrants and immigration that made the call for reform more urgent and
necessary.
Link—Family (Reunification)

The concept of ‘family reunification’ is founded entirely on the gendered ideation of


such families
Lee 15 (Catherine, Associate Professor in Sociology and Faculty Associate at the Institute for Health and
the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University, “Family Reunification and the Limits of
Immigration Reform: Impact and Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act”, Sociological Forum, Vol. 30, No.
S1, June 2015, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/socf.12176)//JSL
In the rest of the article, I provide evidence of family reunification prior to the Hart-Celler Act during the exclusion era from the mid-1800s
through the 1920s when national origins policy was legislated. I show that family
reunification existed for otherwise racially
undesirable immigrant groups, because gendered notions of family provided liminal space for some
individuals who possessed appropriate gender and class characteristics. These family unity
opportunities, however, resulted from efforts at immigrant exclusion, illustrating the point that family
reunification can be part of exclusionary processes. To demonstrate further how and why family reunification is not
necessarily emblematic of liberal expansion for immigration, I provide a history of the efforts to reform immigration policy that led to the 1965
Act. Like most other civil rights laws of the era, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 resulted from political compromise. FAMILY
REUNIFICATION IN THE EXCLUSION ERA Prior to 1924, the United States did not have a comprehensive immigration policy apart from treaties,
group-specific laws, and executive orders, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907, which directed
Chinese and Japanese immigration. In addition, before
national origins policy of the 1920s was enacted, there was no
general family provision or preference system for other would-be immigrants. Nevertheless, prior to that
legislation, gendered ideas of family and coverture, which tied a woman's legal status to that of her
husband's, permitted some immigrants to reunite with their spouses and children. Thus, despite ethnic, racial,
and national origins exclusion, many immigrants entered through the use of family unity provisions. For example, between 1908 and 1924, just
over 5,400 Chinese wives were admitted, and over 36,000 Japanese wives were permitted to enter (U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of
Immigration, 1908— 1924:Table E and Table 2). The National Origins Act of 1924 provided nonquota visas for wives
and minor children under 18 years of age of U.S. citizens, including naturalized immigrants. Although we have rich
accounts of why the United States enacted immigrant exclusion laws during this period, no explanation has been offered as to
why family reunification even existed at all. That is, given the anti-immigrant tide that swelled over the decades from
the mid-1800s through 1920s, why did the government ever concede family reunification and show reverence
for the preservation of family? Political leaders, intellectuals, moral reformers, and other immigration
stakeholders faced an unprecedented number of immigrants; in just three decades from 1890 to 1920, over 18 million
immigrants landed, increasingly from regions previously unknown, including southern and eastern Europe and Asia. Reference to family
provided these actors with language and framework for discussing the changes and challenges new
immigrants engendered. By engaging in family ideation—talking about what family is and should do—
immigration stakeholders were able to articulate and attach racialized and gendered meanings to
immigrant groups. This guided policy that denied their entry as an immigrant ethnic or racial group
because of their inassimilable ("not like one of the family") characteristics but still permitted family unity
provisions based on gendered ideals for some individuals. These gendered declarations of family
protected immigrant men's right to hearth and home, even as their racial assimilability remained
questionable.

Ideas of family reunification disguise a background of gendered familial stereotypes


Lee 15 (Catherine, Associate Professor in Sociology and Faculty Associate at the Institute for Health and
the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University, “Family Reunification and the Limits of
Immigration Reform: Impact and Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act”, Sociological Forum, Vol. 30, No.
S1, June 2015, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/socf.12176)//JSL

The rhetoric used to characterize Chinese as inassimilable opened up more favorable immigration
opportunities for Japanese immigrants who began to immigrate in greater numbers after 1900. Whereas Congress made the
Chinese Exclusion Act permanent in 1904 (which was reversed only in 1943 when the United States and China became wartime allies), the
United States implemented a friendlier policy toward Japan. Japan and the United States negotiated the terms of an immigration policy
outlined in the Gentlemen's Agreement, a series of six memos exchanged between late 1907 and early 1908. The Japanese government
pledged not to issue passports to laborers, skilled or unskilled, for the continental United States in exchange for concessions regarding laborers
already residing in the United States.8 The United States permitted Japan to continue issuing passports to parents,
wives, and children of laborers already in the United States (Daniels 1977; Ichioka 1988). A number of factors explain why
policies toward Japanese immigration began with partial restriction and family reunification. During the
height of Chinese immigration, Japan and its subjects were characterized as superior to China and its people
(Ichioka 1988; O'Brien and Fugita 1991). This comparison was cast in familial terms as politicians and leading intellectuals
presented Japanese immigrants in a more favorable light than the Chinese. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle noted the difference
between the two groups: "The
objections raised against the Chinese...cannot be alleged against the Japanese...
. They have brought their wives, children and...new industries among us" (Daniels 1977:3). Crucial differences
between the two groups highlighted by many commentators centered on gender relations and notions
of proper family arrangements. The United States also conceded a more favorable immigration policy to Japan, agreeing to the
terms of the Gentlemen's Agreement, because Japan was becoming a major geopolitical power. Unlike China, which faced declining influence
as it was besieged by domestic and international crises, Japan emerged as an important international player after its defeat of Russia in the
Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Thus, geopolitics, as other scholars have documented, mattered greatly (Daniels 1988; Hing 1993). Other
important factors included the timing of Japanese immigrants' arrival. They followed Chinese immigrants just as the United States began to
recover from a national economic recession, beginning in the 1890s and increasing more significantly after 1900. Although these contextual
factors shaped the overall more favorable policy toward the Japanese, theparticular allowance for family unity owed more
to family ideation, which identified new immigrants as good and assimilable, depending on their familial
characteristics. The family reunification provisions were short lived; based on their racial ineligibility for naturalization, Japanese
immigrants were banned in the Immigration Act of 1924 (Haney Lopez 1996; Ngai 2004). Nevertheless, the varying treatment was hugely
consequential, creating a viable American-born second generation (Nisei)for the Japanese but not for the Chinese (C. Lee 2010). By 1920, there
were over 111,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in the continental United States, and over a quarter of them were native-born citizens
(Rossiter, Thorp, and Beales 1922:137, 174).9 The seeming reverence for family continued throughout the
exclusionary era even as lawmakers passed ever more draconian measures. These examples of family unity
provisions highlight the point that family reunification existed long before the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. The ways in which immigration
stakeholders invoked family and defended family unity while exclusionary laws were enacted suggest
that family reunification is not necessarily always about immigrant support and immigration
expansion. Family reunification as a part of family ideation can be part of anti-immigrant sentiment. We
can see more evidence of this in the next section on the history of the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
Link—Family (Visas)

Exclusive family ideations underpin all family unity visa programs


Lee 15 (Catherine, Associate Professor in Sociology and Faculty Associate at the Institute for Health and
the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University, “Family Reunification and the Limits of
Immigration Reform: Impact and Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act”, Sociological Forum, Vol. 30, No.
S1, June 2015, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/socf.12176)//JSL

Family unity provisions are part of the larger discursive and symbolic practices that I term family
ideation—conceptualization of what family means, constitutes, and features in terms of its idealized
characteristics, such as gender or sexual norms, class ideals, and racial or ethnic attributes. Through
family ideation, immigration stakeholders constructed racialized, gendered, and class meanings and
attached them to immigrants and immigration policy as they negotiated who would be allowed to enter
and settle permanently. Family and family reunification are critical to making claims about inclusion and
exclusion that are central to immigration control. For example, politicians and other influential elites'
discussion of family allowed them to evaluate whether immigrants were "like one of the family" and
could be integrated into the larger family of the nation (Collins 1998, 2001). Thus, in both periods of exclusion and
expansion, immigration stakeholders talked about what a family is, whose families deserved protection,
and which families were legitimate as they regulated the entry of new would-be immigrants.
Link—Immigration

Immigration has been built upon heteronormative structures of success and desire –
biopower now operates through repression of our sexuality via continuous
recodifications of sexuality, gender, and race. Immigrants are reduced to an
infestation that can paradoxically be worn as a badge of national pride.
Luibhéid 08 [Eithne, “Queer/Migration: An Unruly Body of Scholarship”,
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241318, published 2008, accessed 6/23/18] BBro

Although the nation-state, nationalism, and nation-based citizenship are no longer the unquestioned
horizon for analysis, these categories have not disappeared. Instead, scholars have theorized them as
critical loci for upholding and contesting regional, transnational, and neo-imperial hierarchies, and for producing
forms of exclusion, marginalization, and struggle for tranformation. Indeed, sexuality scholarship has a rich history of
engagement with questions of nationalism. Many scholars have characterized modern nation-states and
citizenship as heteronormative in a manner that (as described above) involves hierarchies based on not only sex and
gender but also race and class. The calculated management of migration comprises a critical technology for
(re)producing national heteronormativity within global and imperial fields. Thus, throughout the first half of the
twentieth century, nation-states including the United States and Australia implemented eugenic policies that
encouraged migration and settlement by families that both conformed to the normative sexual order and were (or
would become) “white.” Settlement and family formation by migrants from colonized regions, however, was
generally barred (although in the United States, temporary labor for low wages was often permitted). Racial and neocolonial preferences
have become less explicitly stated in recent decades, but actual migration policies display continuing anxieties (and encode
punitive practices) where childbearing, cultural concerns, and possible economic costs among migrants
racialized as minorities and from neocolonized regions are concerned. Furthermore, although most nation-states may
no longer bar LGBTQ migrants, their presence nonetheless challenges and disrupts practices that remain normed
around racialized heterosexuality. National heteronormativity is thus a regime of power that all migrants
must negotiate, making them differentially vulnerable to exclusion at the border or deportation after
entry while also racializing, (re)gendering, (de)nationalizing, and unequally positioning them within the
symbolic economy, the public sphere, and the labor market. These outcomes, in turn, connect to the ongoing
reproduction of particular forms of nationhood and national citizenship—which have ramifications for local,
regional, national, transnational, and imperial arrangements of power. Heterosexuality is an unstable norm,
however, which requires anxious labor to sustain. Public discourses, like migration policies, reflect
heterosexuality’s instability. Thus unwelcome migrants are often characterized as engaging in
“unrestrained” childbearing, which is seen to reflect their deviation from or imperfect mastery over
mainstream heterosexual norms, resulting in the birth of “undesirable” children. Or they are portrayed
as the bearers of aberrant sexual practices, questionable sexual morals, and sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS, that
threaten to “contaminate” the citizenry. On the other hand, migrants are sometimes described as the upholders of family values
that promise to remoralize a citizenry that has lost its virtue. Or, within national heterosexual romance narratives, they
are painted as passionately desiring the nation, as shown by their migration; thus citizens depend on migrants to
show that the nation remains lovable. In these and other instances, heteronormativity animates both anti- and
pro-immigrant imagery and discourses in ways that reiterate, yet continually recode, sexual, gender,
racial, and class distinctions and inequalities in relation to constructs of nation-state, nationalism, and the
citizenry.
Immigration control is a site for the management of life through the identification and
categorization of populations.
Luibhéid 02
Luibhéid, Eithne. Entry Denied : Controlling Sexuality at the Border, University of Minnesota Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umichigan/detail.action?docID=310601. -Amanda

Immigration control is clearly one key dimension of the calculated management of life, because
immigration is one of four ways that the United States has acquired new population. The other three
ways have been slavery, annexation/colonization, and “natural reproduction.” People seeking to
immigrate were evaluated both as potential elements of the larger population group called
“American” and as individual bodies to be disciplined. 20 Racial and ethnic barriers have always
constrained who could be considered an actual or potential “American.” Therefore, immigration
officials considered (and thereby helped to construct) the racial, ethnic, and class identities of intending
immigrants. At the same time, they considered what would happen if these various immigrant groups
gave birth to significant numbers of children or had sexual relations or intermarried with “Americans.”
As Havelock Ellis expressed the concern, “the question of sex— with the racial questions that rest on
it— stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution.” 21 As these chapters
show, since sexual behavior was a crucial nexus through which the racial and ethnic order could become
altered, immigration was regulated accordingly. But this history also makes clear that the calculated
management of life, which necessitated attention to sexuality, was always designed to foster only
certain populations while other populations remained unfostered to the point of death.

Sexual identity is developed and expressed as a response to social factors and


pressures. The discrimination queer women faced on the border was a site for the
construction and regulation of societally defined “abnormal” practices of gender and
sexuality. This exclusion constructs specific images of the nation and of citizenry and
nationalism.
Luibhéid 02
(Luibhéid, Eithne. Entry Denied : Controlling Sexuality at the Border, University of Minnesota Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umichigan/detail.action?docID=310601.) AJN

Asking how the immigration service tried to know about immigrant women’s sexual acts, identities, tendencies, and possibilities
situated my analysis within the literature on social construction, which argues that sexual
identities and categories are
never transhistorical, essential, fixed and self-evident but rather are constructed within social
relations that change over time and by location. As Ellen Ross and Rayna Rapp write, “the bare biological
facts of sex do not speak for themselves; they must be expressed socially. Sex feels individual or private, but
these feelings always incorporate the rules, definitions, symbols, and meanings of the worlds in which
they are constructed.” 4 These authors describe how powerful social formations, including the family,
community, church, and state, give definition to sexual categories and identities. Within a constructionist
framework, the question “How would they know?” suggests the need to shift the analysis away from
individual immigrants’ lives, interesting though they are, and toward the actions of the immigration
service. It identifies the immigration control apparatus as a key site for the production and
reproduction of sexual categories, identities, and norms within relations of inequality. This book therefore
investigates how the U.S. immigration control system has served as a crucial site for the construction and
regulation of sexual norms, identities, and behaviors since 1875. 5 While both women and men have been targets
of immigration control based on sexuality, this book focuses on women’s experiences, since women’s bodies historically serve as
Immigration laws and procedures that
the iconic sites for sexual intervention by state and nationmaking projects. 6
differentiated women into categories such as wife, prostitute, and lesbian reveal the role of immigration
control in regulating admission on the basis of sexuality. Historically, laws and procedures granted
“preferred” admission to wives, while mandating the exclusion of lesbians, prostitutes, and other
“immoral” women. Yet these distinctions did not simply derive from preexisting identities that immigrant women already “had.”
Rather, this book argues that in seeking to ascribe these identities the immigration service centrally
contributed to constructing the very sexual categories and identities through which women’s
immigration possibilities were then regulated. The policing of immigrant women on the basis of
sexuality also enabled the discursive production of exclusionary forms of nationalism that took
concrete shape in immigration laws and procedures, but extended well beyond the border to produce
particular visions of the U.S. nation and citizenry.
Link—Inclusion
The aff’s imaginary inclusionary project strengthens the heterocentric framework – to
identify with the nation is to disidentify with queer movements founded on politics of
difference – that strengthens national fantasies that perpetuate neoorientalism
Sabsay 12 Leticia, Assistant Professor in Gender and Contemporary Culture in the Department of
Gender Studies @ The London School of Economic and Political Science. “The emergence of the other
sexual citizen: orientalism and the modernisation of sexuality,” Citizenship Studies, vol. 16 no. 5-6, 2012,
pp. 605-623 JE

At the same time, as Lauren Berlant would put it, Queer Nation aimed to ‘dismantle the standardizing
apparatus that organizes all manner of sexual practice into “facts” of “sexual identity”’(Berlant and
Freeman 1992). In effect, what originally defined the queer movement was its contestation of the
identity politics of gay and lesbian social movements that were by then committed to a politics of
inclusion within a heterocentric framework. To identify with a queer nation, or even to acquire a ‘queer
nationality’ meant to adhere to a politics of difference that would find ‘a home’ in the practices of dis-
identification and, in turn, would inflect the nation in a queer way. But where has the ‘queer inflection
of nationalism’ ended up? Paradoxically enough, the promising contradiction between the two terms
that compose the name pointed out by Escoffier and Be´rube´ (1998) – ‘queer’, the signifier for the
politics of difference against identity, and ‘nation’ being the place of sameness – seems to have found an
ironic resolution: instead of queering the nation, nationalism re-inscribed the queer into its own
narrative. The call for queering nationalist fantasies, which was supposed to disrupt or at least disturb
heteronormative nationalism, has become, according to many scholars, the occasion for the emergence
of new homonormative forms of nationalism and therefore the brand of a new exclusionary version of
‘queerness’. Jasbir Puar (2007) coined the term ‘homonationalism’ to describe the way in which the
imaginary inclusion and the celebration of sexual diversity have assumed a key role in the configuration
of current national fantasies in the USA during the war on terror. As many authors have suggested, the
rising in islamophobic discourses that accompanied US imperial nationalism after 11 September 2001,
was due to the assumption that Muslim subjecthood is inseparable from sexual backwardness. Very
often the rescue narratives that present ‘the other’ women and gays as mere victims of ‘other cultures’
supposedly committed in essence to gender oppression, homophobia and transphobia are aimed at
justifying this imperialism (Hunt and Rygiel 20)
Link—Liberal Immigration Reform

Oppressive institutions and practices reinscribe norms through sympathetic narratives


that manifest a savior dynamic in which governments ‘rescue’ migrants through liberal
reform. In order to blunt neoliberal pain, non-migrants use sentimental narratives to
feel good about themselves and convince themselves that individuality can exist in
neoliberal structures – family reunification narratives prove
Chavez, 13 – Karma, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Mexican American & Latino/a Studies @ University of Texas-Austin. Queer Migration Politics: Activist
Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, University of Illinois Press, p. 60-61 – walsh

For Nair, the root of contemporary oppression of migrants, queers, and others is neoliberal capitalism
and how it economically functions and becomes culturally and politically naturalized. 52 Consequently,
one of her primary concerns is how labor becomes erased from both a queer and a queer migration
agenda as groups instead choose to emphasize good stories as a means to achieve political ends.
Because we are, in Nair’s words, “all neoliberals now,” left-leaning politics tends to adhere “to a
sentimental and nostalgic view of the Other [that] is deeply embedded in a politics of abjection and
rescue.” 53 Such logic is not unique to neoliberalism or new to leftist politics. Bassichis, Lee, and Spade
write, “Oppressive dynamics in the United States are as old as the colonization of this land and the
founding of a country based on slavery and genocide. However, they have taken intensified, tricky
forms in the past few decades—particularly because our governments keep telling us those institutions
and practices have been ‘abolished.’” 54 To Nair, one such “tricky form,” is neoliberalism’s reduction of
politics to the intimate and private, an argument akin to Lauren Berlant’s notion of the “intimate public
sphere.” 55 Within this logic, if people feel bad for someone whose situation is so terrible that they
need to be rescued from it, then those people are more likely to take action. This function of narrative
is long-standing. Perhaps the difference within neoliberalism is that the personal narrative and affect in
the form of “feeling good” about helping an individual in a bad situation stand in place of a critique of
the labor conditions and capitalist expansion that have created the bad conditions in the first place. If
a feel-good story about someone’s terrible personal plight can be told to persuade lawmakers to change
laws that oppress people because of an identity they possess, it is a much easier strategy than offering a
systemic and abstract critique of issues that would require much more radical change. Moreover, such a
strategy tries to construct all who share that position as “good” and deserving of help. A primary
function of neoliberalism is to privatize financial and governmental structures, 56 which results in
slashing public services and organized labor in the name of individual freedom. This has devastating
material impacts on working and poor people, who are disproportionately women and people of color.
The pain privatization causes has to be blunted through affective or emotional means. Nair explains that
“to dull and distract from the pain of privatization, we need to feel good about ourselves as human
beings and as creatures of identity, people with stories.” 57 If people can relate to others, feel their
plights as shared, and also feel affirmed in their identities, it makes it easier to deal with the material
devastations of neoliberal privatization. The affective dulling offered through story sharing is especially
devastating for immigration politics. Framing immigration as a crisis, as opposed to, say, an economic
reality, creates space for the dehumanization of those who supposedly cause the crisis. In order to
confront this situation, those on the political left rely on compelling stories about “good” migrants. The
need to confront dehumanization also explains why appeals to family and family reunification are so
strong, because, as Nair puts it, the logic is that “the plight of the undocumented would best be
alleviated if their families were allowed to join them here,” and families should not be torn apart. 58
Keeping loved ones together who desire to stay together is a powerful and important goal, yet as shown
in the last chapter, this rhetoric can be highly problematic. Fundamental to Nair is that the appeal to the
family erases the reality that many families are not hospitable to queers or that family situations
generally can be inhospitable for all of their members because of various kinds of abuse. Such rhetoric
also “erases the labor issues that are integral to how families work within their adopted neighborhoods
and cities.” Families are not mere affective units bound by love. Instead, paid and unpaid family
members often serve as the primary labor source for migrant-run business, for instance, and this is an
economic consideration more than an affective one.
Link—Marriage

Traditional notions of “family” and “marriage” are founded upon a normative


temporality that must necessarily exclude queer bodies.
Halberstam 05 [Jack, “In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives”,
https://nyupress.org/books/9780814735855, published 2005, access 06/25/18] BBro

- talks about the production of queer counterpublics, means it can be run with the Berlant and Warner
alt
Queer time and space are useful frameworks for assessing political and cultural change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
(both what has changed and what must change). The critical languages that we have developed to try to assess the
obstacles to social change have a way of both stymieing our political agendas and alienating
nonacademic constituencies. I try here to make queer time and queer space into useful terms for academic and nonacademic
considerations of life, location, and transformation. To give an example of the way in which critical languages can
sometimes weigh us down, consider the fact that we have become adept within postmodernism at
talking about "normativity, " but far less adept at describing in rich detail the practices and structures that
both oppose and sustain conventional forms of association, belonging, and identification. I try to use the concept of
queer time to make clear how respectability, and notions of the normal on which it depends, may be upheld by a
middle-class logic of reproductive temporality. And so, in Western cultures, we chart the emergence of the adult
from the dangerous and unruly period of adolescence as a desired process of maturation; and we create
longevity as the most desirable future, applaud the pursuit of long life (under any circumstances), and
pathologize modes of living that show little or no concern for longevity. Within the life cycle of the Western human
subject, long periods of stability are considered to be desirable, and people who live in rapid bursts (drug
addicts, for example) are characterized as immature and even dangerous. But the ludic temporality created by drugs
(captured by Salvador Dali as a melting clock and by William Burroughs as "junk time") reveals the artificiality of our privileged constructions of
time and activity. In the works of queer postmodern writers like Lynn Breedlove (Godspeed), Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls), and others, speed
itself (the drug as well as the motion) becomes the motor of an alternative history as their queer heroes rewrite completely narratives of
female rebellion (Myles 1 994; Breedlove 2002). Thetime of reproduction is ruled by a biological clock for women and
by strict bourgeois rules of respectability and scheduling for married couples. Obviously, not all people who
have children keep or even are able to keep reproductive time, but many and possibly most people
believe that the scheduling of repro-time is natural and desirable. Family time refers to the normative
scheduling of daily life (early to bed, early to rise) that accompanies the practice of child rearing. This timetable is
governed by an imagined set of children's needs, and it relates to beliefs about children's health and healthful environments for child rearing.
The time of inheritance refers to an overview of generational time within which values, wealth, goods,
and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next. It also connects the family to the
historical past of the nation, and glances ahead to connect the family to the future of both familial and national stability. In this category we can
include the kinds of hypothetical temporality-the time of "what if" -that demands protection in the way of insurance policies, health care, and
wills. In
queer renderings of postmodern geography, the notion of a body-centered identity gives way to a
model that locates sexual subjectivities within and between embodiment, place, and practice. But queer
work on sexuality and space, like queer work on sexuality and time, has had to respond to canonical work on "postmodern geography" by
Edward Soja, Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and others that has actively excluded sexuality as a category for analysis precisely because desire
has been cast by neo-Marxists as part of a ludic body politics that obstructs the "real" work of activism (Soja 1 989; Harvey 1 990; Jameson
1997). This
foundational exclusion, which assigned sexuality to body/local/personal and took
class/global/political as its proper frame of reference, has made it difficult to introduce questions of
sexuality and space into the more general conversations about globalization and transnational
capitalism. Both Anna Tsing and Steve Pile refer this problem as the issue of "scale." Pile, for example, rejects the notion that certain
political arenas of struggle (say, class) are more important than others (say, sexuality), and instead he offers that we rethink these seemingly
competing struggles in terms of scale by recognizing that while we tend to view local struggles as less significant than global ones, ultimately
"the local and the global are not natural scales, but formed precisely out of the struggles that seemingly
they only contain" (Pile 1 997, 13). A "queer" adjustment in the way in which we think about time, in fact,
requires and produces new conceptions of space. And in fact, much of the contemporary theory seeking to
disconnect queerness from an essential definition of homosexual embodiment has focused on queer
space and queer practices. By articulating and elaborating a concept of queer time, I suggest new ways of understanding the
nonnormative behaviors that have clear but not essential relations to gay and lesbian subjects. For the purpose of this book, "queer" refers to
nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time. "Queer
time" is a
term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the
temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance. "Queer space" refers
to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage and it also describes
the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics. Meanwhile,
"postmodernism" in this project takes on meaning in relation to new forms of cultural production that emerge both in sync with and running
counter to what jameson has called the "logic" of late capitalism in his book Postmodernism (1997). I see postmodernism as simultaneously a
crisis and an opportunity-a crisis in the stability of form and meaning, and an opportunity to rethink the practice of cultural production, its
hierarchies and power dynamics, its tendency to resist or capitulate. In his work on postmodern geography, Pile also locates postmodernism in
terms of the changing relationship between opposition and authority; he reminds us, crucially, that "the map of resistance is not
simply the underside of the map of domination" (6).
Link—Refugees

The process of becoming a refugee is fundamentally flawed – queer migrants are


forced into a position where they must reveal their sexual orientations in order to be
eligible for protection. Independently, the asylum process creates a sense of isolation
and otherization in immigrants who seek refuge in homophobic ethnic communities.
Randazzo 05 [Timothy J., “Social and Legal Barriers: Sexual Orientation and Asylum in the United
States”, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/32277, accessed 06/24/18] BBro *edited for g-lang*

- expanding access to asylum forces more queer immigrants into positions of social isolation

- prereq: solving for uncomfortability comes before asylum

- the second card is far better than this one

Those who do manage to escape persecution in their home countries do not necessarily find liberation
after arrival in the United States. Because of language and cultural barriers, many immigrants join ethnic
communities composed of people from their own country of origin. According to Dusty Araujo, Asylum Program
coordinator at the Inter- national Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, such migrants may "find themselves in
homophobic communities that are culturally similar to the ones they left behind." Living in such
communities, many gay and lesbian immigrants "have learned to protect themselves by hiding and
denying their sexual orientation. In many cases potential asylum seekers have never told anyone about
their sexual orientation, they do not know of others in the same situation, and their sense of isolation is
tremendous." Furthermore, immigration attorneys to whom a potential asylum seeker might turn often have close ties to the immigrant
community, and interpreters may even be members of the community itself. "In such a situation," Araujo explains, "a gay immigrant is
unlikely to reveal [their] sexual orientation."37 At times, however, an immigrant might seek out lesbian and
gay communities in the United States. These communities, while sometimes romanticized as sites of liberation and
equality, typically reproduce the same racial and gender inequalities characteristic of the U.S. social order.
Gay and lesbian immigrants, most of whom arrive from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, must deal with U.S. gay
and lesbian communities that often exclude or marginalize people of color. Gay and lesbian writers of color discuss
this racism in many of their works. David Frechette, for example, describes the unwelcome reception many gays and lesbians of color face.
"Most gay social groups have few black members and can't imagine why. Blacks often feel unwelcome or
barely tolerated in many of these groups and fail to return after a few visits." He continues, "Gay literature—
books, newspapers, and magazines—as well as film and theatrical efforts either studiously ignore blacks
or gratuitously insult them."38 Filmmaker Richard Fung describes the way people of color, particularly Asian American men,
are often fetishized and marginalized by white gays in North America. "[T]he mainstream gay movement,"
he concludes, "can be a place of freedom and sexual identity. But it is also a site of racial, cultural, and sexual
alienation sometimes more pronounced than that in straight society."39 Recently arrived immigrants, particularly
immigrants of color, may not necessarily find advocacy and support networks in the gay and lesbian
community that might lead them to find out about the asylum process as a means of seeking refuge
from persecution. Homophobia in immigrant communities has the same effect; many newly arrived
immigrants who depend on their immigrant communities for support are understandably hesitant to
reveal their sexual orientation. In fact, many gay and lesbian immigrants mistakenly believe that revealing
their sexual orientation would make them deportable from the United States.40 The isolation resulting
from their dual marginalization prevents many potential asylum applicants from even learning about the
possibility of seeking asylum based on their sexual orientation. Araujo explains, Because of the coming out process
which significantly affects their ability to seek out immigration advice, many gay and lesbian asylum seekers take many
years before they are comfortable enough with their sexual orientation to speak to an attorney about
asylum. Of the asylum seekers who did seek out legal advice over the years many never divulged their sexual orientation and their adviser
never asked. Not until by chance, either through a friend, through a flyer or some other haphazard way did they learn about asylum and called
the Asylum Program.41 Furthermore, even when lesbian or gay immigrants are able to establish networks with
mainstream gay and lesbian groups, they may still be unaware of the possibility of asylum based on
sexual orientation. According to Araujo, "Usually members of the gay community are United States citizens who do not know anything
about immigration laws," and they can rarely offer any information on the asylum process to potential applicants.42 The consequences
of applying for asylum on other grounds without revealing one's sexual orientation can be devastating
to one's asylum case. For example, in 1998, an asylum officer in Houston denied the case of a gay Honduran
asylum seeker because he failed to disclose his sexual orientation at an earlier hearing. Ashamed to reveal his
abuse at the hands of Honduran police and others for being gay, the Honduran man had initially applied for asylum solely because of a land
dispute. Explaining
his denial of the man's claim, the asylum officer wrote, During your [earlier] hearing, you
did not mention your homosexuality. You were embarrassed. You were not represented. You based your claim
on problems that resulted from a land dispute. Your current testimony presented no new evidence regarding the land dispute. Your current
testimony related to harm you suffered in the 19808 because of your homosexual orientation. This testimony could have been presented at
your original hearing on November 20,1996.43
Link—Same-Sex Marriage
Queer marriage operates on a different plane societally than straight marriage
Quinn 2012 (Kevin Brandyon, dissertation submitted for review in the Graduate College of the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champain, “‘Queering the Family’ the American Family: Belief, Fallacy, and
Myth”, https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/42290/Kevin_Quinn.pdf?sequence=1)

Much of the recent debate, both within and outside of the LGBTQ communities has centered on the legalization of
queer marriage. Many queers believe that State sanctioned marriage is the only to guarantee full
societal recognition and participation. Yet others, queer as well, resist marriage as a form of social
assimilation that they want no part of – concurring with many that marriage per se, is an outmoded
hegemonic institution. According to the Human Rights Campaign, currently, samesex couples are entitled to all of the State-level rights
and benefits of marriage in Massachusetts. In addition, same-sex couples in New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut are able to
enter into State-level civil unions and there are broad domestic partnership laws in California and Oregon. California voters banned gay
marriage in November of 2008, an issue that was recently settled against gay marriage by the California Supreme Court. In the State of New
York, after a 2008 court ruling, valid out-of-state marriages of same-sex couples must be legally recognized. New York’s legal recognition of gay
marriage was quickly followed by the District of Columbia. Finally, on April 3, 2009 the Supreme Court of the State of Iowa unanimously ruled
that the State’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional and the State legislature was enjoined to write new law that would ensure
equal marriage rights to all citizens of Iowa. The survey found that 58% of all respondents to the Queering the American Family survey were in
committed relationships. 55.7%
of those surveyed saw their intimate relationships as something that must be
recognized by the State. 58% of those surveyed also wanted to be married; while 33.8% did not want
the title of “marriage” assigned to their intimate relationships, but wanted all the same rights and
responsibilities as guaranteed by State sanctioned marriage. 14.6% saw marriage as a form of social
assimilation, while 3.2% proposed that marriage was a form of social transgression. 21.5% indicated that
their relationship was a commitment only between them and wanted no part in State recognition. When
asked if marriage was the only way to validate their intimate relationships, 60.9% equated marriage with
social equality and must be recognized by the State. While, 33.3% agreed that marriage was an outdated
institution that they wanted nothing to do with. 97 This rift in opinions on State sanctioned marriage was apparent in the
interviews as well; 48% for marriage, 42% against. Most of the interviewees in favor of marriage stated that it made them more politically
aware and active.

LGBTQ people are relegated to second class citizens because of their identities
Quinn 2012 (Kevin Brandyon, dissertation submitted for review in the Graduate College of the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champain, “‘Queering the Family’ the American Family: Belief, Fallacy, and
Myth”, https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/42290/Kevin_Quinn.pdf?sequence=1)

LGBTQs claim first-class citizenship when it comes to societal responsibilities; abiding by the laws of the State and
our society, working, paying more than their fair share of taxes, serving their country, but with their mouths closed and lives closeted.
However, LGBTQs are immediately relegated to second-class status when claiming rights to privacy, in
intimate relationships, childbearing and rearing, and to live free from societal prejudice. Most
interviewees said that given a lifetime of misunderstanding, prejudice, discrimination and
marginalization by societal expectations to be heterosexual had, at one point or another in their lives, to
seek professional help to deal with feelings of being ostracized, both familial and societal. Yet, interestingly
enough most of these same LGBTQs feel surprisingly optimistic about their political future.
Link—Securitization

Rhetoric regarding securitization spills over to discussions of “national purity” that


always work to alienate and expunge those deemed sexually deviant – turns case
because their notion of inclusion pivots around the exclusion of the queer body
Chavez 15 Karma R., Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Mexican American & Latino/a Studies @ University of Texas-Austin. “The Precariousness of
Homonationalism: The Queer Agency of Terrorism in Post-9/11 Rhetoric,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ
Worldmaking, Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 2015, pp. 32-58 (Article) JE

National security discourse subtly advocates isolationism, nativism, and xenophobia, and it promotes
U.S. projects of increased militarization on its borders and beyond. Such strategies echo those of more
than a century ago. Nancy Ordover demonstrates the additive ideology of advocates of eugenics in the
early twentieth-century United States, who worked to incorporate a host of so-called “deviants” and
“degenerates” within the purview of those who needed to be excluded and/or expunged from the
nation.15 In this way, people of color, homosexuals and “inverts,” the “feeble-minded,” and the poor
were all incorporated into eugenics rhetoric as threats to national purity. National security discourses
work through a similar logic as the figure of the terrorist shares characteristics supposedly possessed by
these other strangers to the nation. The terrorist is usually imagined as foreign, leading many like former
Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) to hold that too much immigration leads to a “clash of cultures” that
ultimately creates a “clash of loyalties that is inherently dangerous to national security.”16 Moreover,
the terrorist is often thought to be sexually deviant or deranged, leading to an easy slippage between
the queer and the terrorist. This can be seen when conservatives encapsulate queers into national
security threats, such as in 2008 when Oklahoma Republican State Representative Sally Kearn argued
that homosexuality was a bigger threat to national security than terrorism.17 Former Senator Rick
Santorum (R-PA) called traditional marriage “the ultimate homeland security issue,” during a 2004
debate over a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in the Senate.18 Bryan Fischer, the
American Family Association’s director of issue analysis for government and public policy argued in 2010
that “gay sex is a form of domestic terrorism.”19 And in 2009, documents surfaced that showed that the
Maryland State Police classified Equality Maryland, a state-level LGBT rights organization, as a possible
“security threat” and surveyed its activities as a result.20 Furthermore, Puar and Rai have aptly pointed
out how Middle Eastern terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, and the countries from which they
originate, are figured through feminizing and homophobic rhetoric in ways that reinforce Islamophobia
and work to reclaim and assert white “heterosexual patriotism” and masculinity in the United States.21
The events of September 11, 2001 provide modern justification for these facile linkages. Their historical
origins extend much further.
Link—Suffering Narratives

the aff’s relying on suffering narratives and saviorism retrenches violent white
heteropatriarchal norms which create the harms in the squo. A broader, more abstract
critique of oppression and injustice which opposes underlying systemic issues is
necessary to achieve liberation. Coalition politics is necessary to oppose the
inclusionary piecemeal politics of the usfg
Chavez, 13 – Karma, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Mexican American & Latino/a Studies @ University of Texas-Austin. Queer Migration Politics: Activist
Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, University of Illinois Press, p. 60-61 – walsh

Moreover, such familial rhetoric often erases the migrants whose experience involves sex work, perhaps
to support their family or as an only means to escape their family. Nair wonders if it is “even possible to
‘tell a different story.’” 59 Writing about a forum hosted by CLIA that addressed the complicated
intersections between sexuality, gender, labor, and migration issues, Nair notes that one panelist,
Jessica Acee, offered a key reminder: “There can be no neat divisions between the kinds of labor
performed by immigrants, and we benefit from a renewed focus on labor and its connection to issues of
gender and sexuality.” 60 Nair concludes, “A queer immigration reform agenda which centralizes labor
has less to do with locating actual queers and narratives and more to do with the particular analytic and
activist lens that’s possible within a queer framework.” 61 A queer framework attends specifically to
gender and sexuality, but emphasizing labor decenters queer identity and narrative. This framework
links differing material conditions and oppressions to sexual and gender logics. For instance, a migrant
trans sex worker likely experiences unique kinds of oppression as a laborer compared to other laborers.
Their situation highlights much about the way sexuality and gender interact with labor and migration to
affect people’s possibility for a livable life. 62 Utilizing such a framework does not make Nair anti-
narrative; instead, she says, “Personal stories can help to make systemic conditions more easily
understood. But is there a way to use them without buying into pathos and abjection?” 63 As is clear,
Nair views capitalist exploitation as the root of oppression. She also sees that an analysis of capitalism—
and in this historical period, neoliberal capitalism—necessitates an approach that concurrently attends
to gender and sexuality. Yet gender and sexuality politics have too often relied only on narrative
strategies and their accompanying “pathos and abjection,” which distracts from capitalist exploitation
and seeks to normalize and make respectable certain identity groups. In part, Nair seeks a new, more
radical story. Nair also seeks a turn t o abstraction. She explained to me that she is interested in writing
an essay called “The Importance of Being Abstract,” a riff on Oscar Wilde’s famous play The Importance
of Being Earnest . The call for abstraction could easily be taken as a guise for another call to masculine
rationality. The point of the essay, Nair claims, would be to center on issues that are fundamentally
problematic regardless of whether someone feels personally connected to or impacted by them. To
Nair, oppression and injustice in the abstract sense should be enough to compel to action, or at the very
least they should be the foundation for creating arguments for or against a position. Without
abstraction it is easy to get lost in the details of a personal situation that may or may not have relevance
to the broader issue at hand. Critiquing the commonsense feminist adage “the personal is political,” Nair
told me, “I think the whole personal is political, that formulation of the personal as political was useful
at its time, and I think in some ways it can still be critically useful, but now the personal has become the
neoliberal. So I think neoliberalism now has learned how to use that formulation . . . I think the political
is political. And I’m tir ed of this idea. I think what that has become now is, for instance, an issue of
dueling stories. Whose story can be more melodramatically effective?” 64 At least in par t, Nair’s
analysis reflects a type of Marxist tension between structure and agency that insists that achieving
liberation is a matter of changing deep structural conditions as opposed to enacting individual (or even
some forms of collective) agency. In suggesting that the personal has been reduced to the neoliberal,
Nair issues a sweeping and normative claim about the realm of the political, one that may be off-putting
to some people. This claim also functions as a profound warning about the co-optation of stories to
achieve ends that the subjects of those stories may not actually desire (e.g., maintaining capitalist
exploitation of some people under the guise of achieving equality for others). At times Nair seems to
negate the value of the human component to movement, which for many is what compels involvement.
Furthermore, the idea of persuading people by using a plea to abstraction is somewhat utopian, given
the power of stories generally and the profound role that emotions and affect play in all of our lives,
including in activism. As Deborah Gould writes in her book about the role of emotion in AIDS activism,
“The movement in ‘social movements’ gestures toward the realm of affect; bodily intensities; emotions,
feelings, and passions; and toward uprising.” 65 Here, Gould remarks upon the undeniable role that
emotion plays in political life and maintains the importance of thinking through emotional processes.
Nair’s oppositional vision may err too much on the side of being anti-affective, but she provides an
important counterpoint to the predominant narrative strategy. And in this way her vision also resonates
with Chela Sandoval’s claim about differential consciousness providing an alternative narrative for
counter-hegemonic struggles. 66
Link—Trafficking

The affirmative’s discourse claiming to save helpless migrants from sex trafficking erase the
experiences of migrant sex workers. Their savior narrative paints sex workers as “objects of
help” and justifies legislation that is detrimental to the same groups it claims to assist.
Oram 07
(Siân Oram [London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine] reviewing and analyzing Laura Agustin’s work “Sex at the margins:
migration, labour markets and the rescue industry” in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Issue published in the
month of July, 2008. https://www.lauraagustin.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/JRAIreview.pdf)

The book draws upon fifteen years of anthropological research in Latin America and Europe, and upon
extensive historical research into the development and traditions of ‘the social’. Agustín’s interest in
studying the people who work in this social sector – including civil servants, police, campaigners, and
service providers – was aroused by discrepancies between how migration and sex work was talked about
by migrants in Latin America and by social programmers in Europe. In particular, she noted that whilst
European programmes tended to consider migrants who sold sex as victims, migrants generally rejected
this identity. The early chapters critique current discourses on migration, the sale of sex, and trafficking,
which, Agustín argues, inadequately reflect the lives of those who migrate and sell sex. In examining the
origins of these discourses, she charts the construction of the ‘prostitute as victim’ in need of rescue, and
argues that the work of middle-class female philanthropists in rescuing and rehabilitating prostitutes was,
whatever its benevolent intentions, ultimately self-serving. ‘Social’ work offered ‘autonomy, status and
money’ at a time when few jobs were deemed appropriate for ‘respectable’ women. Agustín goes on to
argue that in Europe the ideas developed about prostitution in the nineteenth century have been
incorporated into central and local government policies, and that current social programmes and agents
tend to reproduce discourses on prostitution. These discourses, Agustín argues, are moralistic and
ideologically driven, as are discourses on trafficking, which tend to ignore the experiences of many migrants
who sell sex. Consequently, social programming is typically unable to meet the needs of this group. Agustín
powerfully evokes the conflict between those who argue that prostitution is inherently violent and
exploitative and those who argue that selling sex should be considered a legitimate form of work. She
criticizes the former position as frequently fundamentalist and neo-colonialist, and whilst acknowledging
that many who sell sex may feel ‘disgust, fear, loneliness and sadness’, she argues that this is not a
universal experience, and draws parallels between work in the sex industry and other service sectors. In
the final chapters, Agustín demonstrates how these discourses affect the objectives of social programmes
and the services they provide, typically to the detriment of those whom the programme claims to help.
Ultimately, the book advocates that projects aiming to help migrants who sell sex first find out what these
‘objects of help’ actually want, and to think carefully about what to do if the answer received is not the one
that was hoped for.
Link—Undocumented Migration

Queer undocumented immigrants are often marginalized by the nation-state and


society writ-large
Cisneros and Gutierrez 2018 (Jesus and Julia, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Volume 5,
Number 1, Spring 2018, pp. 84-102 (Article), “‘What Does It Mean to Be Undocuqueer?’: Exploring
(il)Legibility within the Intersection of Gender, Sexuality, and Immigration Status”) - ghosh

Yet, the application of a queer of color analysis is likewise important for problematizing the notion of
nation as a protective “home” to its citizens. Like black feminism’s challenge to the black liberation and feminist
movements, queer of color critique demonstrates the insufficiency of political projects predicated on a
single-issue analysis. A queer of color critique considers the ways that bodies enact multiple identities
simultaneously and negotiate various levels of power in order to survive. Queer of color criticism
interrogates how social formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices to
describe what has been hidden, made invisible, forgotten, and rendered unknowable by hegemonic
power structures.14 Prior to 1990, for example, political projects publicly linking struggles around homo/transphobia, racism, and
anti-immigrant sentiment were practically impossible, because immigrants who identified as queer and trans “risked exclusion by
announcing their presence, publicizing their struggles, or participating in organizing.”15
Immigrants who were found to be
homosexual or to engage in same-sex behavior were almost always either denied entry into the United
States or deported. Because queer and trans undocumented immigrants continue to be expelled or
rejected from home and the nation “for not conforming to the dictation and demand for uniform
gendered and sexual types,” the development and application of a queer of color analysis remain as
significant today as ever.16 Queer and trans undocumented immigrants from Latin America may
encounter legal consequences and further social marginalization in disclosing their gender, sexuality,
and immigration status due to the overlapping margins of prejudice, stigma, and deportability. Given their
undocumented status, for example, many often rely on family and extended networks for economic survival and other resources. 17 To
minimize rejection and uphold familial ties, many often report keeping their gender presentation and sexuality tacit (understood, but not
discussed).18 Others likewise describe avoiding or rejecting certain people and not speaking up about immigrant rights within
mainstream LGBT spaces, or vice versa, in order to reconcile conflicting values and norms. 19

“Undocuqueer” immigrants face prejudice on multiple levels that leave them on the
margins of society
Cisneros and Gutierrez 2018 (Jesus and Julia, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Volume 5,
Number 1, Spring 2018, pp. 84-102 (Article), “‘What Does It Mean to Be Undocuqueer?’: Exploring
(il)Legibility within the Intersection of Gender, Sexuality, and Immigration Status”) - ghosh

The state usually serves as a protector or safety net by providing public services like medical care, food assistance, and price reduction of
utilities to low-income families in need. Due to
their immigration status, however, social support services for
undocumented immigrants become minimum or nonexistent. Experiencing rejection and invisibility due
to their gender, sexuality, and immigration status, undocumented immigrants are placed in double
jeopardy when even resources allocated for the LGBT community become inaccessible. Franco, a 24-year-old
DACA recipient from Arizona, described the challenge of obtaining access to social services specifically for queer and trans people. Being
undocumented among the LGBT community, I feel like I am just this little magnet walking around just waiting for anything to fall on me,
like any sickness or anything. And that’s scary. Being undocumented and not easily being able to turn out to a program, it is hard. And
aside from the health care system, housing, and shelters. ere is none. ere is none here within our state. There is no flexibility, there is no
programs that really cater to the undocumented queer community. I think it’s because of propositions in place, like legislation placed in
the state of Arizona, which is Proposition 200. It really limits the reach for the undocumented community. Arizona Proposition
200 requires state and local agencies to verify the identity and eligibility, based on immigration status, of
applicants for nonfederally mandated state public benefits. Such policies across states construct the
(il)legibility of undocuqueer immigrants and preclude them from having access to specific resources,
including homeless shelters, identification cards, and health care. As Mario, a 28-year-old DACA recipient from
Florida, described: I felt so ashamed that I would disappoint my mom that I ran away from home. I stopped going to school. I was
homeless for about three months going from friend’s place to friend’s place. Many times just sleeping outdoors. It was a rough period of
time for me. I didn’t have any help. WhenI talk about homeless youth, particularly homeless LGBT youth, the
struggle for individuals who are both LGBT and undocumented is so severe because you can’t even go to
a shelter. You will be turned away from a shelter if you don’t have pieces of information that you cannot give them. So that is what was
going on with me. Mario described the importance of material manifestations associated with being recognized under the state. In his
narrative, he highlights the prevalence of issues of family acceptance for queer and trans youth, yet the inaccessibility of homeless
shelters for undocuqueer immigrants. Shelters typically require IDs for background checks, and individuals typically must prove that
they are citizens or legal permanent residents to obtain services. Due to
their undocumented status, and because they
do not qualify for government issued IDs in most states, including Florida, undocuqueer immigrants are
often unable to turn to homeless shelters, leaving them feeling rejected from both the literal home and
the nation-state. The lack of protection for undocuqueer immigrants demonstrates the intertwined
oppression through the social formations of gender, sexuality, and immigration status. The literal home
often replicates what the nation-state has normalized as unworthy of protection. Undocuqueer
immigrants do not fit legally and socially under the normative perception of what it means to be a U.S.
citizen. Identifying as undocumented challenges the notions of citizenship produced as an effect of law
materially inscribed on papers. Identifying as queer and trans disrupts the normative social construction
of cisgender and heterosexual normativity in the private and public spheres. Hence, being both queer
and trans and undocumented leaves individuals stranded in the streets and outside the margins of what
the nation comes to accept as legitimate and acceptable citizens.

This marginalization is one that scholars need to be aware of when examining


sociopolitical climates
Cisneros and Gutierrez 2018 (Jesus and Julia, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Volume 5,
Number 1, Spring 2018, pp. 84-102 (Article), “‘What Does It Mean to Be Undocuqueer?’: Exploring
(il)Legibility within the Intersection of Gender, Sexuality, and Immigration Status”) - ghosh

Because identity is discursive, changing political contexts require researchers to continuously examine the
shifting sociopolitical climate and its impact on the experiences of individuals at the overlapping margins
of identity. Scholars need to remain attentive to the ways that power—through representation, authorizing agents,
and discourse—legitimizes certain ways of being while invalidating and consequently marginalizing those that do
not con- form to prevailing cultural, political, or social norms. The space within the over- lapping margins
of gender, sexuality, and immigration status where queer and trans undocumented immigrants have learned to negotiate,
agitate, and resist, for example, has produced the subjectivities and possibilities for undocuqueer immigrants to
exist. Their experiences highlight the boundaries of (il)legibility and provide a nuanced understanding of the dominant discursive
meanings of cisgender heteronormativity and citizenship. Given the aggressive enforcement of immigration law under the current
administration, highlighting the experiences of queer and trans undocumented immigrants at the intersection of criminality and
immigration (i.e., “crimigration”) is more important today than ever.
Impact
Impact—Exceptionalism

Legitimization of the sovereign’s right to include and exclude certain bodies furthers
the scapegoating of violence onto non-conforming queer bodies that drives the
American Exceptionalist narrative – illustrated by the Wars on Communism and Terror
Chavez 15 Karma R., Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Mexican American & Latino/a Studies @ University of Texas-Austin. “The Precariousness of
Homonationalism: The Queer Agency of Terrorism in Post-9/11 Rhetoric,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ
Worldmaking, Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 2015, pp. 32-58 (Article) JE
Queerness, in the form of various kinds of sexual deviance, homosexuality, excessive promiscuity,
gender nonconformity, or other nonnormative gender and sexual practices or identities, has long been
blamed for national ills. Since September 11, 2001, some gay and lesbian identities have been mobilized
in service of the nation, a phenomenon Jasbir Puar has coined “homonationalism,” which extends the
concept of homonormativity.3 Homonationalism is “a facet of modernity and a historical shift marked
by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by nation-states, a constitutive
and fundamental reorientation of the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexuality.”4 Within
the United States, the gays and lesbians that the nation imagines as most worthy of protecting are those
who most conform to homonormative ideals: white, middle-class, monogamously coupled (now perhaps
married) U.S. citizens. Many gays and lesbians who approximate those norms take solace in the nation-
state’s recognition and legitimization of gay and lesbian identity through offers of marriage and military
rights, hate crime and employment protections, and inclusion in civic life. I write this article as many
gays and lesbians and their allies celebrate the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex
marriage nationwide, a byproduct of the homonationalist project, which says the state now counts a
new kind of relationship as legitimate. Those folded into the nation through marriage, military, or other
kinds of civic inclusion are defined over and against queer and queered others who are either left to die
(often poor or homeless gender nonconforming people of color) or targeted for death, a distinction Puar
calls “queer necropolitics.” Among the most prominent of those marked for death are queered Muslim
subjects, who are framed as sexually depraved terrorists.5 This tension between scapegoating and
leaving or marking for death on the one hand, and protecting and fostering life on the other, reveals the
precarious positioning of gays and lesbians in homonationalism; even when included, we are always
potentially threatening to the “us” that many imagine to comprise the national body.6 The protection
and security that normative gays and lesbians experience through homonationalism reflect what Puar
calls “the fantasy of the permanence” that “drives the production of exceptionalism, a narrative that is
historically and politically wedded to the formation of the U.S. nation-state.”7 The exceptional events of
September 11, 2001 created the circumstances for homonationalism, and they also unearthed enduring
discourses pertaining to queers who threaten the nation. Akin to the homosexual-communist-subversive
of the Cold War, the queer-immigrant-terrorist in the War on Terror haunts even the most included gay
subjects. Even when gays and lesbians are at the pinnacle of their inclusion, as in the case of someone
such as former U.S. Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA), the specter of queerness lurks. As Avery Gordon
reminds us, haunting and specters notify us “that what’s been concealed is very much alive and present
. . . .” 8 This specter becomes especially obvious when the sovereignty of the nation that has folded in
the gay subject is challenged or penetrated, especially via horrific acts of terrorism. Such a phenomenon
is perhaps even clearer in the post-9/11 moment with Muslim terrorists attacking the nation, some
overtly accused of homosexuality. In fact, the agency assigned to queerness for the September 11, 2001
attacks reveals a contemporary manifestation of the homosexual-communist-subversive logic in the
form of the queer immigrant-terrorist.9 It also shows the instability of the homonationalist project,
creating political possibility and material and political precarity for gay and queered subjects, a point to
which I will return in the conclusion of this article.
Impact—Homonationalism

Their expansion of multiculturalism is only another facet in which homonationalism


manifests – requires populations to assimilate into neoimperialist, homonormative
complacency that is used to advance the “national imaginary” that normalizes state-
centric biopolitical control, the ascendancy of whiteness, and American
Exceptionalism
Mendoza 9 Victor M., Joint appointment in Women's Studies and English and faculty associate in the
Department of American Culture, the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program, and the Center
for Southeast Asian Studies @ University of Michigan. “Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in
Queer Times (review),” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 12 no. 1, 2009, pp. 128-132. JE

On 18 September 2008, Diane Schroer won a federal lawsuit (Schroer v. Billington) against the Library of
Congress after a job search committee reneged on a 2005 employment offer. After getting the job offer,
Schroer, then known as David, told of his intention to undergo gender transitioning and, eventually,
transsexual [End Page 128] surgery. Officials retracted, saying that such a transition might compromise
her position, which was as a Specialist in Terrorism and International Crime with the Congressional
Research Service. While Schroer’s recent win is certainly a victory for civil rights advocates, it also speaks
directly to Jasbir Puar’s acute identification, in her introduction to Terrorist Assemblages, of three
symptoms of the “queer times” (that is, the neoimperialist, homonormative contemporary) we live in:
sexual exceptionalism, queer as regulatory, and the ascendancy of whiteness. “Sexual exceptionalism”
characterizes how U.S. national heteronormativity has absorbed particular previously-excluded gay and
queer subjects (not all of them) and cultural politics into American national life: “an exceptional form of
national heteronormativity is now joined by an exceptional form of national homonormativity, in other
words, homonationalism” (2). “Queer as regulatory” signals how LGBTIQ advocates and scholars’
conventional positioning of queerness as an inherently transgressive category—and thus as a mark of
liberalist agency, autonomy, and resistance—capitulates ultimately to forms of normalizing biopolitics.
The “ascendancy of whiteness,” a phrase which she draws from Rey Chow’s The Protestant
Ethnic (2002) and amends through Susan Koshy’s concept of “class fractioning,” describes how white
hegemony is consolidated not by the exclusion of the “ethnic” but rather through liberal multiculturalist
inclusion and its attendant violence on and separation of ethnic communities (31). On one hand, these
three manifestations of today’s queer times work in tandem to produce a nationally acceptable
queerness, thus projecting the U.S. as remarkably “tolerant” in its affording concessions to some queers.
On the other, they render other queer subjects—those who either are not white queer liberals or who
unwittingly benefit from and perpetuate the ascendancy of whiteness—far too perverse for inclusion
into the national imaginary. Ultimately, what has emerged is an exclusionary “global political economy
of queer sexualities” that “repeatedly coheres whiteness as a queer norm and straightness as a racial
norm” (xxiv)
The impact is the endless continuation of the war on terror. Now justified under
protecting “good gays” from “barbarous terrorists”, homonationalism is the latest tool
of the military industrial complex to shift the justifications for warfare to civilizing
missions that justify the worst violence in the world
Givelber 17, |Jackie, “Is Love a Battle field? The New Politics of Marriage Equality in the Aging War on
Terror”|

By now, the personal benefits afforded to queer folks wielding their marriage rights (as well as the corresponding
problems of the institution altogether) should be well established. It is important that the Obergefell decision not be
interpreted merely as a sort of rights-allocation to a traditionally marginalized group but as a crucial
element in the furtherance of the United States’ enduring quest for nation-building and nationalism.
Benedict Anderson’s theoretical conception of the nation as “an imagined community”— whose collective identity and purpose are located in
its fantasy of shared values and other points of alleged mutual identification—stands as a salient approach for understanding the state’s
incentive for granting marriage rights to same-sex couples.32 In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant situates her
analysis of present-day identity politics around the notion of “citizen trauma” in order to explain the United States’ investment in revamping its
nation-building efforts within the twenty-first century. Identifying some of the major drivers of widespread national insecurity as of recent, she
writes, “The
crisis of national future, stimulated by sexual politics, comes at a time when America feels
unsure about its value on a number of domains: in world military politics, in global economics, in
ecological practice, and in the claim that the nation has a commitment to sustaining justice, democracy,
and the American Dream when there seems to be less money and reliable work to go around.”33 In
identifying some of the underlying issues that continue to challenge possibilities for US nationhood, Berlant highlights the incentives driving the
nation-state’s commitment to curing its suffering sense of self. Our nation’s leaders naturally emerge as some of our most sacred keepers in
furthering this project to repair the nation. Accordingly, the illusion of absorbing certain queer folks into the nation-state presents itself as
central to the Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage. Kennedy’s remarks in Obergefell expose the extent to which marriage
bestows queer subjects access to citizenship34 and national belonging. He writes the following: [T]he Court’s cases and the Nation’s traditions
make clear that marriage is a keystone of the Nation’s social order ...When
the American retires from the turmoil of public
life to the bosom of the family, he finds in it the image of order and peace... [H]e afterwards carries [that image]
with him into public affairs ... For that reason, just as a couple vows to support each other, so does society pledge to support the couple,
offering symbolic recognition and material benefits to protect and nourish the union.35 Most noteworthy here is Kennedy’s rumination on the
symbiotic relationship between married couple and nation. His fantasy entails a social order in which spouses support each other, and in turn
the nation offers “symbolic recognition and material benefits to protect and nourish the union.” Kennedy’s articulation of the
linkage of marriage to nation is not without cause; indeed, it is a strategic and authoritative decree
effectively permitting—if not insisting on—the good queer’s entry into the nation-state. Riding on the
coattails of established US ideology that has sought to define the nation by its commitments and rules to
marriage, Obergefell serves as the effective culmination of a political progression in which the nation-
state becomes reimagined as belonging to the good queer, too. As I display in the sections to follow, the
bestowment of dignity and social citizenship onto the good queer through these judicial proceedings will
eventually lend itself to the rhetorical premises supporting Trump’s warmongering presidential agenda.
III. A Queer’s Right to Marriage is the Nation’s Right to War: Reimagining the Nation’s Role in the War on Terror “ Only weeks ago in
Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time the
terrorist targeted the LGBTQ community... As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect
our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful, foreign ideology... And I have to say, as a
Republican, it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said.” —Donald J. Trump, Republican National Convention, July 21, 201636 The
concurrent progressions of the crusade for marriage equality and the War on Terror are not an accident.
Indeed, in peculiar ways the two campaigns have functioned in tandem, with each defining and driving the
basis for the other. Following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, the nation found itself extensively
reimagining who it was and the nature of the threats lodged against it.37 Accordingly, while June 26, 2015 may be understood as
the culmination of the good queer’s absorption into the image of the nation-state,38 we may also view
September 11, 2001 as the commencement of a colossal campaign to define and obliterate public
enemy number one—the bad Muslim, the terrorist.39 Donald Trump’s recent pledge to “protect our LGBTQ
citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful, foreign ideology”— Islam, to be explicit—signals
a key turning point in the War on Terror and the socio- political conditions that sustain it. For the first
time in mainstream US politics, we see bipartisanship around a particular kind of “queer rights”–albeit
hawkish by nature and premised on the eradication of Muslim bodies in “defense” of certain queer
ones. For the remainder of this paper, I argue that the legalization of same-sex marriage and the continuation of the
War on Terror are inherently linked in producing this fairly new brand of mainstream queer politics. I do so
by exposing the particular ways in which the defensibility of the good queer—as promoted by liberals, Donald
Trump, and other likeminded Republican leaders40—is contingent upon the construction of the bad
Muslim as savage, religiously zealous, morally devoid, sexually deviant and racially other. Furthermore, I
situate this analysis within the broader discourse of “American exceptionalism”41—a concept that relies heavily on a
belief in the United States as superior (morally or otherwise) in order to legitimize enduring modes of
intervention throughout the Middle East, be it under the pretense of “humanitarian aid” or flat out war. By tracing some of the
key moments that have defined the nation-state’s investment in the War on Terror, I aim to reveal the critical role that the
fluidity of the US nation-state’s morality politics has played in maintaining efforts to target Muslims and
prolonging what has already been the most drawn-out war in US history. E. Defining the Muslim Threat to the Queer
and the Nation The seemingly abrupt arrival of the good queer as a defensible citizen must not merely be
understood as an isolated phenomenon but as part of a larger project to systemically filter and weed out
adversaries of the nation-state. Just as unwed queer folks, prostitutes, and heterosexual women of color on welfare, for example,
emerge all the more deviant against their newly “legalized” queer-marrying counterparts, so too does the
Muslim body become the object of intensified surveillance, discipline, and punishment at home and
abroad. In Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir K. Puar coins the term “homonationalism” to describe the process by which the emergence of
a “pro-gay” national discourse supports the nation-state’s mission to other and target suspect Muslim bodies; she writes, “For
contemporary forms of U.S. nationalism and patriotism, the production of gay and queer bodies is
crucial to the deployment of nationalism, insofar as these perverse bodies reiterate heterosexuality as
the norm but also because certain domesticated homosexual bodies provide ammunition to reinforce
nationalist projects.”42 Indeed, her reference to “certain domesticated homosexual bodies [that] provide
ammunition to reinforce nationalist projects” concerns those good queers whose acquiescence to marriage and other
expressions of normative sexuality guarantees their passage into the nation-state, imagined or otherwise. The domestication of the
queer thus becomes crucial to the process by which the nation-state reimagines who it is and,
conversely, who it is not. Accordingly, the good queer is deployed not only as a mouthpiece for the
nation’s principles but also as a weapon43 against the nation’s primary adversary—the Muslim
terrorist—from whom the good queer is definitively distinguished. Indeed, the legalization of same-sex
marriage throughout the Western world has proven integral to the production of this queer-versus-
Muslim mythology. Referring to the nature of these ideological forces prior to the Obergefell ruling in 2015, Puar writes the following:
Gay marriage, ‘less about gay rights and more about codifying European values,’ has become a steep but necessary insurance premium in
Europe, whereby an otherwise ambivalent if not hostile populace can guarantee that extra bit of security
that is bought by yet another marker in this distance between barbarism and civilization, one that
justifies further targeting of a perversely sexualized and racialized Muslim population (pedophilic, sexually
lascivious, and excessive, yet perversely repressed) who refuse to properly assimilate, in contrast to the upright homosexuals engaged in
sanctioned kinship norms... Among other groups, OutRage!44 is codifying, for
Europeans but also implicitly for Americans,
that Muslims are an especial threat to homosexuals, that Muslim fundamentalists have deliberately and
specifically targeted homosexuals, and that the parameters of this opposition correlate with those of the
war on terror: civilization versus barbarism.45 Touted as an indicator of the West’s civilizational prowess, the recent
emergence of same-sex marriage proves remarkably convenient as a cogwheel in the West’s ever-
evolving War-on-Terror story. Interestingly, today’s Republican leaders who promote the protection of
LGBTQ folks against “Islamic terror” also sought to constitutionally ban same-sex marriage and adoption
by same-sex couples not long ago (in 1999, in Paul Ryan’s case).46 The present-day promotion of queer-
defensibility relies heavily on long- standing constructions of the Middle East as breeding-grounds for
bloodthirsty zealots and of Muslims as racialized, sexualized, barbarous subjects. The racialization of Muslims is
aided by a confluence of factors; indeed, numerous physical identifiers—such as dress, behavior, and phenotypic expressions—become legible
to Westerners only through traditional Orientalist translations47 and present-day efforts to group Muslims according to essentialized tropes—
the infidel savage, slave/captive, terrorist, and immigrant.48 These
hegemonic characterizations of Muslims thus
undergird the rhetorical foundations of the War on Terror and a western investment in promoting its
civil values—including domesticated queerness—against the purported savagery and intolerance of the
Muslim world. Indeed, the West’s commitment to imagining and developing this queer-versus- Muslim discourse may be read as a crucial
element in the furtherance of American- exceptionalism mythologies and parallel calls to war. Describing the fundamentally ironic conditions of
“American exceptionalism,” Jasbir Puar writes, “the United
States creates the impression that empire is beyond the
pale of it own morally upright behavior, such that all violences of the state are seen, in some moral
cultural, or political fashion as anything but the violence of empire. U.S. exceptionalism hangs on a
narrative of transcendence...that posits America as the arbiter of appropriate ethics, human rights, and
democratic behavior while exempting itself without hesitation from such universalizing mandates.”49
Coincidentally, the ferocity of American-exceptionalism rhetoric and the nation-state’s aggressive claims to
moral superiority enable US militarism and other intervention methods to deceitfully enact the very
“savage” conditions it allegedly seek to eliminate throughout the Muslim world. As such, the
mainstreaming of homonationalism and particular notions of “queer rights” opportunely accommodates
long-standing narratives of American exceptionalism and corresponding efforts to monitor, regulate,
and enforce bloodshed across the Muslim world under the guise of moral-politicking. F. Practicing
Exceptionalism in the Middle East Although fairly recent in the scheme of American exceptionalism, the promotion of queer-defensibility as a
justification for warfare against Muslims is not unprecedented on the global stage. Dubbed “pinkwashing” by queer and trans activists, efforts
by the Israeli government to brand Israel as “gay friendly”50 in contrast to its “homophobic” Palestinian neighbors have proven central to
Israeli military practices and public relations. This discourse hinges on furthering the notion of “Israeli exceptionalism” in its tolerance of
homosexuality in order to deflect interrogative arguments concerning occupation, settler colonialism, and apartheid and to legitimize its brutal
military efforts in the Palestinian territories. Highlighting the methods by which pinkwashing
raises Israel as “civilized” and
racializes Palestinians as “barbaric, homophobic, uncivilized, suicide-bombing fanatics,” Puar writes, “In
reproducing orientalist tropes of Palestinian sexual backwardness, [Israel] also denies the impact of colonial occupation on the degradation and
containment of Palestinian cultural norms and values. Pinkwashing
harnesses global gays as a new source of affiliation,
recruiting liberal gays into a dirty bargaining of their own safety against the oppression of Palestinians,
now perforce rebranded as ‘gay unfriendly.’”51 Although the Israeli nation-state has been advancing such “pro-gay” messaging
for years with the backing of the US, queer-defensibility as a budding strategy within the US nation-state’s own warmongering platform has
curiously materialized only after the legalization of same-sex marriage. Indeed,
this revelation further evidences the critical
role that “legalizing queerness”—with all its respectable bells and whistles attached—has played in
mobilizing emergent nationalist mythologies towards hawkish recourse globally. Before the queer defense came
into fruition, the enforcement of American exceptionalism in the Muslim world manifested in efforts to restore “gender equality,” centering the
liberation of Muslim women from the oppression of Muslim men and, for all intents and purposes, Islam altogether. After President George W.
Bush launched the War on Terror on October 7, 2001, First Lady Laura Bush became the quintessential spokesperson for promoting the
liberation of the Afghan woman under the Taliban. Indeed, the First Lady (alongside her husband) played a decisive role in explicitly linking
“feminism” to the US military bombardment of Afghanistan, famously pronouncing “the fight against terrorism [as] also a fight for the rights
and dignity of women” in a radio address to the nation.52 The Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF)—a nongovernmental organization
committed to “Stopping Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan,”53 among other issues—echoed the First Lady’s words and promoted the war as a
“benevolent” cause against the gender-segregated conditions in Afghanistan, rallying policymakers and the American public around the
“equitable” principles driving US intervention. The FMF’s seemingly admirable campaign centered on dislodging the authority of the Taliban,
inserting a democratic government composed of Afghan women, providing emergency humanitarian assistance, and aiding in the
reconstruction of the economy and infrastructure of Afghanistan. The American public’s backing of the war in Afghanistan
was in large part supported by this “emancipatory” rhetoric. However women’s studies scholar Ann Russo interrupts
this hegemonic US-savior discourse by highlighting the extent to which these “humanitarian” objectives served to
reinforce notions of US superiority and “benevolence” in order to rationalize military control and
intervention. In her critical analysis of the Foundation, she writes the following: The FMF campaign assumes ‘Western’
superiority through its ahistorical and Orientalist focus on ‘the veil’ and gender segregation as symbolic
of women’s oppression and its implicit assumption that the US embodies gender equality and women’s
human rights. This Orientalist logic constructs an absolute difference between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’/
‘self’ and ‘other’. It does so by erasing the history and politics of Afghanistan and by projecting a cultural
barbarity in need of a civilizing mission. The assumption of superiority and benevolence is possible because the FMF evades its
own implication in the politics of the region and condones the terms of imperialism – the right to control, the right to
invade and the right to occupy under the guise of ‘liberating’ women and creating ‘gender equality’
resonant with so-called Western standards.54 Russo’s reflections situate the “equitable” agenda of the Feminist Majority
Foundation and First Lady Laura Bush within the larger Western imperialist and hegemonic framework. She challenges these efforts to defend
US militarization as exercises in “benevolence,” calling attention to their critical role in reifying Western dominance over cultural and political
autonomies of peoples abroad—particularly those in the predominantly Muslim and Arab countries of the “Orient.” Accordingly, the “liberation
of the Afghan woman” reveals itself as yet another manufactured alibi in the furtherance of US geopolitical hegemony. Indeed, this
protectionist discourse reminds us of the substantial role that moral- politicking has played in activating
the massive US war-machine as well as of the strength with which it resonates today. It is the state’s
capacity to project a “moral cause” onto the conflict that sustains the War on Terror, insofar as the moral
politics of the moment remain relevant to the American public. Since its original launch fifteen years ago, the story of the War on
Terror continues to evolve and re-introduce itself according to the authoritative forces of contemporary
US politics; we have watched its agenda transform from “protecting the Afghan woman” in 2001 to
“protecting the American queer” in 2016, all the while holding our breath on the defensibility of the war itself. These
changes expose the extent to which the terms of the War on Terror remain
malleable and relevant in accordance with shifting political tones on US soil,
enabling the conflict to persist with indefinite reach. IV. Conclusion: The Stakes of the War on Terror
Story The convergence of the politics of marriage equality and the aging War on Terror reflects the sheer
stamina of contemporary American warfare ideology. The invocation of queer-defensibility as fodder for
the already-immense counterterror state is revealing in two fundamental ways: on the one hand, it
exposes a reimagined nation-state in which privileged queer folks now find home and security, and on
the other, it demonstrates the tenacity of the War on Terror and its ability to persevere simply by
reimagining the threats that are posed against the nation-state. Between Congress’ declaration of war on September
14, 200155 and the signing of the Patriot Act into law on October 21, 200156, the US government became equipped with an
unprecedented degree of military and surveillance authority in the name of national security. Indeed, when
President Bush announced “our War on Terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there; it will not end until every terrorist group of
global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated,”57 he
effectively opened the door for a counterterror campaign
whose unforeseeably immense capacities would have surprised perhaps even him. National imagination
has played a key role in defining the parameters of the conflict; as Joseph Masco describes, “The innovation of the War
on Terror is that it formally rejects deterrence, with its focus on global stability, as an objective in favor of preemption—an unending
manipulation of the future for national advantage.”58 Rooted
in the provocation of fear and the boundless imagined
possibilities of existential threat to the union, the War on Terror prospers in its ability to morph and
seemingly respond to national sentiment, wherever it lands at any given moment. Whether or not the
infrastructures of the War on Terror are actually activated in the name of protecting queer folks from “Islamic terrorism” is beside the point. It
is of more immediate concern that those innocent Muslim and Arab communities across the Middle
East, South Asia, and the Western world—which since 9/11 have become the sites of ritualized
surveillance, scrutiny, and violence under the pretense of “national security” and the promotion of
“Western” values—become centered in mainstream conceptions of the War on Terror as well as the
rhetorical ploys and moral- politicking that continue to sustain it.
Impact—Imperialism

Immigration is scripted along the lines of a homonationalist view of deviance—These


forms of acceptability politics helps devalue anyone outside of the white, western
queer architype. Homonationalism the a mobilization of sexual exceptionalism and
dominate expectations of queerness to promote western imperialism and
Islamophobic depictions of the world
Sharif 2015 (Raihan,"White Gaze Saving Brown Queers: Homonationalism Meets Imperialist
Islamophobia" Professor of cultural studies at Washington university,
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4598/b7e90f468d513167230d280a5e14d2fea582.pdf)

Global gay discourse and teleological developmental narrative of queerness situate non-Western
queerness as not queer enough. The case studies presented show that both global gay discourse and teleological developmental
narratives tend to play a decisive role in the perception of non-Western queerness as an inadequate
queerness. The case studies also suggest that to compensate for this inadequacy, Muslim queers are encouraged to
come up with Islamophobic persecution stories, which demonize their native countries and religion by
portraying them as homophobic. This demonization should be examined critically, since it often goes unnoticed due to
the easy acceptability of the binary juxtaposition between progressive West and homophobic Islam. Some
Western nations use personal disaster narratives of queer asylum seekers to reinforce Islamophobia. The treatment of the Afghan Christian
discussed above when compared to the treatment of gay asylum seekers reveals a double standard in some Western nations’ designation of
refugee status. This article asks: is freedom of sexuality given the same protections as freedom of religion in the United Nations’ (UN) Charter of
Human Rights? Does this double standard manifest any hierarchic prioritizing of freedom of religion over freedom of sexuality in assigning
asylum status to refugees? This logic of binary association and hierarchic prioritizing can also be traced in queer asylum tribunals’ frame of
credibility: for them, brown queers presenting personal disaster spectacles pass the test of immutable sexuality while other brown queers, who
go through persecution but do not have evidence of personal disaster, fail. This
creates a demand for disaster stories in
places where such disaster is less likely to emerge, because the distinctive homophobic contexts in those
places do not follow the simplistic pattern from homophobia to disaster and death. However, between the
poles of homophobia and death, what determines the living conditions of brown queers are extreme social
harassment, total isolation and abandonment by friends and family, which can be equally devastating.
When asking for persecution stories, immigration officials often do not consider the diverse living conditions and socio-cultural backgrounds
brown queers come from. Bangladesh, for example, is yet to abolish the British colonial law, which criminalizes all other sexual acts except
heterosexuality: Penal Code, 1860 (Act XLV of 1860, Section 377). Whoever voluntary has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with
man, woman, or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to 10
years, and shall also be liable to fine. Explanation: Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence
described in this section. Here only heterosexuality among humans is considered natural and thus homosexuality, bisexuality, and any other
sexual acts are subject to fine and imprisonment, from ten years to life. It should also be noted that no one has been penalized under this law in
Bangladesh. There are two possible reasons behind this. First, homosexuals in Bangladesh usually lead a discreet life. Second, governments
want to protect homosexuals when their homosexuality becomes an issue for public discontent. This attitude is reflected in their stance on
Fatwas, verdicts supposedly based on interpretations of the Holy Quran. In Bangladesh, issuing a Fatwa is not illegal, but the execution of a
Fatwa is illegal. It provides some security to Bangladeshi homosexuals. But legal reform banning Fatwa is not always reflected in societal values,
beliefs, prejudices and stereotypes. Thus, despite the reduced likelihood of Bangladeshi queers facing the death penalty, living with queer
identity in Bangladesh is challenging enough to warrant claims for asylum in some cases. Queer individuals face social stigmatization and
persecution which prevent them from living normal, fulfilled lives and can lead to degenerating mental health and suicide. A recent survey
shows that 32% of homosexual men have a history of suicide attempt while 47% reports that they have considered committing suicide at least
once. Insteadof considering these factors, queer asylum tribunals in Western countries seek persecution
stories that prove immutable homosexuality. In cases of Muslim queer asylum seekers, the expectation for personal
disaster spectacle has been so normalized that it is not critically questioned. Queer asylum tribunals’ reliance
on global gay discourse brings into question whether there any correlations between this bias in favour of the
disaster spectacle and a requirement to prove homophobia in Muslim majority countries. Western
asylum tribunals tend to define homosexuality within the confines of global gay discourse, which views
white queers as the archetype of homosexuality, ignoring potential differences in the identity and appearance of brown
queers. Consequently, tribunals look for the ‘right’ appearance of homosexuals in the bodies of brown queers,
which are usually based on the appearance of white queers. In this way, the tribunals work within teleological
developmental narratives, which assume Western homosexuality to be more progressive and evolved
than non-Western practices of homosexuality. As Manalansan argues, ‘all same sex phenomena are placed
within a developmental and teleological matrix that ends with Western “gay” identity’.5 Arnaldo Cruz-Malave
and Martin Manalansan critique the teleological developmental narrative, as it conceptualizes non-western queer formations as not yet
appropriately lesbian or gay. They
challenge global developmental narrative because it is ‘developmental
narrative in which a premodern, pre-political, non-EuroAmerican queerness must consciously assume
the burdens of representing itself to itself and others as ‘gay’ in order to attain political consciousness,
subjectivity, and global modernity.’6 Thus, they identify a challenge for brown queers who must await
Euro-American legitimization to get considered as right-bearing subjects in the first place. Puri critiques
the global gay discourse as she argues, Shaped in the aftermath of the post-Stonewall era in the United States, gay takes the
meaning within this developmental frame that originates with an unliberated, prepolitical, homosexual
practice and culminates in the liberated, politicized, out, modern gay subject. In so far as gay is singularly
understood within the framework of bourgeois civil society and individual subjectivity, homosexuality
and gayness in non-western contexts are found wanting.7 Both Manalansan and Puri argue how the imperial gaze
of the West finds nonWestern queerness as either inappropriate or non-existent. Jasbir K Puar in Terrorist
Assemblages similarly argues that the politics of homonormativity normalize western homosexuality and
homonationalism and marginalizes non-western queers as inappropriate. Homonationalism is ‘a form of
sexual exceptionalism – the emergence of national homosexuality’.8 Puar goes on to argue that homonormativity is
the assumption that homosexuality is normal and common in western countries and these countries use homonationalism ‘as a regulatory
script not only of normative gayness, queerness, or homosexuality, but also of the racial and national norms that reinforce these sexual
subjects’.9 For Puar, homonationalism implicates ‘a collusion between homosexuality and American
nationalism’10, in which the production and display of domesticated homosexual bodies makes claims for
national progress, which in turn provide legitimacy to civilize other non-homonational countries by
declaring war on them. Puar here builds upon Lisa Duggan’s identification of an emerging trend within neoliberal sexual
politics that does not ‘contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions…but upholds
and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized,
depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’. While Duggan recognizes homonormativity as a
new sexual politics, Puar extends it first to nation-state and then to transnational contexts. Puar argues that ‘homonationalism is not
property of any nation-state’12; it is a field of power which more and more western countries want to
possess, deploy and benefit from. In this configuration of homonationalism as field of power, the
spectre of the terrorist within the orientalist representation of Muslims as essential other has always
provided legitimacy to any homonationalist project. Assigning asylum status to non- western queers is
one such homonationalist project in which the myth of sexual exceptionalism, the freedom for people of all
sexual orientations and practices is invested upon to gloss the atrocities in the war economy of homonationalist
countries.
Admission into the US requires fronting Islamophobic personal disaster narratives that
help mobilize homonationalism. This will always be the case due to the hyper visibility
of queerness
Sharif 2015 (Raihan,"White Gaze Saving Brown Queers: Homonationalism Meets Imperialist
Islamophobia" Professor of cultural studies at Washington university,
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4598/b7e90f468d513167230d280a5e14d2fea582.pdf)

Another Bangladeshi gay received political asylum in the USA.22 The Washington Blade, a gay and
lesbian publication in Washington DC, reported in August 1997 that the (formerly known as)
Immigration and Naturalization Service granted political asylum to a Bangladeshi gay man who was
threatened with stoning by Islamic extremists in his home city of Dhaka. In his affidavit, the man
reported that he had been raped by police, forced into electroshock treatment and ordered by his family
to enter into an arranged marriage. The country information evidence utilized in the cases from
Bangladesh is very general in tone and much of it is very dated. In this particular case, most of the
country evidence was five years old at the time of tribunal decision. More recent and more detailed
evidence would have challenged the tribunal’s repeated findings: whereas the tribunal finds that
Bangladeshis are tolerant of male homosexual behaviour, a study reflecting the time when the case was
in operation shows otherwise—homosexuals going through widespread violence at the hands of police
and others. The study found that 64 per cent of respondents had faced police harassment, 48 per cent
had been sexually assaulted by police and a further 65 per cent had been sexually assaulted by mastaans
(thugs, who are often involved with the police through bribery and other practices) while 71% had
experienced other forms of harassment, such as extortion and bashings.23

Analysis: In this case, success for queer asylum applicants came through only relying on the
homonationalist ideologies where the role of stoning, fatwa, Islamic fundamentalists’ abuse of
minorities, etc. have been foregrounded. In successful asylum cases, both the personal disaster
spectacle and discretion test are encouraged to form around such homonationalist formation. While the
sources of persecution through fatwa may still exist in the rural areas, it is also an undeniable fact that
the fatwa or stoning until death is highly condemned in Bangladesh. Since 2011, any enforcement of
fatwa has been ruled as illegal in Bangladesh. Because of public awareness against the fatwa,
Bangladeshi gays are less likely to be faced with it, but it doesn’t imply that other forms of sociocultural
obstacles—as I have outlined above—have also vanished. However, it is possible that the ruling against
enforcement of fatwa in Bangladesh will now be used to argue for the validity of the discretion test that
recommends hiding sexuality and continuing to live in home countries. Ironically, this recommendation
reinforces both heteropatriarchal and homonationalist hegemonies, suggesting that in the hierarchic
conceptualization of sexuality and nationality ‘Bangladeshi homosexuality’ is to be kept under the rug
while ‘western homosexuality’ is to be publicly practiced. The recent ruling will only worsen the
situation, because Bangladeshi queers will lose any convincing ground on which they can perform
personal disaster spectacles to reinforce homonationalism. The fact that changes in law will not
necessarily stop those ‘intense but unspectacular’ miseries – rejection by family members, social taboos
and stigmas that are also present in some western countries like the US – will be ignored. In order to
avoid this outcome, instead of demanding personal disaster spectacles or evidence of persecution, other
sociocultural factors should be taken into consideration. These include the impossibility of maintaining
discreet relationships in asylum seekers’ countries of origin. Unfortunately, because of the heightened
significance of visibility in proving their queerness, and the privileging of provable persecution over
unprovable and unspectacular suffering, personal disaster spectacles will continue to be sought out
during the legal procedures of queer asylum cases.
Impact—Neolib (Family)

family-based immigration is based on a neoliberal logic of revoking government


assistance and maximizing productivity
Gerken 8 (Christina, Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Indiana University South Bend with a
Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University, “Neo-Liberalism and Family Values in 1990s Immigration
Reform Discourse”, disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, April 2008, Issue 17, pp. 45-71,
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1075&context=disclosure)//JSL

A generous family reunification system was advantageous because family ties represented an additional
safety net. In an attempt to downsize the government apparatus and decrease federal spending,
politicians were eager to activate informal support systems and to shift responsibility from the state to
the individual, or, in certain cases, the family unit. Some commentators showed a clear understanding of the
way family values and neo-liberalism work together. Karen K. Narasaki, the Executive Director of the National Asian Pacific
American Council, for example, reasoned that "families are the backbone of our nation. Family unity promotes the stability, health and
productivity of family members and contributes to the economic and social welfare of the United States" (United
States Congress, House, 1995b). A continuation of the family preference system was also attractive because the pro-family rhetoric
that accompanied this discussion would send a positive message to other nations and encourage
desirable immigrants to join our national community. Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), for instance, justified the
emphasis on family reunification with the following words: "We send a clear signal that we value keeping family members united and together,
that we value a policy of fairness [...], that we value the history and character of our Nation and that the United States values inclusion and
understanding and opportunity, rather than exclusion, blame, and fear" (United States Congress, House, 1996a). Even though Gutierrez
emphasized the historical significance of family values without making a direct reference to families' economic importance, this comment also
complements the neo-liberal logic of Senator DeWine (R-OH). After all, families
who stay "united and together" were
expected to support each other so that the government would not have to provide assistance.
Frequently, politicians and expert witnesses also described immigrants as positive role models who could
make an important cultural contribution by promoting a return to conventional family values. John Swenson,
the Executive Director of Migration and Refugee Services of the Catholic Church, argued that "many immigrant groups represent cultures which
place a premium on family ties. [...]. It
is important that, as a nation, we recognize the importance of affirming
family within the immigration context as a means of [...] affirming the family in the U.S. in general" (United
States Congress, House, 1995b). While it is hardly surprising that a spokesperson for the Catholic Church would focus on the importance of
traditional family values, delegates
from various organizations and politicians from both ends of the political
spectrum advanced a similar rhetoric. They claimed that immigrants' adherence to traditional family
values represented an important contribution to a society facing high divorce and teenage pregnancy
rates. Immigrants were desirable because they could potentially remind U.S. citizens of the significance
of a strong family unit and showcase that intact families were also productive families.

The rhetoric surrounding families in immigration drives a neoliberal, heteronormative


agenda that systematically excludes any other family structures
Gerken 8 (Christina, Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Indiana University South Bend with a
Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University, “Neo-Liberalism and Family Values in 1990s Immigration
Reform Discourse”, disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, April 2008, Issue 17, pp. 45-71,
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1075&context=disclosure)//JSL
These depictions of the immigrant population were problematic for a number of reasons. First, the
aforementioned family values rhetoric portrayed immigrants as a conservative force that could help the
U.S. return to traditional values. These comments classified immigrants as a group of people who were
less corrupted by the dislocations typical of advanced capitalist societies. According to this logic,
immigrants could help to reinvigorate a society that was too preoccupied with the distractions and
indulgences of modern life and initiate a return to heteropatriarchal values. Second, this simplistic
portrayal glossed over the fact that immigrants represent an increasingly diverse group of people from a
variety of cultural backgrounds. The claim that all immigrants honored the importance of family networks was thus factually
incorrect. While certain immigrants undoubtedly attached great importance to the nuclear family unit,
others defined family and kinship in different terms, and yet others were just as individualistic as many
U.S. citizens. Finally, this notion of the family was also an indicator of the heteronormative logic behind
immigration reform. When politicians argued that immigrants should be allowed to enter the U.S.
because of their eagerness to live in traditional two-parent families, they also implied that those people
who did not adhere to this norm were less desirable. At no point in my research did I find a politician
argue for a more inclusive definition of the family unit that would have included unmarried couples,
gay and lesbian couples, or transgendered people. Even though the outright exclusion of gay and lesbian immigrants had
been abolished in 1990, politicians were not only reluctant to take any affirmative steps towards allowing
homosexual immigrants to take advantage of the family reunification system, but they were apparently
hesitant to even acknowledge the fact that not all immigrants lived in traditional two-parent families.
This unwillingness to include non-heteronormative families also indicates that the "family
reunification" category was not primarily concerned with reuniting people who loved each other.
Quite to the contrary, politicians made it very clear that traditional heteropatriarchal families were the
only social units that were evidentially stable enough to provide long-lasting support. In short,
heteronormative family values could be easily integrated into the neo-liberal agenda, while other forms
of family and kinship systems were not necessarily interpreted as an indicator that guaranteed financial
stability and economic success.

Rhetorical appeals to family unity are used solely to paper over a neoliberal effort to
shift financial responsibility for immigrants to individuals
Gerken 8 (Christina, Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Indiana University South Bend with a
Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University, “Neo-Liberalism and Family Values in 1990s Immigration
Reform Discourse”, disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, April 2008, Issue 17, pp. 45-71,
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1075&context=disclosure)//JSL

Even though politicians were generally eager to express their own commitment to family values and, as we
have seen in the previous section, repeatedly praised immigrants' dedication to their families, these concerns were oftentimes
outweighed by economic considerations. Throughout the legislative period, the discourse gradually shifted from
economically-oriented proposals that contained sharp limitations for family-sponsored immigrants to
comparatively more generous proposals. This shift is indicative of the larger tendency to combine
economic objectives with other, more palatable considerations. In order to make bills more appealing to
representatives from both ends of the political spectrum, the final reform proposals made almost no outright exclusions. Instead,
they assigned less economically desirable groups -- such as elderly parents -- a very low priority and thus
limited their admission numbers indirectly. Despite the fact that all of the major immigration reform bills contained provisions
that would have negatively affected parents' chances to immigrate, the final version of the law (P.L. 104-208) did not change the family
preference system. Up to this day, U.S. immigration policy holds that children, spouses, and parents of U.S. citizens are classified as "immediate
relatives" and are thus not subject to numerical limitations.(FN16) Parents of U.S. citizens still receive preferential treatment over many other
groups -- including spouses and unmarried sons and daughters of legal permanent residents -- who are much more likely to develop into net
contributors. In addition, the U.S. government did not pass any risk-management provisions that specifically applied to elderly immigrants (e.g.
mandatory health insurance). Instead, the IIRIRA made the affidavit of support legally enforceable, required sponsors to
provide evidence that they could maintain the sponsored immigrants at an annual income no less than 125% of the poverty line and ensured
that the affidavit was enforceable until a sponsored immigrant had naturalized or until they had worked 40 qualifying quarters of coverage as
defined under Title II of the Social Security Act.(FN17) The
U.S. government had successfully shifted financial
responsibility from the state to the individual sponsor. Especially in the case of elderly immigrants, whose naturalization
rates have always been low, sponsors were likely to make a lifetime commitment when they signed an affidavit of support. The affidavit of
support could be expected to reduce the number of elderly SSI recipients for four interrelated reasons: First,
new arrivals would be
ineligible to receive public support for a minimum of five years. Second, even if immigrants became
eligible for public support, they might be reluctant to take advantage of this opportunity because of the
likelihood that they would be deported as a public charge. Third, many potential sponsors would be
unable to demonstrate that they had an income at or above 125 percent of the federal poverty line.
And, fourth, even if sponsors had the necessary financial resources, they might be hesitant to sign a
legally-enforceable contract for elderly parents who were unable to support themselves (Luibhéid 2005).
Consequently, a legally-enforceable affidavit of support represented an ideal mechanism to reduce
federal spending, while -- at least rhetorically -- upholding a commitment to family values. The repeated
reference to family values served a number of important discursive functions. The bill's proponents
convincingly argued that this reform measure was neither biased nor mean-spirited. Sensing that the
economically-oriented logic behind the new immigration policy might be controversial among certain
groups, these politicians portrayed the affidavit of support as a generous compromise that allowed
immigrants to bring additional family members into the U.S. If immigrants continued to put such a high
premium on family ties, they should be willing to accept some additional financial responsibilities. At the
same time, those people who were unwilling to sign an affidavit of support were apparently not
particularly committed to their family members and thus not worthy of family reunification visas.

Restrictions surrounding family immigration have a basis in exclusionary mindsets


meant to keep out the “undesirable” immigrant
Gerken 8 (Christina, Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Indiana University South Bend with a
Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University, “Neo-Liberalism and Family Values in 1990s Immigration
Reform Discourse”, disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, April 2008, Issue 17, pp. 45-71,
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1075&context=disclosure)//JSL

Congress also struggled to reconcile pro-family rhetoric with their unwillingness to support "chain
migration." On March 21, 1996, for instance, Lamar Smith (R-TX) warned that "the admission of a single immigrant
over time can result in the admissions of dozens of increasingly distant family members. Without reform
of the immigration system, chain migration of relatives who are distantly related to the original
immigrant will continue on and on and on" (United States Congress, House, 1996b). Later in the debate, Senator Alan K.
Simpson (R-WY) painted an even more frightening picture. On April 15, 1996, he asserted that he had heard of cases where a single U.S. citizen
or legal permanent resident successfully petitioned up to 70 family members and ten days later, he proclaimed that "the all-time record was 83
persons on a single petition" (United States Congress, Senate, 1996b). Even though politicians like Representative Xavier Becerra (D-CA), and
Senators Spencer Abraham (R-MI) and Mike DeWine (R-OH) repeatedly corrected these exaggerated statistics and alarmist examples and
reminded their colleagues that family reunification was a very slow process, the
concern about chain migration not only
influenced policy decisions but it also validated several problematic assumptions: Simpson and Smith's
remarks seemed to suggest that most immigrants had large families with multiple children, siblings,
cousins, aunts and uncles. Even though they did not explicitly comment on cultural differences in this context, both speakers
clearly implied that the U.S. government needed to be concerned about 'uncontrolled Third World
sexuality.' Many politicians firmly believed that all of these family members would actually come to America if given the chance. They
implied that distant family members were not only undeserving, but would put a burden on U.S. society.
Congressional Debates thus set up a false dichotomy between family members and skilled workers and ignored the fact that many family-
sponsored immigrants had a high level of education and professional experience. As the aforementioned examples have shown, the
discourse combined specific economic concerns with general anxieties about the social and cultural
impact of a large, ethnically diverse immigrant population. Even though numerous speakers were not shy to point out that
past generations of white Western European immigrants were far superior to current immigrants, they were obviously reluctant to suggest a
return to racially exclusive laws as the solution to America's perceived immigrant problem. Instead, Congress
developed a complex
rhetoric which suggested that contemporary immigrants had failed to succeed because they had refused
to assimilate to mainstream American culture. In accordance with the economic reasoning of the larger
neo-liberal project, politicians denied the importance of inherent characteristics -- such as race and
nationality -- and instead focused on the negative choices made by certain individuals. Poor Mexicans
were perceived as less desirable not because they were poor or of Hispanic descent, but because they
supposedly had failed to act like responsible, neo-liberal subjects (i.e. like law-abiding, middle-class U.S. citizens who
just happened to be overwhelmingly white).

A neoliberal framework underlies the systematic exclusion of non-heteronormative


immigrants from these discussions
Gerken 8 (Christina, Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Indiana University South Bend with a
Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University, “Neo-Liberalism and Family Values in 1990s Immigration
Reform Discourse”, disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, April 2008, Issue 17, pp. 45-71,
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1075&context=disclosure)//JSL

This tendency to favor simplistic distinctions is representative of the larger neo-liberal discourse. Throughout
the immigration
debate, politicians were reluctant to discuss more complex issues. Instead of critically interrogating the
notion of a "nuclear family" in order to develop a more inclusive concept, for example, politicians based
their reform proposals on their own, narrow definitions. In addition, Congress did not define immigrants'
exact contributions and they did not talk openly about immigrants' sexuality, nationality, and race. This
refusal to engage with the complexities of the matter is indicative of a general belief that politicians should be concerned with their
constituencies and the U.S. government's perspective, not with immigrants themselves. What counts in this instance is the effect that a certain
behavior has on society at large, not the motivations behind this behavior. Even more importantly, the
neo-liberal framework
denied the importance of inherent characteristics. Instead of talking about race or sexuality, immigrants
were judged by their ability to navigate the U.S. labor market and their eagerness to become a part of
mainstream culture. Accordingly, if immigrants struggled to succeed by U.S. standards, this was
interpreted as their own fault, not as the result of racism or discrimination.
Impact—Orientalism
The idea of citizenship is founded on Orientalist conceptions of the “Other” – their
inclusion of more bodies into the political simultaneously works to discipline identity
into forms of hetero and homonormativity while also strengthening the divide
between the “Citizen” and the Oriental “Other”
Sabsay 12 Leticia, Assistant Professor in Gender and Contemporary Culture in the Department of
Gender Studies @ The London School of Economic and Political Science. “The emergence of the other
sexual citizen: orientalism and the modernisation of sexuality,” Citizenship Studies, vol. 16 no. 5-6, 2012,
pp. 605-623 JE

The sexual reinvention of citizenship over the last three decades is at the centre of the formation of a
new ‘western late modern’ sexual respectability that now not only includes some former sexual ‘others’
at the cost of further exclusions and normalisation, but also has played a key role in defining what it
means to be democratic against a myriad of colonised and orientalised ‘others’. I argued that the
unquestioned liberal assumptions about sexual citizenship forms one of the main conditions that gave
rise to the position of the sexual citizen as the basis of the homonormative forms in which nationalism
and sexuality are currently entangled. This position underscores the importance of setting the critique of
the colonial and orientalist logic of sexual democracy within the broader critique of a restrictive version
of citizenship in relation to its liberal assumptions. Countering the liberal imaginary, an intersectional
approach allows us to see that the current forms of homonationalism that are serving racist, colonial,
imperialist and orientalist purposes are inconceivable without or outside the normalisation of the queer
and the consequent conversion of the queer into another identity-based community within a liberal
framework. In effect, the current sexualisation of western modernity against its ‘others’ and the
demarcation of national frontiers in sexual terms constitutively require the disciplining of sexuality in
accordance with its own liberal, either multiculturalist or pluralist terms. In the context of liberal
democracy, subjecthood and identity remain intimately linked to imaginary fixed, recognisable, stable
and unequivocal positions, and in these terms, sexuality and cultural difference continue to be central to
the pluralisation of identities and to the drawing of the political map. This imposes a limit on the field of
citizenship that is sustained by norms that implicitly regulate what form those identities are compelled
to take, and relates directly to very specific versions of who the sexual subject of rights is, and under
what conditions this subject can be read as such. The kind of self that establishes the field of what can
be conceived as politics is sustained by a conception of sovereign freedom, which, effectively, extends to
cultural and political regulation of ‘others’ who are understood to lack this defining characteristic for
‘becoming political’, that is becoming the subject of rights
Impact—Scapegoating
These limited forms of inclusion have saturated democratic culture with a logic of
homonationalism, the patriotic inclusion of homosexual bodies as citizens to justify
the exclusion of the terrorist Other as the unpatriotic and dangerous “Queer”. This
scapegoats racial and sexual Others to be destroyed in the defense of civilized society.
Puar 2007 [Jasbir, Professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University, Terrorist
Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times] Awirth

Hate crimes against gays and lesbians are still rationalized through these very same terms: is not the
expression of "a socially appropriate emotion in socially inappropriate ways" the crux of the "gay panic"
defense? Historical amnesia prevails. In the sway from crimes of moral depravity to crimes of passion, Ahmad argues, it is not
only that the targets of attack have altered, but that the entire mechanism of scapegoating is now rife
with sentiment that is attached to the gendered, sexualized, and racial codings of these bodies. It is
notable that white, middle- to upper-class, kind-and-gentle college student Matthew Shepard became the quintessential poster boy for the
U.S.-based Lgbtiq antiviolence movement, one that has spawned a stage production (The Laramie Project) among other consumables. 29
Indeed, exemplary of this transference of stigma, positive attributes were attached to Mark Bingham's
homosexuality: butch, masculine, rugby player, white, American, hero, gay patriot, called his mom
(i.e., homonational), while negative connotations of homosexuality were used to racialize and sexualize
Osama bin Laden: feminized, stateless, dark, perverse, pedophilic, disowned by family (i.e., fag). 30 What is
at stake here is not only that one is good and the other evil; the homosexuality of Bingham is converted into acceptable
patriot values, while the evilness of bin Laden is more fully and efficaciously rendered through
associations with sexual excess, failed masculinity (i.e., femininity), and faggotry. While I have briefly highlighted
the most egregious examples of the collusions between homosexuality and U.S. nationalism—gay conservatives such as Andrew Sullivan being
the easiest and prime target—I am actually more compelled by progressive and liberal discourses of Lgbtiq identity and how they might
unwittingly use, rely upon, or reinscribe U.S. nationalisms, U.S. sexual exceptionalisms, and homonormative imaginative geographies. The
proliferation of queer caricatures in the media and popular culture (such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and, more
recently, Queer Eye for the Straight Girl), the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling upholding same-sex marriage (2004), and the overturning of
sodomy regulations through the Lawrence and Garner v. Texas ruling (2003) all function as directives regarding suitable and
acceptable kinship, affiliative, and consumption patterns, consolidating a deracialized queer liberal
constituency that makes it less easy to draw delineations between assimilated gay or lesbian identities
and ever-sovigilant and -resistant queer identities. Even the acronym Lgbtiq suggests the collapsing into or the analogizing of
multiple identity strands. In homonormative narratives of nation, there is a dual movement: U.S. patriotism momentarily
sanctions some homosexualities, often through gendered, racial, and class sanitizing, in order to
produce "monster-terrorist-fags"; homosexuals embrace the us-versus-them rhetoric of us. Patriotism
and thus align themselves with this racist and homophobic production. 31 Aspects of homosexuality have come
within the purview of normative patriotism, incorporating aspects of queer subjectivity into the body of the normalized nation; on the other
hand, terrorists are quarantined through equating them with the bodies and practices of failed
heterosexuality, emasculation, and queered others. This dual process of incorporation and quarantining involves the
articulation of race with nation. Nation, and its associations with modernity and racial and class hierarchies,
becomes the defining factor in disaggregating between upright, domesticatable queernesses that mimic
and recenter liberal subjecthood, and out-of-control, untetherable queernesses. How does the queer
terrorist function to regenerate the heteronormative or even homonormative patriot, elaborated in the
absurd but tangible play between the terrorist and the patriot? In the never-ending displacement of the excesses of
perverse sexualities to the outside, a mythical and politically and historically overstated externality so
fundamental to the imaginative geographies at stake, the (queer) terrorist regenerates the civilizational
missives central to the reproduction of racist-heterosexist U.S. and homonormative nationalisms,
apparent in public policy archives, feminist discourses, and media representations, among other realms.
Discourses of terrorism are thus intrinsic to the management not only of race, as is painfully evident through the entrenching modes of racial
profiling and hate crime incidents. Just as significantly, and less often acknowledged, discourses of terrorism are crucial to the modulation and
surveillance of sexuality, indeed a range of sexualities, within and outside us. parameters. Unfortunately (or fortunately—this story has
not been fully written yet), U.S.
nationalisms no longer a priori exclude the homosexual; it is plausible perhaps,
given the generative and constitutive role that homosexuality plays in relation to heteronormativity as
well as homosociality, that the heteronormativity so necessary to nationalist discourse has been a bit
overstated or has functioned to overshadow the role of homosexual and homonormative others in the
reproduction of nation. I have elaborated upon three threads of homonationalism: feminist scholarly analysis that,
despite its progressive political intent, reproduces the gender-sex nonnormativity of Muslim sexuality;
gay and lesbian tourists who perform U.S. exceptionalisms, reanimated via 9/11, embedded in the history of Lgbtiq consumer-citizens; and the
inclusion of gay and queer subjectivities that are encouraged in liberal discourses of multiculturalism and diversity but are produced through
racial and national difference. As reflected by the debates on gay marriage in the United States, these are highly contingent forms of
nationalism and arguably accrue their greatest purchase through transnational comparative frames rather than debates within domestic
realms; sustaining these contradictions is perhaps the most crucial work of imaginative geographies of nationalism. Produced in tandem with
the "state of exception," 100 the demand for patriotic loyalty to the United States merely accelerates forms of sexual exceptionalism that have
always underpinned homonormativities. Furthermore, there is nothing inherently or intrinsically antination or antinationalist about queerness,
despite a critical distancing from gay and lesbian identities. Through
the disaggregating registers of race, kinship, and
consumption, among others, queerness is also under duress to naturalize itself in relation to citizenship,
patriotism, and nationalism. While many claim September 11 and the war on terror as scotomatous phenomena, the demand
for patriotic loyalty merely accelerates forms of queer exceptionalism that have always underpinned
the homonational. In a climate where President Bush states that gay marriage would annihilate "the most fundamental institution of
civilization" and the push for a constitutional amendment to defend heterosexual marriage is called "the ultimate homeland security" (equating
gay marriage with terrorism, by former Pennsylvania Republican senator Rick San torum), homonationalism is also a temporal
and spatial illusion, a facile construction that is easily revoked, dooming the exceptional queers to
insistent replays and restagings of their exceptionalisms. 101 Thus the "gains" achieved for queers, gains
that image the United States in sexually exceptional terms, media, kinship (gay marriage), legality
(sodomy), consumption (queer tourism) and so forth, can be read in the context of the war on terror, the
Usa Patriot Act, the Welfare Reform Act, and unimpeded U.S. imperialist expansion, as conservative victories at best, if at all. It is not
only that a history of race is produced through sexuality that renders white heterosexuality proper in
contrast to (black, slave) colored heterosexuality as improper, and as always in the teleological
progressive space of mimicry. The history of Euro-American gay and lesbian studies and queer theory has produced a cleaving of
queerness, always white, from race, always heterosexual and always homophobic. But now we have the
split between proper, national (white) homosexuality ( . . . queerness?) and improper (colored)
nonnational queerness. Therefore, the proliferating sexualities of which Foucault speaks (the good patriot, the bad
terrorist, the suicide bomber, the married gay boy, the monster-terrorist-fag, the effeminate turbaned man, the Cantor Fitzgerald wives, the
white firefighters, the tortured Iraqi detainee . . . ) must
be studied not as analogous, dichotomous, or external to
each other, but in their singularities, their relatedness, their lines of flight, their internalities to and their
complicities with one another.
Impact—Whiteness
The aff is constructed through a taxonomy of knowing – management of difference
allows for the exclusion of the terrorist Other and justifies the assimilation of brown
and queer bodies to conform to whiteness
Puar 2007 [Jasbir, Professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University, Terrorist
Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times] Awirth

Rey Chow, drawing on Foucault's work in The Order of Things, proposes that "Foucault's
discussion of biopower can be seen
as his approach, albeit oblique, to the question of the ascendancy of whiteness in the modern world."
Engendered through scientific observation, classification and taxonomy, the production of data,
detail, and description, leading to the micromanagement of information and bodies, all attempt to
"render the world a knowable object." This objectification and honing for the purposes of
management and domestication is paralleled, according to Chow, by an increasing mystification and
obscuring of the primary beneficiaries of this epistemological project: European subjectivities. This
simultaneity of specification and abstraction is the very basis of distinctions between subjects and objects (and populations), or, for Chow,
between those who theorize and those who are theorized about. 58 For Chow, in contemporary times, the "ascendancy of
whiteness" in biopower incorporates the multiplication of appropriate multicultural ethnic bodies
complicit with this ascendancy. Part of the trappings of this exceptional citizen, ethnic or not, is the
careful management of difference: of difference within sameness, and of difference containing
sameness. We can note, for example, that the multicultural proliferation of the cosmopolitan ethnic a la Chow has some demanding
limitations in terms of class, gender, and especially sexuality. That is, what little acceptance liberal diversity proffers in the
way of inclusion is highly mediated by huge realms of exclusion: the ethnic is usually straight, usually
has access to material and cultural capital (both as a consumer and as an owner), and is in fact often
male. These would be the tentative attributes that would distinguish a tolerable ethnic (an
exceptional patriot, for example) from an intolerable ethnic (a terrorist suspect). In many cases,
heteronormativity might be the most pivotal of these attributes, as certain Orientalist queernesses
(failed heteronormativity, as signaled by polygamy, pathological homosociality) are a priori ascribed
to terrorist bodies. The twin process of multiculturalization and heterosexualization are codependent
in what Susan Koshy denotes as the "morphing of race into ethnicity," a transmogrification propelled by the
cultivation of "white privilege as color-blind meritocracy." (This morphing has also inspired the politicization of the
designation "people of color.") While Chow does not explicitly discuss why racial frames lose their salience (and retain denigrated status) in
relation to marketdriven ethnicity, Koshy adds "the
accommodation of new immigrants and the resurgence of
white ethnicity" as compelling factors that "obscure the operations of race and class" in transnational
contexts. 59 These "operations" involve what Koshy describes as "class fraction projected as the model
minority" produced through "changed demographics, class stratifications, new immigration, and a global
economy . . . thereby enabling opportunistic alliances between whites and different minority groups as
circumstances warrant... project[ing] a simulacrum of inclusiveness even as it advances a political
culture of market individualism that has legitimized the gutting of social services to disadvantaged
minorities in the name of the necessities of the global economy." Koshy argues that fractioning allows "an ethnic
particularist position" to "escape scrutiny" because the distance it impels from whiteness in cultural
terms is abrogated through its proximity to "whiteness as power through . . . class aspirations,"
enabling "a seemingly more congenial dispensation that allows for cultural difference even as it
facilitates political affiliations between whites and some nonwhites on certain critical issues such as
welfare reform, affirmative action, and immigration legislation." 60 Thus, for the ethnic with access to
capital, both in terms of consumption and ownership, the seduction by global capital is conducted
through racial amnesia, among other forms of forgetting. This fractioning, or disassembly into fractals,
is contiguous with state racism in that it too promotes "caesuras within the biological continuum"
necessary to simultaneously particularize and homogenize populations for control. 61
Alternative
Alt—Affect

The alternative is an embrace of the individualized affect created by the politics of


queer migration – we utilize the unique personal trajectories of migration to rethink
our assumptions about the process of immigration.
Di Feliciantonio and Gadelha 16 [Cesare, Kaciano, “Affects, Bodies, and Desire: ‘Queering’
Methods and Methodologies to Research Queer Migration”, published 2016, accessed 06/27/18] BBro

- the rest of the article can probably be cut, but it took too much thinking so I gave up

When referring to mobilities, we refer not just to physical displacement of social actors, but also to the
perspective dealing with the nomadic dimension of affects. Such a reading of mobilities is based on Braidotti’s (1994,
2006) conceptualisation; borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari (1987), she reminds us that the nomad is a traveller in the field of
intensities, this type of travel may or may not involve physical displacement. According to Braidotti, the
experience of nomadic subjects occurs in the affective sphere, where the emotions of the field are also
situated. How often have we travelled from one city to another but it seems that we have not even left
the departing place? The same hotels, the same fast food chains, the same global architectures: we travel miles but we feel
like we have never left, identities remain fixed in their symbolic and emotional dimension. So Braidotti
(1994, p. 5) invites us to think of another nomadism: ‘Consciousness-raising and the subversion of set
conventions define the nomadic state, not the literal act of travelling’. Combining Braidotti’s reconfiguration of the
nomadic subject with the analytical framework of Gorman-Murray presented above about the body as a vector of migration, we can
analyse queer migration throughout its subversive character, assuming the body as the starting point of
movements. Likewise Braidotti when considering the dislocation of actors as not limited to physical space, we emphasise here the
internal movements of affection engendering new cartographies meant as ‘a theoretically-based and
politically-informed reading of the present. A cartographic approach fulfils the function of providing both analytic and
exegetical tools for critical thought and also creative theoretical alternatives’ (Braidotti 2013, p. 3). Commonly ignored in other
theoretical approaches in migration studies, affects play here a very important role considering the
reasons alleged by queer subjects to migrate. As we think of representative practices, here it is important to
distinguish affects from emotions. The latters can be re-territorialised by significants, such as ‘hate’, ‘love’ or ‘melancholia’, thus
they express a kind of affect turning into a symbolic territory. On the contrary, to define affects we find inspiration from Deleuze
and Guattari (1984), considering them as sensitive flows, virtualities, forces with a nomadic power of re-
territorialisation and de-territorialisation. In their critique of a Freudian and Lacanian conception of desire as lack, the French
philosophers inverted the Freudian logic by which desire is interpreted as a foundational lack: desire becomes a flow that is not in
a negative relationship with the social. Furthermore, desire is an active vector that generates worlds, so it is
not by thinking in terms of absence that we grasp how desire works, but we can only understand the
‘worldmaking’ power of desire if we consider it for its excess. The social overflows everywhere by the way ‘desiring
machines’ are producing excesses. Such a category might become a useful tool here to redesign a queer
methodology aimed at working with the dimension of desire we are defining here as affections. The
desiring machines are a composition of flows, forces that aggregate and dissipate. They work by the
conjunction and disjunction of their elements. Relating this to the context of our research on Italian queer migration, how to
understand the desire to migrate from one country to another? For instance, during interviews, our interlocutors often tried to frame their self-
narratives within a linear script, as if the ambition to migrate had been imposed. It was necessary to develop together an alternative discourse
highlighting the conjunctions and disjunctions that brought our coparticipants to Berlin, trying to unveil uncertainties and turning points. So
the process of mobility results associated with desire in the composition of imagined spaces that are not
uniform, but specific markers of difference (e.g. gender, class, education, age, work experience) operate in the life-
trajectories of these young queers. Although departing from and arriving at the same queer ‘creative’ scene, personal
trajectories become exceptional and unique, as they are shaped by affects that compose new territorial
materialities in combination to perceptions and conceptions.
Alt—Counter-Culture

Sexuality has become private, something taboo, to be hidden. This creation a


hegemonic public culture can only be challenged through an embrace of queer
affective worldmaking – the creation of queer countercultures that create new public
forms of affect.
Berlant and Warner 08 [Lauren, Michael, “Sex in Public”,
http://sites.middlebury.edu/sexandsociety/files/2015/01/Berlant-and-Warner-Sex-in-Public.pdf,
published 2008, accessed 06/24/18] BBro

--- wow this tag is horrible

By queer culture we mean a world-making project, where "world," like "public," differs from community or
group because it necessarily includes more people than can be identified, more spaces than can be
mapped beyond a few reference points, modes of feeling that can be learned rather than experienced as a
birthright. The queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance,
projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies." World
making, as much in the mode of dirty talk as of print-mediated representation, is dispersed through incommensurate registers, by definition
unrealizable as community or identity. Every
cultural form, be it a novel or an after-hours club or an academic
lecture, indexes a virtual social world, in ways that range from a repertoire of styles and speech genres
to referential metaculture. A novel like Andrew Holleran's Dancerfrom the Dance relies much more heavily on referential metaculture
than does an after-hours club that survives on word of mouth and may be a major scene because it is only barely coherent as a scene. Yet for all
their differences, both allow for the concretization of a queer counterpublic. We
are trying to promote this world-making
project, and a first step in doing so is to recognize that queer culture constitutes itself in many ways
other than through the official publics of opinion culture and the state, or through the privatized forms normally
associated with sexuality. Queer and other insurgents have long striven, often dangerously or scandalously, to
cultivate what good folks used to call criminal intimacies. We have developed relations and narratives
that are only recognized as intimate in queer culture: girlfriends, gal pals, fuckbuddies, tricks. Queer culture has
learned not only how to sexualize these and other relations, but also to use them as a context for
witnessing intense and personal affect while elaborating a public world of belonging and transformation.
Making a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the
couple form, to property, or to the nation. These
intimacies do bear a necessary relation to a counterpublic-an
indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation. They are typical both of the inventiveness of queer
world making and of the queer world's fragility. Nonstandard intimacies would seem less criminal and less fleeting if, as used to be the case,
normal intimacies included everything from consorts to courtiers, friends, amours, associates, and coconspirators. Along with the sex it
legitimates, intimacy
has been privatized; the discourse contexts that narrate true personhood have been
segregated from those that represent citizens, workers, or professionals. This transformation in the cultural
forms of intimacy is related both to the history of the modern public sphere and to the modern
discourse of sexuality as a fundamental human capacity. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas shows that
the institutions and forms of domestic intimacy made private people private, members of the public
sphere of private society rather than the market or the state. Intimacy grounded abstract, disembodied
citizens in a sense of universal humanity. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault describes the personalization of
sex from the other direction: the confessional and expert discourses of civil society continually posit an
inner personal essence, equating this true personhood with sex and surrounding that sex with dramas of
secrecy and disclosure. There is an instructive convergence here in two thinkers who otherwise seem to be describing different
planets.24 Habermas overlooks the administrative and normalizing dimensions of privatized sex in sciences of social knowledge because he is
interested in the norm of a critical relation between state and civil society. Foucault overlooks the critical culture that might enable
transformation of sex and other private relations; he wants to show that modern epistemologies of sexual personhood, far from bringing sexual
publics into being, are techniques of isolation; they identify persons as normal or perverse, for the purpose of medicalizing or otherwise
administering them as individuals. Yet
both Habermas and Foucault point to the way a hegemonic public has
founded itself by a privatization of sex and the sexualization of private personhood. Both identify the
conditions in which sexuality seems like a property of subjectivity rather than a publicly or counterpublicly accessible
culture.

Status quo forms of queer culture rely on mobility and ephemerality to become
possible – there is no institutional matrix for the queer. In the face of oppression, we
must concentrate affect and culture in one spot – we must develop a critical mass to
create a publicly accessible queer counterculture.
Berlant and Warner 08 [Lauren, Michael, “Sex in Public”,
http://sites.middlebury.edu/sexandsociety/files/2015/01/Berlant-and-Warner-Sex-in-Public.pdf,
published 2008, accessed 06/24/18] BBro

---this tag is also terrible sorry

Queer culture has found it necessary to develop this knowledge in mobile sites of drag, youth culture,
music, dance, parades, flaunting, and cruising-sites whose mobility makes them possible but also renders
them hard to recognize as world making because they are so fragile and ephemeral. They are paradigmatically trivialized as
"lifestyle." But to understand them only as self-expression or as a demand for recognition would be to
misrecognize the fundamentally unequal material conditions whereby the institutions of social
reproduction are coupled to the forms of hetero culture.2g Contexts of queer world making depend on
parasitic and fugitive elaboration through gossip, dance clubs, softball leagues, and the phone-sex ads
that increasingly are the commercial support for print-mediated left culture in general." Queer is difficult to
entextualize as culture. This is particularly true of intimate culture. Heteronormative forms of intimacy are supported, as
we have argued, not only by overt referential discourse such as love plots and sentimentality but
materially, in marriage and family law, in the architecture of the domestic, in the zoning of work and politics.
Queer culture, by contrast, has almost no institutional matrix for its counterintimacies. In the absence of
marriage and the rituals that organize life around matrimony, improvisation is always necessary for the speech act of
pledging, or the narrative practice of dating, or for such apparently noneconomic economies as joint
checking. The heteronormativity in such practices may seem weak and indirect. After all, samesex couples
have sometimes been able to invent versions of such practices. But they have done so only by betrothing themselves to
the couple form and its language of personal significance, leaving untransformed the material and ideological conditions that divide intimacy
from history, politics, and publics. The
queer project we imagine is not just to destigmatize those average
intimacies, not just to give access to the sentimentality of the couple for persons of the same sex, and
definitely not to certify as properly private the personal lives of gays and lesbian. Rather, it is to support
forms of affective, erotic, and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to
memory, and sustained through collective activity. Because the heteronormative culture of intimacy
leaves queer culture especially dependent on ephemeral elaborations in urban space and print culture,
queer publics are also peculiarly vulnerable to initiatives such as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's new zoning law. The
law aims to restrict any counterpublic sexual culture by regulating its economic conditions; its effects will reach far beyond
the adult businesses it explicitly controls. The gay bars on Christopher Street draw customers from people who come there because of its sex
trade. The street is cruisier because of the sex shops. The boutiques that sell freedom rings and "Don't Panic" T-shirts do more business for the
same reasons. Not all of the thousands who migrate or make pilgrimages to Christopher Street use the porn shops, but all benefit from the fact
that some do. After a certain point, a quantitative change is a qualitative change. 4 critical mass develops.
The street becomes queer. It develops a dense, publicly accessible sexual culture. It therefore becomes a base for
nonporn businesses, like the Oscar Wilde Bookshop. And it becomes a political base from which to pressure politicians
with a gay voting bloc. No group is more dependent on this kind of pattern in urban space than queers. If we could not
concentrate a publicly accessible culture somewhere, we would always be outnumbered and
overwhelmed. And because what brings us together is sexual culture, there are very few places in the
world that have assembled much of a queer population without a base in sex commerce, and even those that
do exist, such as the lesbian culture in Northampton, Massachusetts, are stronger because of their ties to places like the West Village, Dupont
Circle, West Hollywood, and the Castro. Respectable gays like to think that they owe nothing to the sexual
subculture they think of as sleazy But their success, their way of living, their political rights, and their
very identities would never have been possible but for the existence of the public sexual culture they
now despise. Extinguish it, and almost all out gay or queer culture will wither on the vine. No one knows
this connection better than the right. Conservatives would not so flagrantly contradict their stated belief in a market free from
government interference if they did not see this kind of hyperregulation as an important victory. The point here is not that queer
politics needs more free-market ideology, but that heteronormative forms, so central to the
accumulation and reproduction of capital, also depend on heavy interventions in the regulation of
capital. One of the most disturbing fantasies in the zoning scheme, for example, is the idea that an urban
locale is a community of shared interest based on residence and property. The ideology of the neighborhood is
politically unchallengeable in the current debate, which is dominated by a fantasy that sexual subjects only reside, that the space relevant to
sexual politics is the neighborhood. But a district like Christopher Street is not just a neighborhood affair. The local character of the
neighborhood depends on the daily presence of thousands of nonresidents. Those who actually live in the West Village should not forget their
debt to these mostly queer pilgrims. And we should not make the mistake of confusing the class of citizens with the class of property owners.
Many of those who hang out on Christopher Street-typically young, queer, and African American-couldn't possibly afford to live there. Urban
space is always a host space. The
right to the city extends to those who use the It is not limited to property
owners. It is not because of a fluke in the politics of zoning that urban space is so deeply misrecognized;
normal sexuality requires such misrecognitions, including their economic and legal enforcement, in
order to sustain its illusion of humanity.
Alt—Coming Out

‘coming out’ politics has the potential to move beyond normative conceptions of
community and belonging and can yield significant radical demands for systemic
change which disrupt normative culture. This coalitional politics is not exclusively
political, but also allows for alternative ways of belonging and being beyond
normative squo queer conceptions.
Chavez, 13 – Karma, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Mexican American & Latino/a Studies @ University of Texas-Austin. Queer Migration Politics: Activist
Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, University of Illinois Press, p. 84-85 – walsh

The metaphor of coming out of the closet and the politics of the closet have been central to
contemporary western queer experiences at least since the 1960s in the United States, and perhaps
earlier elsewhere. 28 The phrase “coming out of the closet” refers to the experience of coming out into
a queer identity, often through a first sexual experience. It also refers to coming out into a community of
other similarly identified people, which entails personal and political dimensions. 29 With regard to
politics, coming out can be used toward inclusionary ends, as is often the case with the mainstream
LGBT movement. Coming out can also have more radical ends, as in the politics of some queer activists
who come out in order to declare their presence, demand systemic changes, and resist and disrupt the
assumptions of normative culture. In this way, for some, coming out is a strategy that reflects a political
orientation toward and around narrative and identity, but for others, coming out suggests being
oriented toward and around systemic critique and change. Likely for many, the act of coming out is
oriented toward and around a variety of objectives. No matter the reason for coming out, some consider
“the closet” mostly a negative construction. Michelangelo Signorile’s “closet conspiracy” thesis alleges
that within major powerful institutions in the United States, heterosexuals and homosexuals alike work
to sustain the institution of the closet. 30 In 1990 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick characterized the closet as the
“fundamental feature of social life” for many gays in the twentieth century. Sedgwick does not
denounce the closet as a wholly negative space, and the etymology of the term is also not bad, mostly
reflecting the connection between the closet and privacy. In fact, nearly all the early usages of the term
in English mention the privacy or private nature of the closet. Other definitions refer to it as a space for
spiritual reflection, and others depict its function as a place for storing valuables. Only in phrases such as
“skeleton in the closet” does the closet become associated with trouble or sin. 31 P erhaps because of
such multiplicity of meanings, Sedgwick carefully demonstrates how the logic of disclosing one’s
sexuality does not lead to necessarily predictable results, nor is being “out” of a closet an implicitly
productive position. Instead, she maps the epistemologies of the closet through the operation of the
homosexual/heterosexual binary in relation to a host of other binaries. Still, as Marlon B. Ross aptly
notes, Sedgwick’s project is an un-reflexively racialized one, and her “desire for an epistemology of
sexuality necessarily draws her attention to certain subjects (elite European men) and their objects (un/
closeted desires) as constitutive of all modern culture from the outset.” 32 The binaries Sedgwick seeks
to unpack and the construction of the closet itself rest upon unmentioned absences. This post-
structuralist approach to the metaphor of the closet, which suggests the instability of the metaphor at
the same time that it explores its “mimetic relationship to social belief systems and unconscious
thought,” builds upon and critiques two other theories of metaphor often applied to the closet:
comparison theory and interaction theory. 33 A comparison approach to metaphor assumes that two
terms can be simply substituted for each other, which in this case means that being in the closet with
one’s sexuality is like being physically inside a closet. Interaction theory extends this literal substitution
by noting a necessary interplay between the figurative and literal dimensions of a metaphor, which
produces meaning. In other words, it is partially true that being in the closet is like being inside a closet,
but in other ways the physical and metaphorical closet are quite different. 34

‘closet politics’ of queerness intersects significantly with the ‘shadow politics’ of


undocumented people. Both have concealing qualities, and coming out of the closet or
shadows allow for the possibility of coalition and systemic critique.
Chavez, 13 – Karma, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Mexican American & Latino/a Studies @ University of Texas-Austin. Queer Migration Politics: Activist
Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, University of Illinois Press, p. 87-91 – walsh

Other cogent critiques of overemphasis on visibility or “ocularcentrism” also challenge the dominant
paradigm in the United States. 48 Mariam Fraser explains, for instance, that visibility politics are
especially difficult to privilege when working-class identities are considered within the purview of queer
because the question of visual politics and the politics of recognition can manifest very differently for
these queers. 49 Eli Clare has commented that the notion of coming out among poor and working-class
rural whites differs greatly from the idea among middle-class urban whites in the United States. Clare
explains that although it may not be ideal, a tacit understanding of queerness often leads to a particular
brand of tolerance and even acceptance of queer people and relationships within such families and
communities. 50 Even though such critiques of coming out and visibility logics persist, around the world
and in an array of communities within the United States, people talk about queer sexuality in terms of
closets. 51 It may be too facile to say the closet is solely a western and capitalist invention, but the idea
of coming out and the development of a national political holiday celebrating it are US creations, or at
the very least they gained the most traction in white, middle-class, urban US contexts. The closet and
the call to come out of it remain pervasive features of queer politics and life. t h e s h adows A
concealing logic also operates for undocumented people, who may “pass” as US citizens because of their
language, culture, and lifestyle even if they lack US citizenship. But for migrants the pervasive metaphor
is not the closet, but the shadows. 52 Unlike the closet, most of the etymology of the word “shadow”
carries some pejorative meaning, even if it merely stems from the archetypal connection between light
and dark, good and evil, and the implied racialization/racism therein. For example, the second meaning
under the first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary references “shadow of death,” and the third
maintains the shadow’s connection with “Gloom, unhappiness; a temporary interruption of friendship;
something that obscures the lustre of a reputation.” 53 T he precise origin of describing immigrants as
being in “shadows” is somewhat unclear. A mention in a US newspaper occurs in 1978 where the
reporter explains, “The illegal immigrant occupies a shadow world of fieldhands, bus boys and day
laborers working, at $2 an hour or less, for employers who do not speak his or her language in jobs that
most native Americans are unwilling to perform.” 54 In 1981 Attorney General William French Smith
described undocumented people as a “shadow population” while giving congressional testimony about
the need for immigration reform. 55 Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan picked up the term from
Smith in his opinion representing the majority in Plyler v. Doe , which found a Texas law denying
education to undocumented children unconstitutional. Brennan wrote, “Sheer incapability or lax
enforcement of the laws barring entry into this country, coupled with the failure to establish an effective
bar to the employment of undocumented aliens, has resulted in the creation of a substantial ‘shadow
population’ of illegal migrants—numbering in the millions—within our borders.” 56 The idea of a
“shadow population” perhaps carries more severe connotation than simply living in the shadows. A
shadow population is the shadow, which may make it more difficult for the population to relieve itself
of the baggage the metaphor holds; the baggage is intrinsic. Shadow metaphors gained prominence as
comprehensive immigration reform and amnesty preoccupied the US imaginary in the mid-1980s. A
statement released by the National Council of Churches, the US Catholic Conference, and the Union of
American Hebrew Congregations in 1985 argued that migrants should be “removed from the shadows of
undocumented status and placed under the protection and rule of law.” 57 Once Congress passed and
Reagan signed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, supporters touted the law for bringing
people out of the shadows. Reagan extended the metaphor when he remarked, “ v e ry soon many of
these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight,” 58 and from around that point the term
can be found regularly in US discourse pertaining to immigration. 59 With the massiv e immigration
rights marches in 2006, the phrases “coming out of the shadows” and “awakening a sleeping giant”
were frequently used to talk about migrants and their potential political power. Immigration scholars
have apparently said little about the function of the shadow metaphor, though many rely upon it to
highlight the condition for migrants in host countries. 60 An exception is René Galindo, who explains
that the shadow is a visual metaphor that is “popularly used to describe the invisibility and
criminalization of undocumented immigrants.” 61 Galindo argues that invisibility, or “living in the
shadows,” marks migrants’ supposed “lack of political presence and agency,” but the 2006 marches
catapulted them onto the political stage. Because some people did not believe migrants belonged in the
US public sphere as political actors, media attention quickly turned to migrants displaying the Mexican
flag at the marches, both interpreting the symbol as suggesting allegiance only to Mexico and further
marginalizing migrants. 62 For people holding such beliefs, migrants should remain in the shadows, or
perhaps disappear altogether. T he fact of migrants’ visibility, and at least symbolic agency, has
prompted some conservative immigration pundits to take time to interrogate the metaphor and suggest
its shortcomings in describing migrants’ situation in the United States. One Center for Immigration
Studies blogger comments that undocumented people live among the rest of us and came here by their
own choice, so perhaps the only way they are in the “shadows” is psychologically, through their guilt for
being here. 63 This blogger maintains that while one level of meaning refers to light and dark, the
distinction between honesty and deception ultimately characterizes shadow metaphors, which further
emphasizes the criminalizing dimension of shadows. These binaries, like heterosexual/homosexual,
operate together within western logics to keep the second terms subservient to the first and, in this
instance, to subtly encode racial superiority. Although the phr ase “coming out of the shadows” in
relation to migrants emerged in popular discourse separately from LGBTQ movement discourse and the
closet, the mimesis of the “coming out” metaphor within the context of migrant youth activism piques
interest because of the centrality of queers in the movement and because the material conditions of
many citizen queers and undocumented migrants are so different. A more direct discussion of the
relationship between these two kinds of coming out provides an important basis to reveal the risks and
opportunities of the appropriation for migrants, even when catalyzed by migrant queers. Closets versus
s h adows Both the metaphors and the physical objects the metaphors draw upon are visual in the sense
that emergence from closets or shadows garners significance only through being seen. 65 Presumably,
coming out involves being seen by an audience of those who may not have realized that people resided
there at all, or even if they did see people, they had no awareness of their closeted or shadowed
existence. As an intended political act (as opposed to mere personal revelation), the emergence is not
just about entering a community or declaring an identity for the self and others like them. 66 The act
occurs before seers who not only see but who are also potential agents of change. In this rhetorical
situation the audience is comprised of only those who can remedy or rectify the exigency that
demanded a rhetorical response in the first place. 67 T he closet also resembles the shadow in other
important ways, as both involve hiding or concealing, darkness, conjuring a sense of fear, and perhaps
being places unsuitable for sustaining life. In this way one’s desire to emerge from either place would be
easy to see as logical and desirable, which could be a persuasive appeal to those in the audience who
could enact change. On the other hand, both closets and shadows can also provide protection from the
outside world and offer an alluring gesture to venture into the unknown. This subversive and exciting
aspect of closets and shadows is also what can be frightening to those who want to protect others from
being lured into worlds of unspecified sin or vice. The similarities in the metaphors are important, and
they point to the opportunities engendered in the appropriation. Crucial differences remain, however,
that help to signal some of the risks in the appropriation strategy that migrant youth activists deploy.
Closets are necessarily human made and very often directly connected to the home. Shadows can result
from human creations, such as buildings, but they can also be disconnected from civilization and
organic, resulting from trees, for example. Closets are concrete, physical objects. Shadows are ephem
eral and changing things. They can, quite literally, disappear. Closets imply privacy and a relatively clear
distinction between the public world and the private closet (even as the threshold is a liminal space).
Closets can protect. Shadows may provide privacy through obscurity, but they also blur into the public
and do not conceal in the same way as closets. Shadows offer little tangible protection. Closets have a
history of being spiritual spaces, places of prayer and personal reflection. Shadows connect only to the
negative dimensions of spirituality, ranging from the devil and death to guilt and deception. Closets have
clear utility. Shadows, aside from providing shade from the sun, and perhaps serving as a hiding place,
simply exist and have no specified utility. The threat of “monsters” hiding in closets can certainly
provoke fear, especially for children. The threat of “stranger danger” posed by unknown people lurking
in the shadows and waiting to attack innocent passersby, anywhere and anytime, functions as a much
larger discourse of fear not relegated to childhood imagination. 68 Closets are not implicitly racialized.
Shadows cannot be divorced from racialization. While similar in some ways, closets, then, carry less
rhetorical baggage than shadows. Shadows conjure much stronger pejorative meanings than closets;
thus, defining a productive politics through shadow references may prove quite difficult.
Alt—Failure

We embrace the negative affect of failure as a tactic to challenge the toxic positivity
that his infected Western society – through blurring the lines between success/failure
we can expose that personal disposition is a myth, and that structural inequalities
structure one’s ability to succeed.
Halberstam 11 [J. Jack, “The Queer Art of Failure”, https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-queer-art-of-
failure, published 2011, accessed 06/27/18] BBro
In this book I range from children’s animation to avant-garde performance and queer art to think about ways of being and knowing that stand
outside of conventional understandings of success. I argue that success
in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates
too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation. But these
measures of success have come under serious pressure recently, with the collapse of financial markets
on the one hand and the epic rise in divorce rates on the other. If the boom and bust years of the late twentieth century
and the early twenty-first have taught us anything, we should at least have a healthy critique of static models of success and failure. Rather
than just arguing for a reevaluation of these standards of passing and failing, The Queer Art of Failure dismantles the logics of success and
failure with which we currently live. Under
certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing,
unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of
being in the world. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well; for queers
failure can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim
scenarios of success that depend upon “trying and trying again.” In fact if success requires so much effort,
then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards. What kinds of reward can failure offer us?
Perhaps most obviously, failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage
human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable
adulthoods. Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly
clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers. And while failure certainly comes
accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also
provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of
contemporary life. As Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us in Bright- sided, positive thinking is a North American affliction, “a mass
delusion” that emerges out of a combination of American exceptionalism and a desire to believe that
success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of a bad attitude rather than structural
conditions (2009: 13). Positive thinking is offered up in the U.S. as a cure for cancer, a path to untold riches, and a surefire way to engineer your
own success. Indeed believing
that success depends upon one’s attitude is far preferable to Americans than
recognizing that their success is the outcome of the tilted scales of race, class, and gender. As Ehrenreich puts
it, “If optimism is the key to material success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there
is no excuse for failure.” But, she continues, “the flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility,” meaning that
while capitalism produces some people’s success through other people’s failures, the ideology of
positive thinking insists that success depends only upon working hard and failure is always of your own
doing (8). We know better of course in an age when the banks that ripped off ordinary people have been deemed “too big to fail” and the
people who bought bad mortgages are simply too little to care about. In Bright- sided Ehrenreich uses the example of American women’s
application of positive thinking to breast cancer to demonstrate how dangerous the belief in optimism can be and how deeply Americans want
to believe that health is a matter of attitude rather than environmental degradation and that wealth is a matter of visualizing success rather
than having the cards stacked in your favor. For the nonbelievers outside the cult of positive thinking, however, the
failures and losers, the grouchy, irritable whiners who do not want to “have a nice day” and who do not believe that getting cancer has made
them better people, politics
offers a better explanatory framework than personal disposition. For these
negative thinkers, there are definite advantages to failing. Relieved of the obligation to keep smiling
through chemotherapy or bankruptcy, the negative thinker can use the experience of failure to confront the gross
inequalities of everyday life in the United States.

The alternative is a radical failure in opposition to the affirmatives affect of potential


which is key to survival
Kolarova 14 (Katerina Kolorova, Charles University, Prauge, "The Inarticulate Post-Socialist
Crip On the Cruel Optimism of Neoliberal Transformations in the Czech Republic" Journal of
Literary & Cultural Disability Studies Volume 8, Issue 3, 2014 some words are edited in [])DR 16
Imagining Crip Failures, Crip Horizons The aspiration of post-socialism was progress, moral
emancipation, and eventual happiness. I recall the quotation above that attempted to articulate the
vision of the optimistic future as a moment when “every citizen of this country fe[els] content and
happy” (Váchalová, 2). Yet, as Sara Ahmed cautions, happiness is a troubled notion. She asks, “What
are we consenting to, when we consent to happiness?” and offers us a troubling answer: “perhaps the
consensus that happiness is the consensus” (Promise, 1). Ahmed’s questioning of happiness as the
normative horizon of our orientation resonates with the key issues that I address; the promise of
happiness is a twin of “cruel optimism.” Most acutely, Ahmed’s critical discussion focuses on revealing
how (the vision of and desire for) happiness participates in establishing structures of consensus, which
are in fact structures of dominance. With (falsely) positive energy, recuperative logic said, “you should
be happy communism is over”; the promise of happiness was used to justify the oppression of “the
disabled” through ideologies of ableism constitutive to liberal individualism and liberal humanism.
The impossibility of seeing and envisioning crip(topias) [utopias] in the situation of (post-)shameful
identity illustrates not only the harmful and utterly disabling [End Page 270] work of certain affective
attachments, it also and just as vividly illustrates the equally harmful impacts/effects of attachments
to affects, in particular attachments to affects of positivity, affects seemingly necessary to foster self-
embracing identity and subjectivity. In other words, the post-socialist crip [disability] challenges
Western-developed theories of (disabled) identity that argue that positive affects are necessary to
foster self-embracing and affirmative understandings of disability and disabled subjectivity. The
symbolic violence embedded in recuperative positivity offers us the opportunity to think about crip
failure and crip [disabled] negativity. The violence also points toward conditions that (could) make
(some forms of) failure useful for cripistemologies [epistemologies] and that (could) map crip
horizons. Cripness [Disability] is already rich with failure; crispness [disability] is infused with
negativity that sustains. The crip negativity I plead for is a critical strategy rupturing ideologies of cure,
rehabilitation, and overcoming, ideologies that inflict hurt and violence (not only) on crips. I wish to
initiate a discussion about crip negativity as a political practice working toward (if never reaching) crip
utopian horizons. Still, the post-socialist crip opens other and new questions about what crip failure
would mean if it were to foster and sustain life, what forms of crip [disabled] negative energies would
allow for crip utopias and make possible the desire for crip survival. J. Jack Halberstam’s theory of
failure elucidates how the compulsory positive nature of optimism, hope, pride, and success precludes
the realization that failure can be a form of sustenance and strategy of critique/survival. In failing the
normative prescriptions of compulsory heterosexuality (and able-bodiedness), failure “imagines other
goals for life, for love, for art, and for being” (88). Coming back to the image of the women
failing/surviving with AIDS at the post-socialist Odessa hospice, failure also imagines signs of crip
solidarity and sustenance where the visions of an optimistic future create spaces of abandonment for
subjects who will never be offered a fantasy of the “good life.” Despite its lack of substantial attention
to cripness that would surpass the level of metaphorics, The Queer Art of Failure does offer some lines
along which to think also about crip failures. The most helpful to the current analysis of post-socialist
affects would seem to be Halberstam’s discussion of the failure to remember. Forgetting, losing, and
looping between past and future are the techniques of resistance to normative temporalities. Such
failures at temporalities of progressive and curative futurity, I argue, could offer forms of sustenance
(for the post-socialist crip). The failure to remember would produce a rupture in the dominant
narratives of shame (of a [End Page 271] failed socialism) and the futurity of “getting better.” It would
forget visions of pride based on overcoming the failed socialist crip, and it would loosen/lose the
compulsory vision of optimism of (neoliberal) humanism. It would forget the ideologies that we have
seen hurt and violate crips and our futures. Cripping [Disabling], disjointing, the normative forms of
(linear) knowing about the past-present-future, could offer resistance to the cruel hope that directs
our desires into (an evacuated) future while foreclosing the negotiation of difficult yet important
relationships, past and present.
Alt—Queer Fugitivity**

The alternative is a politics of queer fugitivity – in the face of institutional oppression,


we learn the unrules of society. We stockpile in crevices, locate ourselves in the
margins of society, and create new extraorganizational forms of resistance that coopt
and subvert the normative roles of the academy.
Chávez 17 [Karma, “From Sanctuary to a Queer Politics of Fugitivity”,
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/668591, published 2017, accessed 06/23/18]
As stated at the beginning, many university presidents and chancellors have come out in tepid support of vulnerable students, and for those at
the helm of public institutions, their support comes in part because of the mission of the public university: to educate the public, regardless of
that public’s citizenship status. But for those of us teaching at public institutions, we need to take the public mission in a slightly different
direction, that is, we need to be public about what that work of support will entail. We
need collective, public visibility that in
the tradition of queer politics insists both, “aqui, estamos, y no nos vamos” and “we’re here, we’re queer, get used
to it!” I call on queerness both as a statement of queer identity, and a signal to most all leadership of the
undocumented student movement, but also an indication of an in-your-face politics. This politics must
not prioritize legal remedies, collude with police, or offer tepid forms of support. About those things, we must be forthright. But
that queer politics must also be coupled with a commitment to what I can only think of as “fugitivity.” A long
tradition of theorizing the concept of fugitivity among radical and feminist black intellectuals traces this line of thinking directly to Frederick
Douglass and fugitive slaves. It
is important not to sever theorizing of fugitivity from its place in black life or to
make fugitivity a purely metaphorical endeavor. But understanding fugitivity, as Christina Sharpe puts it, as “a
powerful way to imagine black life that persists in and in spite of,”8 offers important resources for all
criminalized people and their accomplices to learn to maneuver. For people like me, people whose lives are not
constituted by being criminalized, understanding such features of black and undocumented, and undocublack life will inform how we listen to,
transport, harbor, protect, and collude with those rendered fugitive by unjust laws, and therefore participate in fugitivity ourselves. I want to
direct attention to two conceptualizations of fugitivity that point us in the kind of directions we may want to consider as we undertake various
forms of sanctuary and support. First, Keguro Macharia writes, “Fugitivity is seeing around corners, stockpiling in crevices,
knowing the “unrules,” being unruly, because the rules are never enough, and not even close.”9 Many
undocumented folks, perhaps especially undocublack folks, undoubtedly live in and through this
pedagogy. As Opal Tometi, executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and cofounder of Black Lives Matter points out,
because of changes to immigration law in 1996 that broadened the range of deportable offenses and
allowed for retroactive deportations, black immigrants, who like their citizen counterparts are more likely to be profiled by
police than other groups, have suffered the most dire consequences. Tometi explains, “Even though black immigrants make up
only 7% of the total immigrant population, 20% of all immigrants in deportation proceedings due to criminal convictions are black.”10 Black
folks are most likely to suffer criminalization and therefore have had to discover means to know the
unrules, to see around corners and survive. This is not to say that the perspective of fugitivity does not constitute all
undocumented experience. All lessons of fugitivity are more vital than ever. This moment requires accomplices
to learn concretely what fugitivity means by listening carefully to undocumented folks about how to
support this way of living and how to live in this way. Second, as Jack Halberstam noted in the introduction to Harney and
Moten’s The Undercommons, “Fugitivity is not only escape, ‘exit’ as Paolo Virno might put it, or ‘exodus’ in the terms offered by
Hardt and Negri, fugitivity is being separate from settling. It is a being in motion that has learned that
‘organizations are obstacles to organising ourselves’ (The Invisible Committee in The Coming Insurrection) and that there are
spaces and modalities that exist separate from the logical, logistical, the housed and the positioned.”11 Although there is one way to
read this as an anti-institutional argument, another way to read this idea is to remember that the
undercommons is neither about being for nor against the university. It is about being in but not of it. And
therefore, separating ourselves from particular kinds of positions and positionings, ways of engaging that
become predictable to institutions and developing new kinds of extraorganizational logics are essential to the
practice of fugitivity I am suggesting we need. Stealing from the university’s resources, relying on it for meeting
space to come together to build other structures, while actively refusing its norms of decorum. Making
photocopies after hours, using our offices to harbor the criminalized, and our libraries to study resistance. Teaching to transgress,
testing the limits of our academic freedom, collaborating with the revolutionary fringe on teach-ins and
actions. These are some of the basic practices of fugitivity that this moment demands. And these must be coupled with concrete and
material plans and steps of support, always developed from the perspectives of those most impacted. I recognize that publicly insisting
that we will resist anti-immigrant laws and that we will protect our students by virtually any means
necessary is scary. It would be a lot easier to do what we are comfortable with—asking police to do the right thing, relying on provisions
like FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) to protect student records, and asking administrators to take stronger stances. But as
what Anzaldúa calls nepantleras, those who reside in spaces of tension and struggle to imagine, transform, and
heal, we have a duty to imagine bigger. One way to do this is to reimagine sanctuary as a queer politics
of fugitivity, and then collectively imagine together what that can be.
Alt—Radical Interactionality**

normative calls for inclusion by the usfg which is inherent to the queer experience
reinscribe institutional norms. What is necessary is coming out as a coalitional praxis
of radical interactionality, which queers normative coming out discourses and centers
coalitional possibilities, creating an identity based on politics rather than a politics
based on identity. This coalitional praxis has potential for greater systemic change
than is possible in squo political imaginaries
Chavez, 13 – Karma, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Mexican American & Latino/a Studies @ University of Texas-Austin. Queer Migration Politics: Activist
Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, University of Illinois Press, p. 105-109 – walsh

Thus far, those who have used or responded to the coming out strategy have sustained one of the
fundamental characteristics of coming out: they have asked for inclusion in a community—and in this
instance the national community. As Nair might ask, is it possible to demand, in coalitional fashion, a
different narrative and a different premise altogether? To provide one answer to that question, I turn to
testimony given by José Guadalupe Herrera Soto at a 2012 Chicago forum called “Forced Out: A Unity
Forum at the Crossroads of Deportation and Incarceration,” designed to create a community
conversation about the impacts of mass detention. Herrera Soto’s testimony was subsequently
published on the website for the Moratorium on Deportations Campaign. 100 This campaign, based in
Chicago, seeks to end all deportations, legalize all undocumented people, and put a stop to all anti-
immigrant legislation. Herrera Soto does not identify as a DREAMer. His testimony does not mention the
DREAM Act, even though it is clear that DREAM activism is indicted in his testimony when he states,
“Today, I’m challenging the system that questions my legality in the US. I’m fighting a personal battle
against immigration authorities. Despite their attempts to deport me, I continue to be part of the
immigrant struggle, the struggle that fights for all people—not just for a small few who are portrayed as
being worthy.” 101 While clearly positioning himself in contrast to DREAM activism, Herrera Soto’s
testimony reflects an alternative use of coming out toward coalitional ends, even though his is not, on
its surface, explicitly queer with regard to gender or sexuality. However, as Fatima El-Tayeb argued
about her use of the word “queer” to explain the strategies of European activists of color, “queer”
describes “a practice of identity (de)construction that results in a new type of diasporic consciousness
neither grounded in ethnic identifications nor referencing a mythical homeland, instead using the
tension of living supposedly exclusive identities and transforming it into a creative potential, building
a community based on the shared experience of multiple, contradictory positionalities.” 102 Herrera
Soto advances a different coming out, one that deconstructs identifications based on multiple and
contradictory positionalities toward the end of forging new conditions for activism and radical coalition.
Moreover, these identifications and coalitions he seeks are not ethnically based or located in any
particular nation or culture. This type of positioning is made explicit when Herrera Soto opens his
testimony by arguing that the issue of detention and deportation of immigrants must be understood in
connection to the prison industrial complex. He rrera Soto mirrors the style of coming out testimony
that has become so popular in migrant youth activism by naming himself and his identities early on in
his speech. Yet he shifts from the traditional structure of the coming out narrative in some dramatic
ways. Foremost, like Nair’s use of the rhetoric of radical interactionality, discussed in chapter 2, Herrera
Soto draws attention away from the personal and toward a systemic critique of US capitalism,
imperialism, and militarization, as well as the discourse of criminality that has constituted the entire
immigration debate in the United States. For instance, he states, “My name is José Guadalupe Herrera
Soto; I am considered a criminal, an illegal alien, a person without proper documentation.” Many
DREAM activists begin their speeches offering their name and indicating their undocumented status.
Herrera Soto shifts that by announcing himself as a criminal and an alien. As Nicholas de Genova argues,
some of the strategies of the migrant rights and justice movement have reflected a queer approach by
announcing their presence and not asking for acceptance or inclusion. 103 Herrera Soto demonstrates
this profoundly in his self-introduction and pushes even further in this direction when he indicts a
system of capitalism and criminalization for stigmatizing him with these labels and oppressing him with
incarceration, a criminal record, and possible deportation. He frankly explains, “This system was build [
sic ] for the purpose of profiting out of the criminalization, illegalization, racialization, incarceration and
deportation of human beings; a system that pushes people into breaking capitalistic laws and thus turns
humans into commodities.” Rather than emphasizing individual culpability or choice, Herrera Soto turns
attention to the capitalist system, which limits options and compels people to break often unjust laws
while creating space for corporations to make money off of their criminalization. Most DREAMer
testimonies feature stories of the hardships that undocumented youth have confronted and the
profound successes they have achieved even in the face of such tremendous obstacles. Herrera Soto’s
testimony moves in a very different direction when he tells his story of breaking “capitalistic laws” and,
since he was undocumented and without a driver’s license, being charged with an aggravated felony. He
explains that he refused to accept a plea bargain, which meant that he served time in Cook County Jail
and fought deportation. Whereas DREAMer testimonies often involve a declaration of belonging to the
United States and a desire simply to be included through being offered a pathway to citizenship, Herrera
Soto notes that he is not asking for inclusion in the racist system, nor will he conform in ways that will
make him more palatable to that system. Instead, he insists: I have been labeled a criminal; therefore I
stand up and join the struggle of those who are labeled criminals. I join the struggle of fellow human
beings who are struggling to survive under the racist capitalist system we live in. I join the struggle of the
marginalized, of the poor, of people of color. I join the 2.3 million people, who are behind cages, and I
make no distinction between them and I, we are one, we have been labeled “criminals” by the racist
system, the oppressor, the one that tries to silence and destroy our communities. Herrera Soto’s words
could be characterized as utopian because of his grand desire to join a “struggle of fellow human
beings,” and he certainly offers such a declaration with a better potential future in mind. It is the
present possibility of a coalition of those whom the system has deemed criminal, leading to an end of
the racist, capitalist system that Herrera Soto foremost envisions. In this way, in coming out, he does not
seek personal affirmation or a politics constructed through identity. He concludes, “We humans are not
commodities and will continue to fight and make alliances to combat this. I am José Guadalupe Herrera
Soto and I am grateful to share my testimony with all of you here today.” Herrera Soto disrupts the
usual function of identity in coming out rhetoric; he queers it. This in itself may f ix or reduce the
identities of other activists, and it is not that Herrera Soto can completely avoid identity. In its place he
seeks identification , but such identification is not premised on the logic of personal identity and
individual worthiness. On November 1, 2012, Herrera Soto had a court hearing with DHS in which the
judge determined that removing him would cause extreme hardship for a US citizen, his son. 104 Prior
to his hearing, Herrera Soto and other members of the “No Name Collective” issued a “Call for (a
Different Kind of) Solidarity.” In it the collective refused to ask for people to support Herrera Soto as an
individual, writing, “José has asked that we use his proceedings as a call to fight against the systems that
classify and divide people.” The call goes on to make statements that cannot be said in the scripted
space of an immigration courtroom, including that immigration laws are illegitimate and courtrooms are
mere spectacles. The call ends with the following: “Our resistance must refuse the narrative of the few
exceptional cases and must stand with all those labeled criminal, or illegal, or deportable. We are
sending this message today because we are looking for another way to resist and another basis for
solidarity. Join us!” The issue of exceptionalism and worthiness is taken on directly in the image that
accompanies the text where the collective critiques the use of petitions and the emphasis on
exceptional individuals, suggesting that such use of the petition is both divisive and complicit with the
corrupt system. The “Biography of Worthiness” image thus mocks the familiar petitions that circulate in
order to get people to rally around individual cases. Despite the efforts of Herrera Soto and his
supporters to work against these scripts, he still becomes an exception. He notes this in a comment on
the event’s Facebook page: “I know that I’m one of the lucky few that ‘made it,’ however thousands in
similar situation as mines [ sic ] end up being deported.” He goes on to challenge the logic that says the
worthiest must be helped first, insisting, “My struggle has not ended, I’ll continue to advocate for justice
for all. Always speaking out against injustices and being critical of the struggle, using an identity based
on politics rather than politics based on identity—like always.” Here, Herrera Soto flips the identity logic
popularized in DREAM activism. Although he still seeks community, it is not a community of normative
citizens. Although he still desires belonging, it is through alliances with others who want more than
inclusion into a corrupt • 109 system. Herrera Soto reveals how coming out retains the traces of the
queerness of the tactical strategy by showing that coming out does not have to call for an inclusionary
mode of belonging. His grand coalitional gesture and emergence still remain just as risky, if not riskier,
given that he declares that his coming out of the shadows is a threat to the system itself.

Queer and migrant issues stand in opposition to normative political orientations of the
mainstream, which are exclusionary. A praxis of radical interactionality allows for
critique of the roots of a problem and reveals how systems of power produce the
status quo of limited political possibility. Viewing legislation as an end unto itself is
forecloses potential for meaningful change, which necessitates our praxis, which
causes potential for broader change than legislation can yield. These coalitional
movements allow for a counter-reading of issues in a broader context, and unlocks the
potential for greater political movements.
Chavez, 13 – Karma, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Mexican American & Latino/a Studies @ University of Texas-Austin. Queer Migration Politics: Activist
Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, University of Illinois Press, p. 51-52 – jw

Nair has amassed a body of commentary, a series of coalitional moments that repeatedly bring queer
and migrant issues into each other’s folds. The positions that Nair has taken on the UAFA, the
relationship between queer and migrant organizing, and the relationships between migration and queer
issues in the public sphere reflect an unwavering commitment to an alternative imaginary of how queer
and migration politics should be enacted. Nair’s activist vision is oppositional. She directly opposes the
political orientation and conditions of belonging set forth by the mainstream LGBT immigration rights
community, which she suggests leaves most migrants out. Nair’s vision opposes normative and
inclusionary politics that implicitly or explicitly include only “good” people, that divide the oppressed
from one another, or that succumb to the narrow agenda of the most powerful within marginalized
communities. As a result of such positions, some critics have described her politics as unrealistic and
utopian. I am arguing for an alternative interpretation. The positions Nair takes engender what I call the
rhetoric of radical interactionality, an idea that builds on the women of color feminist notion of
intersectionality. It is a form of rhetorical confrontation that begins critique from the roots of a
problem or crisis and methodically reveals how systems of power and oppression interact with one
another in ways that produce subjects, institutions, and ideologies and that enable and constrain
political response. Nair’s rhetoric often focuses on constructing arguments toward the achievement of
legislative ends, but the legislative frame for the rhetoric does not compel Nair to make arguments
based on political expedience as might be expected. Instead, the legislative frame merely provides the
exigency for the rhetoric of radical interactionality. Such rhetoric is in opposition to how debates
about legislation often unfold, where the legislation is seen as an end in itself. In this instance a
conversation about legislation opens into broader discussions about other, more radical possibilities
for justice and change. Radical interactionality shifts from viewing identities as discrete and suggests
that the crux of any kind of oppression is multifaceted and complex. The possibilities reflected in
these coalitional moments, then, are not the sorts that ask people to strategically coalesce around
temporary or politically expedient issues. Nair invites her audience to read against the grain of
oppression and to understand migration and queer issues more broadly. Nair’s writing asks for people
to come together at the roots of their interlocking oppression. As made clear in the above story,
however, heightened emotionality often characterizes how Nair’s gay and lesbian audience reads her
work. As will become clear in the analysis below, large swaths of her audience read her as a polemicist,
as insensitive, and as failing to understand their deeply personal situations. Aimee Carrillo Rowe
maintains that within transracial alliances, a primary gift that women of color have to offer is their
critique of power relations, yet most white allies are not interested in receiving the gift.6 The LGBT
people to whom Nair offers her critique do not want that gift either. In this chapter I analyze Nair’s
rhetoric of radical interactionality, as well as the audience responses to it, in order to reveal the
possibilities and difficulties these coalitional moments create. I begin with a brief discussion of Nair and
her work within the context of queer and migrant activism in the United States. I then elaborate on the
notion of radical interactionality through an examination of Nair’s blogs and online commentary found
in several queer venues. I conclude with what Nair’s rhetoric offers for thinking about radical coalitional
politics.

Radical interactionality moves away from normative and even intersectional


constructions identities and emphasizes the relations between identities, power, and
systems of oppression. While not negating individual identity, radical interactionality
emphasizes coalition-building through a multiplicity of identities which can address
the roots of a problem and can confront and work against the exploitation and
violence of institutions.
Chavez, 13 – Karma, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Mexican American & Latino/a Studies @ University of Texas-Austin. Queer Migration Politics: Activist
Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, University of Illinois Press, p. 57-60 – jw
Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade paint a somewhat different picture of radical
organizing, noting that it seeks to “expand possibilities for broad-based, social justice solutions.”32
Howard Zinn put the matter simply in his play Marx in Soho: “to be radical is simply to grasp the root of
a problem.”33 Drawing on Zinn’s definition, performance studies scholar D. Soyini Madison describes a
radical act as “a confrontation with the ‘root’ of a problem. It is to reach for the causes of an issue and
not simply respond to its symptoms. It is a showdown with limitations to embrace necessary excess and
to disturb a state of affairs in pursuit of confronting those root causes.”34 The word “radical” extends
from the Latin radicalis, which pertains to “relating to or forming the root.”35 Arguably, finding “root”
causes is very similar to the association of radical with fundamentalism and purity because a root may
also be a fundamental or an origin. To understand the fundamental or root of a problem is not the same
as promoting fundamentalism. Moreover, in some instances the metaphor of a root also refers to a
rhizome, a horizontal root mass that produces new roots and shoots that can be severed and started
anew.36 As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have argued in their extension of the botanical metaphor
to theory, a rhizome turns away from purity and instead highlights multiplicity—or in this case the
complexity—of a problem or situation.37 Heading too far in the direction of Deleuze and Guattari is not
my interest here, except to illuminate the fact that a root is not synonymous with purity or
reductionism. A radical act, then, addresses or confronts roots in their multiplicity and complexity. I
seek to conjoin this idea of radical critique with a framework that is equipped for addressing the
complexity of a problem’s roots, and what results I name radical interactionality. In the realm of social
justice, the framework of intersectionality has been advanced to understand the complicated
interworking of power that constitutes the situation of people who experience interlocking
oppressions.38 Intersectionality invites an understanding of how multiple oppressions (and privileges)
deriving from systems such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation intermesh so that the experience
of being a queer, working-class woman of color in the United States differs very much from being a
queer, working-class white woman or any number of other women. Intersectionality works against
reductionism and purity, promoting instead a perspective that accounts for the “differences that make a
difference” in how people can maneuver their worlds.39 And as David L. Eng writes, we must “insist on
new approaches to intersectionality in queer studies.”40 Intersectionality has been popularized in the
academy to describe the complexity of power, oppression, and identity, but it has also been critiqued
for fixing the very identities and power systems it seeks to subvert and overturn.41 Jasbir K. Puar, for
instance, advises moving from intersectionality to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage. An
assemblage is a conglomeration of multiplicities, “a series of dispersed but mutually implicated and
messy networks, [that] draws together enunciation and dissolution, causality and effect, organic and
nonorganic forces.”42 In this way the assemblage accounts for “other contingencies of belonging” that
the identity politics framework, which is allegedly upheld through intersectionality, may not account for.
The assemblage emphasizes movement, flow, and affectivities. Drawing on Brian Massumi, who
maintains that the notion of “positionality” suggests a “positioning on a grid,”43 Puar suggests that
intersectionality is “a hermeneutic of positionality that seeks to account for locality, specificity,
placement, junctions.”44 On the one hand, Puar’s critique of intersectionality is unnecessarily
reductionistic and builds a binary between intersectionality and the assemblage. Many intersectional
theorists show specificity of oppression without essentializing identity. Kimberle Crenshaw’s analysis of
the erasure of women of color within political, structural, and representational realms demonstrates the
particular ways that these women’s experiences are negated without fixing the women or any others
into such positions.45 In a move that is similar to postmodern theorists before her, Puar uses the
postmodern writing of European male theorists to critique the “theory in the flesh” of women of color
theorists, which functions to simplify and negate women of color theorizing while remaining distant
from the actual lived experiences of oppressed people. On the other hand, Puar and Massumi highlight
the difficulty of the metaphor of intersectionality that at least implies a grid and a fixed position upon it.
Puar further advocates keeping the assemblage and intersectionality in tension, and one way to do this
is through interactionality. Building on intersectionality, interactionality moves away from the linear
metaphor and highlights the complicated and dynamic way in which identities, power, and systems of
oppression intermesh, interlock, intersect, and thus interact.46 Interactionality addresses both the
mobility and complexity of bodily experience but does not negate the lived experience of oppression
through seemingly fixed identities and positions within systems of power. As a resistant logic of
impurity and multiplicity,47 interactionality holds in tension both the predictable ways oppression
and power manifest in relation to and upon particular bodies while also carrying possibilities for
creative and complicated responses to oppression.48 To illustrate, in a blog entry critiquing the
“undocuqueer” movement—a group of young, undocumented, and queer migration rights activists who
urge “coming out” as undocumented (see also chapter 3)—Nair remarks, “It is not radical to claim that
the undocumented are not illegal. In fact, that is a deeply conservative point. It is far more radical to
think about all of us taking on the onus of interrogating the notion of the ‘illegal.’ Do we, as people who
believe in justice and fairness, want to leave anyone behind?”49 In this controversial critique, Nair
reveals how the rhetoric of radical interactionality addresses the complex roots of a problem without
reducing experiences of oppression to fixed identities. Nair goes on to say, “When immigration
becomes a matter of a declarative identity, we stop seeing and dismantling the systems we have to
fight.” Such rhetoric also acknowledges how systems of oppression interact in both predictable and
surprising ways. In this instance Nair works against conventional wisdom on the left, which has pushed
everyone to use the label “undocumented” instead of “illegal” to describe migrants who are in civil
violation of immigration law. Nair claims that making “undocumented” an identity and disconnecting
the problems of immigration from the system that deems some people illegal misses the roots of the
issue. Her radical interactional alternative is a mode of resistance that responds through both
structural critique and logics of creativity and multiplicity. Radical interactionality is an important
rhetorical resource for queer politics. As black queer materialist scholar Cathy J. Cohen writes, “It is the
multiplicity and interconnectedness of our identities which provide the most promising avenue for the
destabilization and radical politicalization of these same categories. This is not an easy path to pursue
because most often this will mean building a political analysis and political strategies around the most
marginal in our society, some of whom look like us, many of whom do not.”50 Cohen presumably
addresses an audience of privileged queer people who may find comfort in the categories that will need
to be destabilized. The radical interventions she calls for require coalition building among different
and differently positioned people. The perspective engendered by such strategies must make “central
the interdependency among multiple systems of domination. Such a perspective also ensures that
while activists should rightly be concerned with forms of discursive and cultural coercion, we also
recognize and confront the more direct and concrete forms of exploitation and violence rooted in
state-regulated institutions and economic systems.”51 Importantly, then, this vision bridges between
discursive and material approaches to ending oppression, recognizing both as sources that deserve
attention. Nair’s rhetoric of radical interactionality integrates the kind of approach Cohen outlines and
seeks to offer an alternative, oppositional vision or paradigm for queer migration activism. Her
rhetoric engenders three primary characteristics: a critique of neoliberal affect and the use of personal
narrative, a strategic blending of the queer and the migrant worker, and a denouncement of the ways
nonprofit organizations dictate the “gay” agenda and squelch dissent from within the LGBTQ
community.
Alt—Sanctuary

Sanctuaries are necessarily illegal and outside the paradigms of law enforcement. To
provide sanctuary is to engage in civil disobedience against unjust laws
Chaves 2017 (Karma R. Chaves, “From Sanctuary to a Queer Politics of Fugitivity,” page 65-66, A
professor at UT Austin, queer/quar feminist, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/668591/summary)

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, sanctuary is foremost a holy or sacred space, often the most sacred
space in a house of worship and sometimes referring to the entire house. During the medieval era, particularly in England, under
medieval church law and English common law, a debtor or a fugitive charged with anything other than
“sacrilege or treason” could seek sanctuary in a church and be given immunity from arrest. However, within
40 days, the person could only secure that immunity by confessing to the crime and signing an oath that perpetually banished them. This
provision was eventually made illegal, excepting certain places. Sanctuary is also more broadly understood as a place of
asylum and refuge. For many of those in Tucson, Arizona, who took up their work of moving and harboring Central Americans fleeing
violence in the early 1980s, their view of sanctuary was biblical, and they knew the term would provide them both a
historical and religious justification for breaking the law. Robert Tomsho describes an early conversation about how people
would proceed: [Pastor John] Fife remembered the religious concept of sanctuary. In the Bible, sanctuary had its roots in the book of Numbers,
where Moses was commanded to establish “cities of refuge” for “the people of Israel, and for the stranger and for the sojourner among them,
that any one who kills any person without intent may flee there.” In the centuries that followed, there were other instances of churches being
declared safe havens for people fleeing persecution or punishment.5 As
these definitions and this history show, the idea of
sanctuary is profoundly connected to the idea of sanctuary in religious traditions, and they also indicate
that providing sanctuary is an extralegal action. These meanings help us to understand what it means to offer sanctuary, and
who and what has historically been in the position to provide it. Other dimensions of thinking about sanctuary in this contemporary moment of
crisis are worth considering. First, because sanctuary, in the form made well- known by the movement of the
1980s, is an action outside of the legal system, it may not be just extralegal, but technically illegal.
Offering sanctuary is often an act of civil disobedience against unjust laws. This relates to a second dimension of
sanctuary that must be seriously considered, which is that sanctuary, as a legal concept, and also in practice outside of
religious institutions, doesn’t really exist. Put differently, as journalist Ruben Navarrette, Jr., notes when it comes to municipal
ordinances, “Some ordinances might bar local officers from cooperating with immigration agents at traffic stops. Others might bar federal
authorities from ascertaining the immigration status of those booked. Others might prohibit the release to federal officials of any suspect who
could be an illegal immigrant.”6 As Navarette explains, in addition to being diverse in the protections they provide, most sanctuary ordinances
have grown lenient over the years. Regardless of what
is actually in place, collaborations between federal
immigration officials and local law enforcement have continued. Under the Obama administration, this was mandated
first through Secure Communities and then through its replacement, the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP). Although PEP prioritizes those
undocumented people here without permission that have committed crimes, it can technically be used to detain and deport anyone without
authorization to be in the country. PEP’s existence shows the fictitiousness of any sanctuary status. The problem is that
when nonreligious entities like cities and universities create and advocate sanctuary policies, they
largely do so by pressuring local and state police and sheriff’s departments not to collaborate with
federal immigration officials. Police leaders are brought into council meetings and community forums to
assure elected officials and communities alike that police are not immigration officials. These policies
therefore attempt to work within the law. If local laws and federal laws come in conflict, there are many reasons why, in
particular situations, federal law will prevail. Ultimately, the job of the police is not actually to protect and serve
undocumented or other vulnerable communities, but to uphold local, state, and federal laws in their
jurisdictions. Thus, the idea of a “legal” sanctuary is, from the beginning, impossible. Sanctuary must
be thought in the way secular and religious folks in Tucson, thought of it: as a direct violation of unjust
laws.7
Alt—Suicide Bomber

The figure of the suicide terrorist is able to disrupt the structuring and representations
of queer life. “Terrorist assemblages”Additionally, it helps disrupt the readings of
brown bodies within the US
Puar 7 Jasbir Puar, “Terrorist assemblages” professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke University
Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 216

The fact that we approach suicide bombing with such trepidation, in contrast to how we approach the
violence of colonial domination, indicates the symbolic violence that shapes our understanding of
what constitutes ethically and politically illegitimate violence. - Ghassan Hage, "'Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm'"
Ghassan Hage wonders "why it is that suicide bombing cannot be talked about without being condemned first," noting that without an
unequivocal condemnation, one is a "morally suspicious person" because "only un- qualified condemnation will do." He asserts. "There
is a
clear political risk in trying to explain suicide bombings."33 With such risks in mind, my desire here is to momentarily
suspend this dilemma by combining an analysis of these representational stakes with a reading of the forces of affect, of the body, of matter.
In pondering the modalities of this kind of terrorist, one notes a pastiche of oddities: a body machined
together through metal and flesh, an assemblage of the organic and the inorganic; a death not of the
Self nor of the Other, but both simultaneously, and, perhaps more accurately, a death scene that
obliterates the Hegelian self/other dialectic altogether. Self-annihilation is the ultimate form of
resistance, and ironically, it acts as self-preservation, the preservation of symbolic self enabled through
the "highest cultural capital" of martyrdom, a giving of life to the future of political struggles-not at all
a sign of "disinterest in living a meaningful life." As Hage notes, in this limited but nonetheless trenchant economy of meaning,
suicide bombers are "a sign of life" emanating from the violent conditions of life's impossibility, the
"impossibility of making a life. "" This body forces a reconciliation of opposites through their inevitable
collapse- a perverse habitation of contradiction. Achille Mbembe's and brilliant meditation on necropolitics notes that the
historical basis of sovereignty that is reliant upon a notion of (western) political rationality begs for a
more accurate framing: that of life and death, the subjugation of life to the power of death. Mbembe attends
not only to the representational but also to the informational productivity of the (Palestinian) suicide bomber. Pointing to the
becomings of a suicide bomber, a corporeal experiential of "ballistics," he asks, "What place is given to life,
death, and the human body (especially the wounded or slain body)?" Assemblage here points to the
inability to clearly delineate a temporal, spatial, energetic, or molecular distinction between a discrete
biological body and technology; the entities, particles, and elements come together, flow, break apart,
interface, skim off each other, are never stable, but are defined through their continual interface, not
as objects meeting but as multiplicities emerging from interactions. The dynamite strapped onto the body of a
suicide bomber is not merely an appendage or prosthetic; the intimacy of weapon with body reorients the assumed
spatial integrity (coherence and concreteness) and individuality of the body that is the mandate of
intersectional identities: instead we have the body-weapon. The ontology of the body renders it a
newly becoming body: The candidate for martyrdom transforms his or her body into a mask that hides
the soon-to-be-detonated weapon. Unlike the tank or the missile that is clearly visible, the weapon carried in the
shape of the body is invisible. Thus concealed, it forms part of the body. It is so intimately part of the body that at
the time of its detonation it annihilates the body of its bearer, who carries with it the bodies of others when it does not reduce them to pieces.
The body does not simply conceal a weapon. The
body is transformed into a weapon, not in a metaphorical sense
but in a truly ballistic sense.,1 Temporal narratives of progression are upturned as death and becoming
fuse into one: as one's body dies, one's body becomes the mask, the weapon, the suicide bomber. Not
only does the ballistic body come into being without the aid of visual cues marking its transformation, it
also "carries with it the bodies of others." Its own penetrative energy sends shards of metal and torn flesh spinning off into the
ether. The body-weapon does not play as metaphor, nor in the realm of meaning and epistemology, but
forces us ontologically anew to ask: What kinds of information does the ballistic body impart? These
bodies, being in the midst of becoming, blur the insides and the outsides, infecting transformation
through sensation, echoing knowledge via reverberation and vibration. The echo is a queer temporality-in the relay
of affective information between and amid beings, the sequence of reflection, repetition, resound, and return (but with a difference, as in
mimicry)-and brings forth waves of the future breaking into the present. Gayatri Spivak, prescient in drawing our attention to the multivalent
tex- tuality of suicide in "Can the Subaltern Speak," reminds us in her latest ruminations that suicide
terrorism is a modality of
expression and communication for the subaltern (there is the radiation of heat, the stench of burning
flesh, the impact of metal upon structures and the ground, the splattering of blood, body parts, skin):
Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through. It is both execution and mourning,
for both self and other. For you die with me for the same cause, no matter which side you are on. Because
no matter who you are, there are no designated killees in suicide bombing. No matter what side you are on, because I cannot talk to you, you
won't respond to me, with the implication that there is no dishonor in such shared and innocent death. 36 We have
the proposal that
there are no sides, and that the sides are forever shifting, crumpling, and multiplying, disappearing
and reappearing, unable to satisfactorily delineate between here and there. The spatial collapse of
sides is due to the queer temporal interruption of the suicide bomber, projectiles spewing every which
way. As a queer assemblage- distinct from the queering of an entity or identity-race and sexuality are
denaturalized through the impermanence, the transience of the suicide bomber, the fleeting identity
replayed backward through its dissolution. This dissolution of self into others and other into self not
only effaces the absolute mark of self and others in the war on terror, but produces a systemic
challenge to the entire order of Manichaean rationality that organizes the rubric of good versus evil.
Delivering "a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through," suicide bombers do not transcend or claim the rational
nor accept the demarcation of the irrational. Rather, they foreground the flawed temporal, spatial, and ontological pre- sumptions upon which
such distinctions flourish. Organic
and inorganic, flesh and machine, these wind up as important as (and
perhaps as threatening) if not more so than the symbolism of the bomber and his or her defense or
condemnation. Figure 24 is the November/December 2004 cover of a magazine called Jest: Humor for the Irreverent, distributed for free
in Brooklyn (see also jest .com) and published by a group of counterculture artists and writers. Here we have the full force of the mistaken
identity conundrum: the distinctive silhouette, indeed the profile, harking to the visible by literally blacking it out, of the turbaned Amritdhari
Sikh male (Le., turban and unshorn beard that signals baptized Sikhs), rendered (mistakenly?) as a (Muslim) suicide bomber, replete with
dynamite through the vibrant pulsations of an iPod ad. Fully modern, animated through technologies of sound and explosives, this body does
not operate solely or even primarily on the level of metaphor. Once again, to borrow from Mbembe, it is truly a ballistic body. Contagion,
infection, and transmission reign, not meaning.

The figure of the suicide bomber disrupts normative temporal and spatial renderings.
It delivers a message that no words can, a message from the future that breaks
through to the present and blurs the relationship between bodies.
Puar 7 Jasbir Puar, “Terrorist assemblages” professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke University
Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 216

Achille Mbembe’s devastating and brilliant meditation on necropolitics notes that the historical basis of sovereignty that is reliant upon a notion
of (western) political rationality begs for a more accurate framing: that of life and death, the subjugation of life to the power of death. Mbembe
attends not only to the representational but also to the informational productivity of the (Palestinian) suicide bomber. Pointing
to the
becomings of a suicide bomber, a corporeal experiential of ‘‘ballistics,’’ he asks, ‘‘What place is given to
life, death, and the human body (especially the wounded or slain body)?’’ Assemblage here points to the
inability to clearly delineate a temporal, spatial, energetic, or molecular distinction between a discrete
biological body and technology; the entities, particles, and elements come together, flow, break apart,
interface, skim o√ each other, are never stable, but are defined through their continual interface, not as
objects meeting but as multiplicities emerging from interactions. The dynamite strapped onto the body
of a suicide bomber is not merely an appendage or prosthetic; the intimacy of weapon with body
reorients the assumed spatial integrity (coherence and concreteness) and individuality of the body that is the mandate of
intersectional identities: instead we have the body-weapon. The ontology of the body renders it a newly becoming body: The
candidate for martyrdom transforms his or her body into a mask that hides the soon-to-be-detonated weapon. Unlike the tank or the
missile that is clearly visible, the weapon carried in the shape of the body is invisible. Thus concealed, it
forms part of the body. It is so intimately part of the body that at the time of its detonation it annihilates
the body of its bearer, who carries with it the bodies of others when it does not reduce them to pieces.
The body does not simply conceal a weapon. The body is transformed into a weapon, not in a metaphorical
sense but in a truly ballistic sense.≥∑ Temporal narratives of progression are upturned as death and becoming
fuse into one: as one’s body dies, one’s body becomes the mask, the weapon, the suicide bomber. Not
only does the ballistic body come into being without the aid of visual cues marking its transformation, it also ‘‘carries with it the bodies of
others.’’ Its own penetrative energy sends shards of metal and torn flesh spinning o√ into the ether. The body-weapon does not play as
metaphor, nor in the realm of meaning and epistemology, but forces us ontologically anew to ask: What
kinds of information does
the ballistic body impart? These bodies, being in the midst of becoming, blur the insides and the
outsides, infecting transformation through sensation, echoing knowledge via reverberation and
vibration. The echo is a queer temporality—in the relay of a√ective information between and amid
beings, the sequence of reflection, repetition, resound, and return (but with a di√erence, as in
mimicry)—and brings forth waves of the future breaking into the present. Gayatri Spivak, prescient in drawing our
attention to the multivalent textuality of suicide in ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak,’’ reminds us in her latest ruminations that suicide terrorism is a
modality of expression and communication for the subaltern (there is the radiation of heat, the stench of burning flesh, the impact of metal
upon structures and the ground, the splattering of blood, body parts, skin) Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the
body when no other means will get through. It is both execution and mourning, for both self and other.
For you die with me for the same cause, no matter which side you are on. Because no matter who you
are, there are no designated killees in suicide bombing. No matter what side you are on, because I
cannot talk to you, you won’t respond to me, with the implication that there is no dishonor in such
shared and innocent death.≥∏ We have the proposal that there are no sides, and that the sides are forever shifting, crumpling, and
multiplying, disappearing and reappearing, unable to satisfactorily delineate between here and there. The spatial collapse of sides is
due to the queer temporal interruption of the suicide bomber, projectiles spewing every which way. As a
queer assemblage— distinct from the queering of an entity or identity—race and sexuality are denaturalized through the impermanence, the
transience of the suicide bomber, the fleeting identity replayed backward through its dissolution. This dissolution of self into other/s and
other/s into self not only e√aces the absolute mark of self and other/s in the war on terror, but produces a systemic challenge to the entire
order of Manichaean rationality that organizes the rubric of good versus evil. Delivering
‘‘a message inscribed on the body
when no other means will get through,’’ suicide bombers do not transcend or claim the rational nor
accept the demarcation of the irrational. Rather, they foreground the flawed temporal, spatial, and
ontological presumptions upon which such distinctions flourish. Organic and inorganic, flesh and
machine, these wind up as important as (and perhaps as threatening) if not more so than the symbolism
of the bomber and his or her defense or condemnation.
Aff—AT: Queer Migration Politics
Impact Turns
Citizenship Good—2AC

The alt can’t solve and the perm is best – absolutist queer challenges to citizenship
inevitably replicate either settler expansion via open borders or the expansion of
political exclusion
Stevens, 18 – Jacqueline, "Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative by Amy L. Brandzel,"
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 43, no. 3 (Spring 2018): 767-770, p. Project Muse –
klab/br

Brandzel’s work reiterates themes common to what might be called “contemporary oppression” or
“injustice studies.” Her main inference from these, to oppose citizenship, follows from this logically and,
alas, repeats their familiar failure to engage tough questions raised by earlier generations of theorists
and historians, some of whom Brandzel cites. First, if our group identities are not natural but exist
through political or other kinship laws and practices, then why call some nations “native” and
“Indigenous” but not others? If the answer is “whoever was there before someone else from a different
intergenerational group,” then does that mean that the unpopulated lands encountered by European
conquistadors, explorers, and their descendants should exclude from membership those arriving later
who are associated with other intergenerational groups? Is Brandzel, in the contemporary Southwest,
willing to put herself under the rule of native descendants of White slave-owning filibusters, or Mexican
ranchers, or Spanish conquistadors who staked out territory that was not previously settled? Much of
the terrain where Europeans settled in the Americas was previously occupied—it was easier to take over
established trade routes and cultivated fields than create them anew. But in absolute terms, massive
amounts of land on this continent and elsewhere were staked by out by European settlers in areas that
had never been seen by anyone: do these regions belong only to the countries, clans, or families of the
descendants of those adventurers? Their churches? And if not, what distinguishes their conquest from
that of the “Indigenous” nations of Hawaii and elsewhere in the Americas, who also did not spring out of
that earth but arrived there at some point after they were born?

And yet if Brandzel embraces the queer attack on borders and the free movement and legal protections
of migrants outside their countries of origins, then on what basis would Rice or anyone else be excluded
from voting for representatives to determine the cultural disposition of their states of residence? Where
is the argument—not “comparative anti-intersectional” namecalling but the argument—for despising
the Nazis’ invocation of “blood and soil” and not the claims of an IndigenousHawaiian nation? If
Brandzel brings a queer appreciation of narratives behind the racist, capitalist ideological underpinnings
of mass incarceration, and remains committed to the present, then on what basis is she celebrating any
group’s intergenerational sovereignty over land and people? Brandzel cites scholars challenging naive
views that sovereign native nations were utopian or without their own wars (119). So why develop an
analysis that not only affirms their purity and rejects hybridity but provides political support based on
putative bloodlines? None of these are easy questions, and I hope to read Brandzel’s thoughts on them
in her subsequent contributions to this scholarship.
Queering citizenship can never be the basis for the formulation of politics – it either
fails to dismantle subject positions or can never be the basis for collective struggle
Stevens, 18 – Jacqueline, "Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative by Amy L. Brandzel,"
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 43, no. 3 (Spring 2018): 767-770, p. Project Muse –
klab/br

Brandzel’s conclusion calls for queer theory’s antifuturity analyses. “Queering the faiths in citizenship,
law, and temporality creates a space in which decolonial, queer, feminist and critical race scholars and
activists work toward imagining and restructuring accountability in order to see oppression, seek
change, and envision justice in the present” (147). No further specifics are provided, nor is this ever
reconciled with Brandzel’s embrace of sovereign na- tions whose integrity was disrupted, corrupted, and
for the most part destroyed by European settlers. Brandzel’s refusal of liberal democratic citizenship—
something that has never actually existed—ignores quandaries of scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois,
Edward Said, Chandra Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy, as well as work that explicitly and
implicitly pursues the fraught politics of Spivak’s strategic essentialism. Regardless of whether one
embraces or rejects strategic essentialism’s compromises, it is impossible to formulate a politics on
behalf of indigeneous sovereign nations without engaging what it means to act on behalf of a subject
position interpellated by others, be it one’s contemporary enemies or narratives recreated by the group
whose membership one has inherited by ties defined by kinship or actual genetics (135). Brandzel’s
arguments run on two parallel tracks, one committed to queer theory and another to full-blown nativist
practices and claims oblivious to anarchist, pacifist, and queer—not just liberal—critiques of diachronic
identities that depend on intuitions about nature, nativity, and nationalism.
Law Good—2AC

Legal control over subjectivity is inevitable but so are strategic demands on the law—
radical queer anti-statist politics are possible within the law
Peter Campbell 13, faculty member in the Program in Composition, Literacy, Pedagogy, and Rhetoric
at the University of Pittsburgh, JUDICIAL RHETORIC AND RADICAL POLITICS: SEXUALITY, RACE, AND THE
FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT,
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/45352/Peter_Campbell.pdf?sequence=1

But—following Matsuda—I think that Butlerseems to miss an important point. Given the material force of the fantasy
of legal sovereignty in the margins, “‘at the point[s]’” where power is “‘completely invested in its real
and effective practices,’” 31 I argue that resistance to the idea of legal sovereignty must not preclude what
Cathy Cohen might call a “practical”32 understanding of the presently inevitable reality of the sovereign

rhetorical operations of the law. The political project of resistance to the performative sovereignty of
judicial rhetoric in the United States must not deny (as Matsuda and Richard Delgado said in 1987 to the “crits” of
Critical Legal Studies) the need to construct strategically informed and tactically sound responses to those

“formal” structures of law that already act as and with the material power of sovereign authority––
authority over the constraints that legal forms of subjectivity already impose on personhood.33 As Butler
herself acknowledges in 2004,34 the absolute critique of legal sovereign performatives does not adequately
consider how the effects of the fantasy of legal sovereignty are most often (and most often most
terribly) felt by “those who have” actually “seen and felt the falsity of the liberal promise”35 of the U.S.
judiciary as a shield against domination.¶ My experience of the law has occurred through my own participation in and observation of judicial
sovereignty––both from a majoritarian perspective. I teach argumentation in a prison, a setting that emphasizes the paradoxical and simultaneous vitality and
uselessness of rhetorical and argumentative interaction with those persons charged with enforcing the reasoned justification of judicial decision through coercive
violence. In our present democratic state of laws, the production of legitimacy for judicial sovereignty through argument, and the production of legitimacy through
force, work together in explicit and mutually supportive fashion. More happily, I was recently invited by two friends to officiate their wedding, at a ceremony in
Rehoboth, Massachusetts. I agreed, and asked whether I should purchase an ordination online, so that I could legally perform the ceremony. There was no need—
Massachusetts is unusual among U.S. states in maintaining a category of officiant called a “solemnizer.” Any person, with little qualification, can apply to be a
solemnizer. The dichotomy between the “republican style”36 of the application process, and the quotidian ease with which I was granted the certificate made me
think about the “sovereign performative”37 that I would stage in Rehoboth. The “I do” statement in a marriage ceremony is one of Austin’s core examples38 of an
“illocutionary” performative, an utterance which “has a certain force” in the “saying” of it,39 but this example itself performs an interesting elision of the role of a
state representative in a civil marriage ceremony. In Rehoboth, my friends would not be married until I pronounced them so publicly. That pronouncement would of
course require other performative statements (“I do”) from my friends as a pre-requisite to its validity.40 But on the date and in the location specified by the
solemnization certificate, I had, as a feature of the designation “solemnizer” bestowed on me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, absolute power over
whether they would be married or not—on that date and in that location. In the narrow context of the two possible realities of my friends becoming married or not
on that day and in that location, my role was to exercise the sovereign performative power of the Commonwealth as its judge-like representative. ¶ But in that
exercise, I would also be performing two arguments: one for the sovereign legitimacy (and successful performativity)41 of my utterances and the illegitimacy of any
others; and one for the value and significance of “married” as a position of legal subjectivity in Massachusetts and the United States. I bring up this example to
emphasize the specifically illocutionary power of the judicial rhetorical constitution of subjects before law. Austin describes illocution as “‘in saying x I was doing y’
or ‘I did y,’”42 but judicial illocution might more accurately be described as “in saying x I did x.” When I said that these people were married, I made them married.
The statement and the doing were one and the same.
If a judge sentences a person to death, she does not depress the
needle; the pronouncement of sentence is an illocutionary act in the first sense (x and y). But in
pronouncing the sentence, the judge does redefine the convicted (of a death-eligible crime) person’s
subjectivity before law from “convicted” and/or “criminal” and/or “felon” and/or “murderer” and/or “traitor” to, more primarily,
“condemned.” This is an illocutionary act in the second sense (x and x).¶ If a judge rules that it is unconstitutional to
require a trans* person’s passport to list their gender contrary to that person’s “self-understanding,”43
this is a “perlocutionary” act (where the utterance effectively causes something to happen)44 in that the
ruling enables the person who is trans* to change the official designation of their gender. But it is also an x and x
illocutionary act in the context of the petitioner’s subjectivity before law —the utterance of the ruling has

changed their self-understanding of their own identity from “not real” to “real” in the eyes of the law. This
would be even more evident if the ruling did not merely realize the truth of a trans* person’s self-understanding as male or female, but went so far as to create, in
the moment of the utterance itself, a legally recognized trans* identity category. ¶ All of these examples are performatives enabled by the fantasy of the sovereign
location of power in law. When asked, I considered (given my own views on marriage as an institution) declining to perform the ceremony—even in Massachusetts,
whose marriage laws mean that the sexual orientation identity of the two people I married cannot be discerned from this story. I understood that my performative
and the discourse of the ceremony surrounding it would contribute in a small way to the sovereign power of the state over human relational and sexual legitimacy.
But this refusal would not have made the present sovereignty of the state over the determination of legally legitimate and illegitimate forms of relation any less
inevitable.¶ Petitions to the law are inevitable; they will be made, often by people with no other recourse
to save their life, or to preserve their life's basic quality. As Butler demonstrates, any such petition will
have performative effect. I do not offer this brief critique of Butler’s theory of “sovereign performatives” to dispute the facticity of her arguments. I
begin this project with the stipulation that politics of resistance to the “sovereign performative” must include actions of

resistance to statist law itself—that is, the specific articulation of opposition, within progressive social
movements, to strategies that privilege appeals for help from judges. But these politics must also
acknowledge that those who undertake such strategies do not always do so without knowledge of the
sovereign performative function of their actions—“recourse to the law” does not always or even usually
“imagine” the law “as neutral.”45 These radical politics must also be undertaken with knowledge of the effects of the petitions to law-
as-sovereign that will inevitably be made—and particularly with knowledge of the effects that flow from
the (also performative and also inevitable) judicial rhetorical responses to these inevitable petitions. ¶ Austin teaches us that it is
in the nature of performatives to not always work, and to produce effects in excess of their explicit ones. The judicial rhetorical constitution of subject and abject
forms of being-in-relation to law operates through legal performatives that contain the possibilities for their own future “infelicity.”46 My project is an attempt to
explore some future possibilities for the counter-sovereign articulation of subjectivity before U.S. law—possibilities that are both foreclosed and engendered in the
argumentative justifications for judicial decisions. Specifically, I examine some key Supreme Court cases relating to sexual practice, race in education policy, and
marriage. I perform a legal rhetorical criticism of critic-constructed “meta”-texts47 that form argumentative frameworks through which judges apply various legal
doctrines to questions of sexual, racial, educational, and relational freedom. ¶ Following Perelman, I understand judicial argument to be the explanatory
justifications offered for judges’ authoritative interpretive application of legal doctrine to problems of public concern––problems that have been framed as legal,
either by jurists themselves, petitioners to the courts, or both. In
the United States, judicial arguments about constitutional
interpretation have the privileged function of delimiting the grounds on which the authority of all other
statist legal argument is based. Given the overwhelming salience of constitutional legal discourse in
U.S. everyday life,48 this means that the judicial rhetoric of constitutional law plays a significant role in
delimiting the grounds on which a person can base their claim—literally49––to existence and legitimacy
in the U.S. polity.50 Jurists’ arguments from and about the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the
Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution in particular perform a final arbitration function in the ongoing and
generally contentious process of the statist determination of what forms of racialized queer identity
and relation will be eligible for recognized and legitimated status in U.S. public life. ¶ In this dissertation, I focus
on the Fourteenth Amendment—due process and equal protection—rhetoric of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. I read this rhetoric in terms of
“genealogies of precedent,” or the argumentative
possibilities for queer subjectivity before law that are brought into
being by the doctrinal frameworks Kennedy and other judicial rhetors use in a given opinion. Each chapter offers a case
study of opinions in several Federal and Supreme Court cases that are foundational to Kennedy’s development of a new constitutional jurisprudence of substantive
due process and equality. I demonstrate that this jurisprudence is both productive of and violent to possibilities for practical and strategic sexually “progressive”51
interactions with U.S. constitutional law. These
interactions, despite their practical or strategic formulation, can be
undertaken and/or framed in terms of anti-statist and institutional radical queer political goals. Possibilities for the
success of such radical framing of practical interaction are partially delimited in the argumentative choice of U.S. judicial opinions.

The TVA is a demand on the state that comes from a position outside of the political
order – it’s not a reinvestment, it’s a critique
Saul Newman 10, Reader in Political Theory at Goldsmiths, U of London, Theory & Event Volume 13,
Issue 2

There are two aspects that I would like to address here. Firstly, the
notion of demand: making certain demands on the state –
say for higher wages, equal rights for excluded groups, to not go to war, or an end to draconian policing – is one of the basic
strategies of social movements and radical groups. Making such demands does not necessarily mean working
within the state or reaffirming its legitimacy. On the contrary, demands are made from a
position outside the political order, and they often exceed the question of the implementation of this
or that specific measure. They implicitly call into question the legitimacy and even the sovereignty of
the state by highlighting fundamental inconsistencies between, for instance, a formal constitutional order
which guarantees certain rights and equalities, and state practices which in reality violate and deny
them.
Liberal Immigration/Perm—2AC

A combined strategy that leaves inclusion on the table is best – state engagement
combined with new studies of immigration are the best way to confront
heteronormativity
Lewis 10 (Rachel, Ph.D. candidate in Musicology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell
University, “Lesbians under Surveillance: Same-Sex Immigration Reform, Gay Rights, and the Problem of
Queer Liberalism”, Social Justice, 2010-11, Vol. 37, No. 1 (119), pp. 90-106,
www.jstor.org/stable/41336937)//JSL

It is also important to consider same-sex immigration rights within a broader, transnational framework. Legislation
such as the
Uniting American Families Act must account for the structural inequalities generated by imperialism and
more recent forms of globalization when determining which groups are most likely to be "deemed legal." Arguments
supporting same-sex immigration rights in the United States must engage the kinds of racialized and
gendered discourses of criminality and illegality that are responsible for the production of the
legal/illegal distinction; failure to do so leaves the opposition between (white) queer citizen and
(nonwhite) heterosexual immigrant intact. Above all, we must challenge the logic of crime and punishment and law and order
that produces the "illegal immigrant." As Arendt suggests, understanding how the right of asylum is transformed into a virtually illegal act
involves reconsidering the relationship between the "citizen" and the "human," as well as the abstract contradictions that produce such
distinctions. Only
by understanding and historicizing the tension between human rights and citizenship
rights can we begin to effectively grapple with the frame for same-sex immigration rights advocacy
today. Maple Palm does not offer a cinematic "corrective" to U AFA legislation through coalitions between queer and immigrant movements,
but it provides a point of departure for conceptualizing a more progressive political agenda. It invites us to relate UAFA to international human
rights discourses and make human rights central to our analyses of gay and same-sex immigration rights. Beyond endorsing human rights, as
Maple Palm does, a transnational lesbian cinema is needed that leads to more politically accountable humanitarian advocacy. Such a cinema
would critically grapple with the form humans must take culturally. Maple Palm should engender a wariness of a transnational lesbian
cinematic consciousness that makes the subject of queer migration a middle-class, white body and insufficiently interrogates connections
between gay rights and racial privilege. Much more information is needed about the ways in which binational
same-sex couples in the United States negotiate and encounter the legal/illegal distinction within their
everyday lives and about how, and under what circumstances, queer agency occurs. To effectively
engage state immigration controls and better understand the struggles that constitute such practices of surveillance, further
analyses of the material circumstances under which queer agency emerges are essential. Also needed are
comparative transnational studies of how same-sex immigration rights were attained by binational couples in other countries. Positive
immigration reform for same-sex couples must engage the patriarchal disciplinary structures that are
endemic to the modern nation-state, which can be enabling and disabling. Through engagement with
the state, alternative interests are constructed and possibilities for change emerge. As feminist
poststructuralists know, the state is an instrument of regulatory power and a contested terrain where struggle
can make all the difference (see, for example, Pringle and Watson, 1992; Cooper, 1995).
Legal Reform Good—2AC

The aff is a reductionist critique of all reform for queer people that results in the worst
forms of violence
Levi & Shay ‘12
Jennifer Levi and Giovanna Shay. Jennifer Levi is the director of the Transgender Rights Project of GLAD (Gay and Lesbian
Advocates and Defenders). Jennifer has participated in successful efforts to pass transgender-inclusive antidiscrimination laws
throughout New England. Giovanna Shay is a co-chair of the Corrections Committee of the American Bar Association Criminal
Justice Section. She has participated in institutional change litigation involving prisons, as well as efforts to enforce the Prison
Rape Elimination Act (PREA) and amend the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). Both serve on the faculty of Western New
England University School of Law. - “The dangers of reform” - Source: The Women's Review of Books. 29.4 (July-August 2012):
p30. Info Trac database

In his recent book, Normal Life, Dean Spade, a law professor at Seattle University School of Law and noted transgender activist, criticizes several
law-reform movements, including those to improve prison conditions, win marriage equality for same-sex couples, and ensure that hate crimes
and antidiscrimination laws include transgender people. Spade finds fault with LGBTQ rights organizations' efforts to win mainstream
acceptance, arguing that instead of pursuing an equality agenda, they should focus on changing "the distribution of life chances," by
"demand[ing] radical redistribution of wealth and an end to poverty." Spade's critique has the most force in the context in which it originated--
calling for an end to what David Garland first described as mass incarceration, the system many refer to as the "prison industrial complex." It is
less persuasive when applied to the realm of free-world LGBTQ rights. Spade's perspective is shaped by the prison-abolitionist movement, as
well as, he says, by critical race theory and "woman of color feminism." In 2002, Spade founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), which
provides free legal services to transgender and gender nonconforming people, and whose mission, according to its website (slrp.org/about), is
"to guarantee that all people are free to self-determine their gender identity and expression, regardless of income or race, and without facing
harassment, discrimination, or violence." Normal Life is rooted in this experience, and fits comfortably within a series of recent prison-
abolitionist works focusing on the experiences of queer and transgender people, including Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People
in the United States (2010), and Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (2011), a collection of essays to which
Spade contributed. Spade writes that his purpose in Normal Life is to describe a "critical trans politics ... that demands more than legal
recognition and inclusion." Arguing that equality of life chances, or distributive justice, cannot be achieved through law reform alone, he calls
for a broader agenda: "prison abolition, the elimination of poverty, access to full health care, and an end to immigration enforcement." These
goals, he submits, "cannot be conceptualized or won within the realm of US law." Citing the work of critical race theorist Alan Freeman, Spade
questions the focus of antidiscrimination law on violations of individual rights, which, he argues, tends to obscure more systemic and structural
kinds of disadvantage. Instead of pursuing a rights-based law reform strategy, Spade writes, the trans movement should focus on "population-
level operations of power," such as ending mass incarceration. The models he recommends for pursuing "transformative change" will resonate
with those familiar with the work of organizers such as "rebellious lawyering" proponent Gerry Lopez, Brazilian educational reformer Paolo
Freire, or civil rights campaigner Ella Baker: "[M]eaningful change," Spade says, "comes from below," and "those most directly impacted"
should lead the fight. Normal Life's leftist critique of liberal reform has deep roots in the history of US social movements. For example, in his
book Stories of Scottsboro, James Goodman describes how, in 1931, during the trial of the Scottsboro Boys (nine African American teenagers
falsely accused of raping two white women), leaders of the International Labor Defense (ILD) organization attacked the NAACP as "an
instrument of the white capitalist class for the perpetuation of the slavery of the negro people." ILD members marched with signs equating
"lynchers, reformers, and enemies of the Negro people." Then as now, leftists viewed the racialized criminal-punishment system as a tool of
broader economic oppression. Spade writes that advocates seeking to remedy prison conditions should beware of inadvertently strengthening
the prison system. He explains: We must avoid proposals that include constructing buildings or facilities to house trans prisoners, to hire new
staff, or make any other changes that would expand the budget and/or imprisoning capacities of the punishment system. He goes on to say,
"[W]e must ensure that legal work is always aimed at dismantling the prison industrial complex ... [k]nowing that the system is likely to try to
co-opt our critiques to produce opportunities for expansion." This is essentially the criticism of prison reform leveled by Angela Y. Davis
in her 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete? She argues that, despite the good intentions of advocates, prison reform can produce more
prisons--new and sanitized versions built to reduce overcrowding. Davis warns that discussions of prison reform focus "almost inevitably on
generating the changes that will produce a better prison system." Although some reforms may be significant, she writes, "frameworks
that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond prison." It is not
only prison abolitionists who share Spade's concern about the unintended consequences of prison reform. The sociologist Heather
Schoenfeld writes that prison-conditions litigation in Florida contributed to a prison building boom there. Other commentators--including James
Jacobs, Malcolm Feeley, and Van Swearingen--argue that prisoners' rights litigation contributed to the "bureaucratization" of prisons,
consolidating administrators' power even as it asserted prisoners' rights. Examples of double-edged US criminal-punishment reforms extend
well beyond prison conditions. As described by Kate Stith and Steve Y. Koh (in "The Politics of Sentencing Reform: The Legislative History of the
Federal Sentencing Guidelines," Wake Forest Law Review, 1993), some of the initial proponents of federal sentencing guidelines were liberal
academics and judges, who wanted to rationalize sentencing to make it fairer and more consistent. Unfortunately, as innumerable
commentators have recounted, the implementation of the guidelines produced draconian sentences, ultimately contributing to the growth of
US prisons. In adopting an all-or-nothing approach, however, Spade fails to acknowledge ways in which the
liberal prisoners' rights movement has helped to advance critical trans politics. At a minimum, prison-reform litigation generated
information, through civil discovery, that advocates used to draw attention to prison conditions. Access to prisoners has been
facilitated by the minimal legal protections and professional norms that the prisoners' rights movement helped to achieve. Rather
than undermining the radical project that Spade promotes, liberal law-reform efforts arguably laid foundations
for the prison-abolitionist movement. As for hate crimes prohibitions, Spade writes that they "strengthen and legitimize the
criminal punishment system," which targets poor people of color and singles out poor trans people of color for particular harassment.
"Changing what the law explicitly says about a group," he points out, "does not necessarily remedy the structured insecurity faced by that
group." We ourselves are agnostic on the question of hate crimes penalties for crimes against LGBTQ people: the exclusion of sexual orientation
and gender identity from existing laws not only minimizes the seriousness of anti-LGBTQ violence but also nearly guarantees a dearth of law
enforcement resources. Nevertheless, we are also acutely aware of the danger of expanding the already massive criminal-punishment system in
any way. In
the context of mass incarceration, in which reform can produce ever cleaner and more technologically
advanced human warehouses, Spade's arguments are well-taken. His critique is less persuasive when he moves into the broader
arena of LGBTQ rights. Spade believes that law reform is at odds with distributive justice. In his view, advocacy that departs from the idealized
approach he champions harms the transgender community. While we laud his critique of some elements of liberal law reform, we
disagree
with his zero-sum frame. Law reform is only one piece of a strategy. It cannot achieve everything, but it is sometimes a
necessary precondition to reaching other goals and, at a minimum, is not a causative element for
diminished opportunities and status. A transgender equality movement that includes expansion of
antidiscrimination laws and marriage equality among its goals is coextensive with the project of "transformative
change." Spade argues that antidiscrimination laws "create the false impression that ... fairness has been imposed,
and the legitimacy of the distribution of life chances restored." But such protections merely ensure that a person's sexual
orientation or gender identity cannot be an obvious basis for an adverse employment action. They are nowhere
near broad enough to promise substantive equality, for transgender people or anyone else. However, excluding gender identity and
sexual orientation from existing employment protections is far more damaging than committing the resources for the
advocacy required to expand them. In addition, organizing to pass antidiscrimination laws has activated and
radicalized LGBTQ advocacy organizations. The California-based Transgender Law Center (incubated by the National Center for
Lesbian Rights) and the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (first envisioned by GLAD staff members and interns) are two examples of
the generativity of liberal law reform efforts. Both organizations share many of the distributive justice goals of SRLP. Spade is not the first to
criticize the movement for marriage equality for same-sex couples. In "Arguing Against Arguing for Marriage" (University of Pennsylvania Law
Review, 2010), Shannon Gilreath claims that "marriage is dangerous for Gays conceptually, in its patriarchal and heteropatriarchical
foundations." In less absolute terms, Katherine Franke writes in the New York Times (June 23, 2011) that same-sex marriage is a "mixed
blessing," which may undermine other arrangements that LGBTQ people have used to "order our lives in ways that have given us greater
freedom than can be found in the one-size-fits-all rules of marriage." Spade goes too far in applying the same critique to both prison reform and
marriage equality. Removing gender discrimination from the institution of marriage does not strengthen it in the way that modifying the
criminal-punishment system reinforces mass incarceration. The institution of marriage has an evolving social meaning. Extending it to lesbians,
gay men, bisexual and transgender people reaffirms our human dignity. Even the most steadfast critics of the marriage-equality movement--
including the lesbian activists and law professors Nancy Polikoff and the late Paula Ettelbrick--have acknowledged that critiques of marriage and
ignores law-reform efforts spearheaded
the marriage equality movement need not be on a collision course. In addition, Spade
by LGBTQ legal organizations other than those focused on hate crimes, anti-discrimination, and marriage. These include
challenges to discriminatory health care access and to prison regulations that deny essential medical
care to transgender inmates; immigration reform advocacy; and support for transgender students and
homeless LGBTQ youth. To ignore these efforts is to miss the ocean for the tidal pool beside it.
AT: Links
AT: ‘Family’ Bad

The aff is best – re-defining the government’s definition of family to be more inclusive
best protects non-heteronormative families
King 9 (Shani, Assistant Professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law and Co-Director of
the Center on Children and Families with a J.D. from Harvard Law School and B.A. from Brown
University, “U.S. Immigration Law and the Traditional Nuclear Conception of Family: Toward a
Functional Definition of Family that Protects Children's Fundamental Human Rights”, Columbia Human
Rights Law Review, Vol. 41, Issue 2, 10/1/09,
https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=facultypub)//JSL

But even where the United States aims to further family unity, it fails to do so because U.S. immigration
law reflects a legal construction of the "family" concept that is largely premised on biology, is grounded in the traditional
conception of a nuclear family, and excludes what this Article calls "functional" families: formations which may
not satisfy this narrow conception of family, but satisfy the care-taking needs of children. By excluding functional
families, the United States ignores the reality of millions of families who are affected by its immigration
laws, separates children from their families, and fails to honor a child's right to family as defined by the United
Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and international law as it has developed in Europe and the Americas. This Article suggests
that the United States must move beyond this largely biological narrative of family if it is to protect the
internationally recognized human rights of children. What this means in practice is that we must reform U.S. immigration law
to reflect a broader conception of family that respects and protects functional families as well as the
traditional nuclear family. What this Article suggests is that the notion of parenthood that is reflected in U.S.
immigration law should be reconsidered and modified to reflect a definition grounded in relationships
and care, or what has been described by Professor Nancy Dowd in a slightly different context as
"nurture." This would likely include, for example, "the psychological, physical, intellectual, and spiritual
care" of children. In this Article, the primary focus, therefore, is on what has been described as in loco parentis relationships between
children and relatives who are not their biological parents. In other words, relationships in which an adult is operating as a parental figure for a
child in a way that results in the child seeing the adult as a parental figure.
AT: Futurity Bad

Their rejection of futurity is just privileged sanctioning and anti-queer violence


¶ Manalansan ‘15¶ Martin F. Manalansan IV - Associate Professor of all of the following at The University of Illinois:

Gender and Women's Studies, Asian American Studies, Anthropology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, LAS Global
Studies, Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, and Center for Global Studies. The author holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology
from The University of Rochester and studied philosophy, Asian Studies and anthropology at the University of the Philippines.
As part of claims about futurity, the author references lived excahnges with queer trans women of color. The author also
references concurring professional exchanges with David L. Eng, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania; Gayatri
Gopinath, who is an associate professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and director of Asian/Pacific/American Studies at New
York University.; Roderick Ferguson, who is a professor of African American and Gender and Women's Studies in the African
American Studies Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago; Chandan Reddy, who is an Associate Professor of Gender,
Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington; and the late José Esteban Muñoz, was an American academic in
the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory; “A Question from Bruno
Latour” This article is part of the series Queer Futures. Fieldsights - Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online,
July 21, 2015 - https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/703-a-question-from-bruno-latour

My response to the question of “no future” comes from my encounters, engagements, and conversations with colleagues
under the aegis of queer-of-color critique, scholars like David Eng, Gayatri Gopinath, Roderick Ferguson, Chandan Reddy, and the late José
Esteban Muñoz, among others. We appreciate the renegade antireproductive stance of the “no future” camp, which states that we

should not subscribe to a future that is entrenched in heteropatriarchal dreams of marriage and procreation.
However, there was a general sense among us that the issue of “no future” comes from a vantage point
and a comfortable perch of privilege. As a scholar invested and immersed in the plight of queers of color,
futurity is not just a possibility but a necessity. To paraphrase my queer-of-color critique colleagues, we

cannot not think of a future it is the very fuel of existence


— , the pivot that animates and propels energies,
performances, feelings, and other bodily capacities. The promise and peril of queer, both as a stance and as a field
of study, is precisely in its anticipatory and hopeful dimensions. Queer is constituted by a yearning and a
longing for something better than what is here right now. It is, as Muñoz would say, a horizon that we are drawn
to and which is not yet here. Consider the group of undocumented immigrant queers of color in New
York City whose lives I have been following for years. Dwelling in cramped domiciles and working in contingent jobs, there is very little
to witness in their lives that suggests a kind of gay/lesbian triumphalism or the bright markers of the new normal. In fact, they live in precarious

conditions but—a very important caveat—they live in moments that showcase fleeting gestures and images of fabulosity set amidst
the squalor and mess of their lives. These moments, while fleeting, provide some way for them to think of another day, giving

them a brief glimpse of a time and a place where there are sequined gowns, plush salons, and many sparkling things. While this might be called

naïve hopefulness, thinking of a future that is an alternative to the present is a potent way to think
beyond and against the status quo—to plant the seed for social transformation. In other words, there is a
political potential to queer futurity. Or, to put it another way, we need to complicate and unravel the negativity
inherent in the “no future” stance and to be open to the various alternative ways a future or futures can be
imagined, particularly by those in the margins. Otherwise, we can all just pack our bags, go back home, put on some makeup, close the
door, and hide under the bedcovers.
AT: Homonationalism

Homonationalism provides a simplistic account of relationship between tolerance and


violence – the aff’s specific analysis of material structures and institutions is necessary
to solve.
Ritchie 14 [Jason, “Pinkwashing, Homonationalism, and Israel–Palestine: The Conceits of Queer Theory
and the Politics of the Ordinary,” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/anti.12100,
published 2014, accessed 06/29/18] BBro
My argument is not, of course, that racism does not exist in many contemporary contexts—including Israel–Palestine—nor I am arguing that
“tolerance” of homosexuals has not, in many of those contexts, been marshaled to provide cover for the imposition of violence against
racialized others (eg the Israeli occupation). My argument, instead, is that the
popularity of the concept of
homonationalism owes much to its oversimplifications. Power, in this framework, is reducible to racism, and
racism is understood in a universalizing manner that allows the critic to avoid the messy work of
“[locating] the meanings of race and racism … within particular fields of discourse [and articulating their meanings] to the
social relations” in concrete socio-historical contexts (Solomos and Back 1995:415).¶ I have utilized the metaphor of the
checkpoint to demonstrate what I believe to be a more empirically convincing and politically engaged account of the everyday violence queer
Focusing on the checkpoint requires one to locate the racist violence of the Israeli state
Palestinians face.
in a specific time and place, structured by identifiable social and political processes and inhabited by
actual human beings who embody multiple subject positions that differently inflect the ways in which they encounter
those processes and one another. Such a strategy will do little to challenge the monopolization of queer spaces in North American and
European cities by racist neocons like Michael Lucas, nor will it provide a convenient mechanism for radical activists—or theoretically
sophisticated academics—to validate their queer credentials. But if queers who live in other places have some value beyond serving as grist for
North American and European queers to consolidate a properly radical subjectivity and mitigate their privilege, homonationalism's
activist critics—and its theorists—might consider resisting the impulse to homogenize this or that queer as
the victim or the victor and work instead to develop a nuanced framework for building coalitions to
fight—rather than platforms on which to fight about—the complex and unpredictable ways space is
organized, difference is enforced, and some bodies in some places are allowed to move more freely than others.

Their critique of homonationalism is so totalizing that it is analytically meaningless –


turns the K
Ritchie 15 – Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Florida International University
(Jason, “Pinkwashing, Homonationalism, and Israel–Palestine: The Conceits of Queer Theory and the Politics of the Ordinary,” Antipode
47(3):616-634 )

Implicit in Puar and Mikdashi's wholesale dismissal of pinkwatching—a dismissal that lumps activists like
Queers Against Israeli Apartheid into the same broad category as “marriage equality” activists—is the
assumption that these activists simply do not understand the theory of homonationalism or their
complicity with the objective reality it aims to describe, ie neoliberal sovereignty's incorporation of white
citizen queers (under the rubric of “tolerance” and “gay rights”) and the parallel exclusion of racial others, who are
“castigate[d] … as homophobic and perverse” (Puar 2007:xii). Although Puar and Mikdashi (2012) note their confusion over “the difference
between how pinkwashing operates … and [its] supposed counter-narratives”, the object of their critique is perfectly clear. “[M]any of the same
assumptions that animate the discourses of pinkwashing”, they write, “are unwittingly and sometimes intentionally reproduced in the
pinkwatching efforts to challenge the basis of pinkwashing” (emphasis added). This is a somewhat odd critique, given Puar's endorsement of
pinkwatching—a year before she dismissed it—as a “broad” transnational movement that “involves many activists and scholars in the United
States, Canada, Palestine, Israel … and spans from queer of colour communities, to Palestinian activists, both in and out of Palestine, to
diasporic, as well as Israeli Jews, and Palestinians … [who] cannot be summarily dismissed through the reductive accusations of being racist,
homophobic, or anti-Semitic” (2011:139). Setting
aside the irony in Puar and Mikdashi's dismissal of pinkwatching
activists, whom they subject to the reductive accusation of being unwitting—or worse, intentional—
homonationalists, their argument suffers from two more serious flaws. First, as I argued earlier, debates over
pinkwashing in Western gay metropolises have less to do with actual instances of pinkwashing than with
struggles over the nature of queerness in the context of neoliberalism and the War on Terror. Such debates,
moreover, have been instigated primarily by the ostensible victims of homonationalism—queers of color, trans people, working class queers,
and so on—in their efforts to stake a claim on spaces traditionally dominated by the likes of Michael Lucas. Second, the
problem with
pinkwatching lies not in the inability of queer activists to understand homonationalism but in the
conceptual limits of the theory, which they have taken up enthusiastically and which now means so many things that it no longer
means much of anything. The importance of Terrorist Assemblages (2007) and Puar's original articulation of homonationalism cannot be
overstated. Puar extended the already well developed critique of assimilationist gay politics, crystallized most elegantly in Lisa Duggan's
“homonormativity”, to chart the connections between sexuality and race in neoliberal North American and European states. As a result,
homonationalism opened up a multitude of new possibilities both for queer activism and for queer theory. But in
elevating
homonationalism to a kind of master narrative that explains all things in all places—in suggesting, for example, that
homonationalism in Israel “is exactly what [has been] theorized, within the context of the United States, as well as some European states” (Puar
2011:136)—homonationalism's critics have removed the theory from the concrete socio-historical context
it so lucidly described and released it into the ether of empty signifiers that can take on ideological
value for any purpose, from a fight over who belongs in New York City's LGBT Community Center to an effort by two American
academics to dismiss anti-homonationalism queer activists for engaging in homonationalism. It would seem, in fact, that—at least in the limited
realms of queer thought and activism—homonationalismhas eclipsed homonormativity “as a homogeneous, global
external entity that exists outside all of us and exerts its terrifying, normative power on gay [sic] lives
everywhere” (Brown 2012:1066). To be sure, homonationalism is a useful heuristic device for understanding the discursive utility of
“gay rights” and “tolerance” in “gay capitals” around the world—how and why, for example, representations of gay-friendly Israel are marketed
by the Israeli government to European and North American queers and passionately contested by queer anti-occupation activists—but it is
severely limited in its capacity to shed light on the everyday experiences of queers for whom the language of
pinkwashing and homonationalism does not have the same currency it has accrued in places like New York City. Paisley Currah (2013) criticized
the ways in which this
lack of attention to “the local, micro, particular sites where public authority is being
exercised” often translates into a fetishization of the state as “a totalizing logic, an ordered hierarchy, a
comprehensive rationality, a unity of purpose and execution”. And in a terse but powerful review of an application of
homonationalism to a very different context—settler colonialism in North America (Morgensen 2011)—Natalie Oswin asks whether “Native
queers [are] necessarily resistant? Are they outside homonationalism, in relation to either settler or Native nations, or are Two-Spirit and
Native queers also caught up in the web of complicity” (Oswin 2012:692)? Oswin's question hints at one of the fundamental flaws with the
theory of homonationalism, a flaw that is perfectly—if more than a little ironically—demonstrated in a recent effort by Puar to advocate the
post-humanist Deleuzian notion of “assemblage” as an alternative to the theory of intersectionality, which—in opposition to Puar's dismissal of
it—I offer here as a more productive framework for understanding the actual operations of power in diverse socio-historical contexts. “[W]hat
the method of intersectionality is most predominantly used to qualify”, Puar writes, “is the specific difference of ‘women of color,’ a category
that has now become … simultaneously emptied of specific meaning in its ubiquitous application and yet overdetermined in its deployment”
(2012:52). Assemblages, however, “are interesting because they de-privilege the human body as a discrete organic thing” and do not rely on
stale “identitarian frameworks” (57, 63). While I find some value in the notion of assemblage, in which “categories [like race, gender, and
sexuality] … are considered events, actions, and encounters between bodies, rather than simply entities and attributes of subjects”, the theory
of homonationalism has, as Puar suggests of intersectionality, constructed its own category—queers of color—that has been applied so
ubiquitously and deployed in such an overdetermined way that it, too, has been “emptied of specific meaning”. Homonationalism
has
morphed from an argument about the tentative and incomplete incorporation of some (white/citizen)
queers by the neoliberal nation-state in a specific time and place (post-9/11 North America and Europe)—and the
parallel and interconnected “targeting of queerly raced bodies for dying” (Puar 2007:xii)—into a totalizing
framework that depends on a dangerously simplistic construction of reality. With “a unity of purpose and
execution” (Currah 2013), the state entices privileged white queers with the illusion of equality as it relegates queers of color to a space of
death and dying so complete—and completely inescapable—that even their critiques (lodged under the banner of pinkwatching, for example)
are unintelligible except as a confirmation of the explanatory power of the theory of homonationalism. Indeed, one might ask—following
Brown's critique of theories of homonormativity—to what extent Puar and Mikdashi's castigation of pinkwatching activists
“ends up performatively (re)constituting those tendencies”, against which both the activists and the theorists are
ostensibly united, “as particularly one-dimensional and hegemonic” (Brown 2009:1497).
AT: Kinship Bad

Queer kinship networks that emphasize chosen family rather than given family are
vital survival strategies for multiracial, queer, trans, and undocumented youth
Chávez, 17 – Alex E., Assistant Professor of Anthropology @ Notre Dame. “Intimacy at stake:
Transnational migration and the separation of family,” Latino Studies, April 2017, Volume 15, Issue 1, pp
50–72, p. Springer Link – klab/br

The definitions of ‘‘given’’ and ‘‘chosen’’ families I presented above were formulated over months by
multiracial, queer, straight, transgender, undocumented, and documented youth who discovered that
‘‘chosen families’’ were a crucial survival skill for their group and peers they interviewed and surveyed.
Again, these young people were part of various organizations throughout the City of Chicago that I came
to know through both my students’ and personal activist networks. This group of youth in particular was
part of the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health (ICAH), ‘‘a network of empowered youth and allied
adults who transform public consciousness and build capacity of family, school and healthcare systems
to support the sexual health, identities, and rights of youth.’’13 In 2012, ICAH embarked on a three-year
organizing campaign with young leaders to engage in cultural advocacy in health care, family, and school
regarding issues and the rights of young people to make decisions about their bodies and access to
sexual health care—decisions that involve relationships of intimacy all around and that become ever
more heightened with respect to undocumented youth of color. Having watched the raw footage of the
videos the youth took with their phones, I noticed that youth who stated they couldn’t ‘‘come out’’ to
their parents were able to create their own nonbiological families through bonds of trust. However,
their demonstrated queering of kinship exists far beyond sexuality, again evidence of De Genova’s
interpretation of queer politics as ‘‘a politics that both identifies and is committed to the impossibility of
inclusivity’’ (2010, p. 105), by acknowledging that even basic survival must sometimes transcend
biological bonds, or that biological bonds can imperil survival itself (Weston 1991).

A social conception of kinship that re-defines family, home, and kinship through
transnational legibility and solidarity is good, especially for those whose existence is
marked by exclusion and violence – it breaks down traditional notions of ‘citizenship’
Chávez, 17 – Alex E., Assistant Professor of Anthropology @ Notre Dame. “Intimacy at stake:
Transnational migration and the separation of family,” Latino Studies, April 2017, Volume 15, Issue 1, pp
50–72, p. Springer Link – klab/br

In Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latino America, Perez et al. (2010) open with a question posed by
W. E. B. Du Bois over 100 years ago as he grappled with the racism of his time: ‘‘How does it feel to be a
problem?’’ he asked (1). Indeed, they suggest, America’s contemporary Latina/o population might pose
a similar question, for their lives remain tethered to the enduring dilemma of how America defines
social membership along the lines of race, such that Latinas/os live out ‘‘the strange experience of
looking at oneself and one’s communities ‘through the eyes of others’ ’’ (1). At a moment in which
Latina/o subjects and Latina/o ‘‘culture’’ circulate widely in popular media, the conditions of their lives,
homes, and families remain frequently tied to racialized stereotypes—the results of the 2016
presidential election certainly brace this very point. To move ‘‘beyond el barrio,’’ thus, is to move
beyond these tropes, as well as nostalgic or uncritical portraits of the complexity of Latina/o life,
including family.

My own ethnographic work on transnational Mexican migrants has explored how they position
themselves in relation to narratives and concepts that stigmatize— particularly those that conflate
notions of citizenship with race under the guise of juridical neutrality (illegality). Other racialized groups
in the US are no strangers to violations of family and severance of intimacy by state-sanctioned violence,
in this regard. A feeling of illegality permeates the existence of black youth in cities like Chicago, for
instance, youth who forge bonds beyond the bounds of biological family for the purposes of survival.
Meanwhile, biological family bonds are severed by imprisonment, violence, death, and the carceral
state. Through these kinds of severed intimacies, stereotypes akin to those experienced by Latina/o
families persist among other marginalized families in the US as well. Hyper-fertility and lack of individual
responsibility are the bases for stigmatizing teen pregnancy prevention campaigns that target young
people of color in major US cities. Further, the myth of the absent black father justifies a sense of
criminality as the rate of imprisonment soars. Studies show that absent black fathers are no more
prevalent than absent fathers of other races, including white fathers (Coles and Green 2010).21 In short,
racially targeted violence emerges in part from attitudes formed based on misinformation about
reproduction, family, and intimacy as they exist in communities of color more broadly and how such
presumed pathology must not be allowed to be socially reproduced. Such attitudes toward families of
color, both biological and otherwise, lend themselves easily to dehumanizing tactics of the nation-
state— deportation, imprisonment, and the kinds of violent language and behavior that rose to
heightened levels during the 2016 presidential campaign and will continue given the outcome of the
election. These forms of violence only seem to become ever more abhorrent and dehumanizing—
consider the recent case of an undocumented Mexican woman in Harris County, Texas, who went to a
gynecologist only to be reported, arrested, and placed in deportation proceedings, all while her children
looked on weeping in fear.22

The underprivileging of undocumented migrants relates to the fundamental belief that they do not
deserve intimacy, or can serve the state better, that is, be better laborers, without it. Think about
everything regulated for and against them: communicating, occupying public space, access to health
care, living out daily life amid policing that allows them to travel only from their residence to work and
back for fear of being captured—all those channels through which senses of intimacy are enacted in
daily life. Fearing the worst under these circumstances is oftentimes justified, particularly as measures
aimed at checking the immigration status of all ‘‘reasonably suspicious individuals’’ have been proposed
in several states (Georgia and Alabama garnering recent national attention) and discussions around
selfdeportation brace heightened levels of violence throughout migrant communities. These measures
seek to make life so unbearable for undocumented migrants that they will make the prudent personal
decision to leave the US (self-deport). Amid this atmosphere, where the dignity of migrants is denied,
researchers and policymakers must take up the challenge of understanding the new social relationships
and solidarities forged as tactics of survival amid these strategies of state-sanctioned violence. And so,
when an ethnographer such as myself asks a question like, ‘‘Where is your family?’’ or ‘‘Where is your
home?’’ should I not also be asking how multiple places and people matter and connect, and how family
is therefore forged despite the feeling of being unwanted in a place, and with others who are
experiencing that same journey with you? In other words, how home can exist in any person? The desire
for home as a place embedded with intimate relationships is part of transnational personhood and
forms of social kinship— conceived through the idea of ‘‘chosen families’’—and offers but one way of
looking at these emerging social relationships of transnational legibility, one of many potential windows
into landscapes of intimacy, of memory, of family, and of home that disturb the racial project of the
‘‘American family’’ and the ‘‘American dream.’’

Immigrant kinship is vital to creating forms of connection and strength amid the
ongoing political project to demonize migrant others
Chávez, 17 – Alex E., Assistant Professor of Anthropology @ Notre Dame. “Intimacy at stake:
Transnational migration and the separation of family,” Latino Studies, April 2017, Volume 15, Issue 1, pp
50–72, p. Springer Link – klab/br

Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of the chronotope as a time-space envelope for the delineation of
forms of social life, Agha (2015) suggests the idiom of kinship—and its concomitant intersubjective and
interpersonal semiotic and material practices—exists ‘‘at varying degrees of spatial and temporal
remove in social history,’’ such that people construct kin relations ‘‘in order to become recognizable to
each other as social beings of specific kinds’’ (402). This collective social project allows persons to ‘‘co-
locate themselves and kin-like others in place and time’’ (401). I’d like to situate Agha’s understanding of
kinship—as a chronotopic formulation through which social actors become legible to one another—
within the asymmetrical political economy that structures transnational labor flows between the US and
Latin America. Here, geographies of racialized management maintained through punitive and violent
means—border militarization, everyday policing, and segregation (Rosas 2006, 2007, 2012)—work to
sever intimacy, this is to say, render migrants illegible ‘‘illegals’’ with no social means with which to
meaningfully reproduce their social structures. And indeed, emerging work has already begun to take
into account how notions of family operate as forms of connection amid this political condition in ways
that shape transnational personhood.

In Alyshia Galvez’s Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers: Mexican Women, Public Prenatal Car, and the
Birth Weight Paradox (2011), she begins with a scene in which a woman named Marisol is pregnant and
has a bout of morning sickness. Marisol lived with her mother-in-law in Mexico, who wrings the neck of
a hen and makes her caldo de gallina with corn tortillas to ease her nausea. After moving with her
husband and child to New York City, Marisol is pregnant with her second child, but ‘‘her mother-in-law’s
soup could not bridge the distance’’ (1). Galvez skillfully paints portraits in words of how biological
family connections exist transnationally; how new families begin and are treated within the US with
regard to pregnancy, prenatal care, and family size; and what is at stake and what is at promise when it
comes to family-type relationships separated by political borders amid an increasingly hostile anti-
immigrant political atmosphere. She attends to the intersection of these social dynamics to describe
how migrants enter into familial-type arrangement to support their mutual ability to thrive: Typically,
recent immigrants share an apartment among members of an extended family or multiple, unrelated
families. Within these arrangements, a woman who has young children or is pregnant may provide
childcare for the other families with whom she resides, thus consolidating and economizing on childcare
expenses and responsibilities and allowing the housemates who work to maximize their labor
participation. (43)
AT: Alts
AT: Queer IR

Queer IR doesn’t explain international relations and makes things worse — perm best.
Currah 14 — Paisley Currah, Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College,
2014 (“The State,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1-2, Accessible Online via e-Duke
Journals Scholarly Collection, Accessed On 07-13-2016)

According to Gilles Deleuze, a concept ‘‘should express an event rather than an essence’’ (1995: 14). Molar, large-scale accounts of sex and the
state have assumed a sameness to sex and a singular rationality to state actors, decisions, and
projects. If the state is not unitary, coordinated, and hierarchically organized in an ultimately rational
way—if, as Michel Foucault suggests, ‘‘the state is only a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction whose importance is much less than we think’’ (1991:
103)— then it should come as no surprise that state definitions of sex are also plural. A contradiction is something that
does not make sense, a position that is logically inconsistent. To begin by letting go of the assumption that there is any ‘‘there there,’’ any whatness, to (legal) sex
apart from what an agency says it is, the contradiction evaporates. The
official sex designation—or, more precisely, the M or the F— stamped
on documents or coded in records becomes the starting point. Then an analysis can focus not on what
sex is, or what it should be, but on what it does, what it accomplishes, what it produces. Indeed, if the only
thing we know for sure about sex is what any of these many state actors say it is in any particular
instance, sex will turn out to be as messy and diffuse a concept as the state. Entering into the analysis
without a firm sense of what sex is or what the state is—as a priori facts, as edifices—makes the
processes through which they come into being more visible. It might be better to defer attempts to
resolve— theoretically or politically— the messiness in order to understand what a particular system
of sex designation does for a particular state project such as recognition or redistribution (Currah, forthcoming).
Of course, states should not only or always be imagined as messy, scattered nodes of local and arbitrary power arrangements. The Leviathan state’s terrible
concentrated authority to impose sanctions (death, imprisonment, fines) has been the subject of theories of sovereignty for centuries. For this purpose, the most
apt definition of the state begins with the simple description from Max Weber: ‘‘A human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate
physical violence within a particular given territory’’ (1991: 78). To create a truly compelling account of sovereign violence and the paradox of sovereignty, one must
take Weber’s definition, put question marks around ‘‘legitimate,’’ and add the observation made by scholars such as Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt,
Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben that the force that creates the law and makes it legitimate cannot be justified by a law that does not yet exist. Still, much

of what states do— regulating the health, safety, and public welfare through myriad regulations, rules, decisions, practices— does not reach
the threshold of juridical violence, even if those actions are ultimately undergirded by its threat.
Fetishizing a generalized idea of the state and its terrifying or redemptive power (depending on one’s perspective)
can obscure what is actually happening in the local, micro, particular sites where most public authority
is exercised. While it is crucial to theorize the singular finality of state violence, neglecting to examine
the messiness of actually existing and potentially incommensurate policies, practices, rules, and norms
risks substituting the conceptual for the concrete and gets in the way of understanding what might
actually be going on (Latour 1995: 48).
AT: Failure/Halberstam

The neg’s appropriation of failed knowledge is neither new nor radical – universities
have been studying cartoons, pirates, vampires, and porn for over a decade – voting
for the queer art of failure recirculates these while locking in attachment to the
current structure of the university
Eagleton 3 [Terry, Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, After Theory,
2003, Basic Books: New York, NY, p. 1-3]
Many of the ideas of these thinkers remain of incomparable value. Some of them are still producing work of major importance. Those to whom
the title of this book suggests that ‘theory’ is now over, and that we can all relievedly return to an age of pre-theoretical innocence, are in for a
disappointment. There can be no going back to an age when it was enough to pronounce Keats delectable or
Milton a doughty spirit, It is not as though the whole project was a ghastly mistake on which some merciful soul I AFTER THEORY has
now blown the whistle, so that we can all return to whatever it was we were doing before Ferdinand de Saussure heaved over the horizon. If
theory means a reasonably systematic reflection on our guiding assumptions, it remains as indispensable
as ever. But we are living now in the aftermath of what one might call high theory, in an age which, having grown
rich on the insights of thinkers like Althusser, Barthes and Derrida, has also in some ways moved beyond
them. The generation which followed after these path-breaking figures did what generations which follow after usually do. They
developed the original ideas, added to them, criticized them and applied them. Those who can, think up
feminism or structuralism; those who can’t, apply such insights to Moby-Dick or The Cat in the Hat. But
the new generation came up with no comparable body of ideas of its own. The older generation had proved a hard
act to follow. No doubt the new century will in time give birth to its own clutch of gurus. For the moment, however, we are still
trading on the past - and this in a world which has changed dramatically since Foucault and Lacan first settled to their typewriters.
What kind of fresh thinking does the new era demand? Before we can answer this question, we need to take stock of
where we are. Structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism and the like are no longer the sexy topics they were. What is sexy instead is
sex. On the wilder shores of academia, an interest in French philosophy has given way to a fascination with French
kissing. In some cultural circles, the politics of masturbation exen far more fascination than the politics of the Middle East. Socialism has
lost out to sado-masochism. Among students of culture, the body is an immensely fashionable topic, but
it is usually the erotic body, not the famished one. There is a keen interest in coupling bodies, but not in
labouring ones. Quietly-spoken middle-class students huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist
subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies. Nothing could be more
understandable. To work on the literature of latex or the political implications of navel-piercing is to take literally the wise old
adage that study should be fun. It is rather like writing your Master’s thesis on the comparative flavour of
malt whiskies, or on the phenomenology of lying in bed all day. It creates a seamless continuity
between the intellect and everyday life. There are advantages in being able to write your Ph.D. thesis without stirring from in
front of the TV set. In the old days, rock music was a distraction from your studies; now it may well be what you are studying. Intellectual
matters are no longer an ivory-tower affair, but belong to the world of media and shopping malls, bedrooms and brothels. As
such, they re-join everyday life - but only at the risk of losing their ability to subject it to critique. Today, the old fogeys who work on
classical allusions in Milton look askance on the Young Turks who are deep in incest and cyber-feminism. The bright young things
who pen essays on foot fetishism or the history of the codpiece eye with suspicion the scrawny old scholars who dare to maintain that Jane
Austen is greater than Jeffrey Archer. One zealous orthodoxy gives way to another. Whereas in the old days you could be drummed out of your
student drinking club if you failed to spot a metonym in Robert Herrick, you might today be regarded as an unspeakable nerd for having heard
of either metonyms or Herrick in the first place.This trivialization of sexuality is especially ironic. For one
of the towering
achievements of cultural theory has been to establish gender and sexuality as legitimate objects of
study, as well as matters of insistent political importance. it is remarkable how intellectual life for
centuries was conducted on the tacit assumption that human beings had no genitals. (Intellectuals also
behaved as though men and women lacked stomachs. As the philosophcr Emmanuel Levinas remarked of Martin Heidegger’s rather lofty
concept of Dasein, meaning the kind of existence peculiar to humn beings: ‘Dasein does not eat.’) Friedrich Nietzsche once commented that
whenever anybody speaks crudely of a human being as a belly with two needs and a head with one, the lover of knowledge should listen
carefully. In an historic advance, sexuality is now firmly established within academic life as one of the keystones
of human culture. We have come to acknowledge that human existence is at least as much about fantasy and desire as it is about truth
and reason. It is just that cultural theory is at present behaving rather like a celibate middle-aged professor who
has stumbled absent-mindedly upon sex and is frenetically making up for lost time.

Orienting the affirmation of queerness towards criminality and failure locks in a purely
reactionary politics that actively precludes imagining queerness as a positive
articulation of hopeful futures---shuts down potential roles for queer resistance to
global inequality, environmental destruction, and climate change
Kim Q. Hall 14, Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Affiliate of Women's Studies and Sustainable
Development, Appalachian State University, 2014, “No Failure: Climate Change, Radical Hope, and
Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures,” Radical Philosophy Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, p. 203-225
While J. Jack Halberstam has critiqued the absence, in Edelman and others, of any reflection on what a queer politics of no future might look
like in the world and how it might speak to the material lives of queers, he nonetheless shares Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurity.
Halberstam’s critique of the future emphasizes society’s relentless optimism. In this context of optimism,
queerness, Halberstam argues, is that which is associated with failure. By characterizing queerness as an
“art of failure,” Halberstam suggests it resists the “naïve optimism” that squelches creativity and
prevents the development of genuinely counter-hegemonic alternatives.39 After all, in the context of neoliberal
capitalism, success is connected to “reproductive maturity” and “wealth accumulation.”40 Consequently, failures are people who refuse those
norms in favor of living life otherwise.41 Halberstam writes, “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, umaking, undoing,
unbecoming, unlearning, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is
something queers do and have always done exceptionally well.”42 In other words, because queers do not conform to
norms of identity, success, maturity, or having a life, queers are failures, and our failure promises to
open new directions in queer theory, communities, and lives. What can it mean to think radically about
queerness when it is conceived as a site of failure and no future? Things certainly seem, at first glance, very bleak
indeed. Edelman and Halberstam accurately portray how heteronormativity frames the concept of
queerness. They also rightly critique the homonationalism and homonormativity that dominate
contemporary neoliberal movements for LGBTQ rights in the U.S., a movement that seeks recognition of LGBTQ normalcy.
Nonetheless, Halberstam’s association of optimism with a desire for normative happiness seems to
make it impossible for hope to be anything other than a rejection of queerness in favor of normalcy and
positive thinking. Hope, for Halberstam, is a response that locks one into a reactionary politics that
vacillates between “cynical resignation” or “naïve optimism.”43 Thus, Halberstam’s interest in the
resistant possibilities of failure reflects his interest in thinking “after hope.”44 One of failure’s queer virtues, for
Halberstam, is its challenge to “the toxic positivity of contemporary life.”45 If queer is by definition a failed identity with no
future, is there any non-naïve way in which there could be hope for queers? Could this hope be radical?
I certainly appreciate Halberstam’s point and agree that queer has been associated with failure to achieve
heteronormative happiness and success. Nonetheless, I am concerned that embracing failure leaves only a
reactionary role for queer resistance. In other words, queer resistance, when understood as failure, becomes
a mere rejection of hope, which is understood as only a heteronormative affect. Because this ultimately
limited conception of queer resistance does not reflect our naturecultural being in the world, it is unable
to address how modes of life and thinking among global elites have contributed to a toxic environment
for human and nonhuman bodies and communities. In addition to efforts to conceive of queerness,
gender, and disability in ways that remain open to possible transnational alliances, a critically radical
conception of queerness must also, to borrow from Rosi Braidotti, “strike . . . an alliance with the productive and
immanent force of zoē, or life in its non-human aspects. This requires a mutation of our shared understanding of what it
means to think at all, let alone think critically.”46 While I am wary of Braidotti’s reference to a “shared understanding,”47 her claim presents a
provocative challenge to persistent anthropomorphisms in feminist, queer, and disability studies. Being
radical, at least in part, is being
critically aware of and accountable to the historical, economic, social, and political contexts in which one
lives. In this sense, queer crip feminist critique is radical to the extent that it not only understands identity as
situated within and shaped by structures of power, but also to the extent that it strives to be cognizant of its
impact on those structures of power. It is this radical conception of situatedness and contingency that Diana Coole and Samantha
Frost seem to have in mind when they characterize new materialist critique as concerned not only with the material but also with “the
immersion in the material,” including the immersion in the material of theorists and theories themselves.48 What
would it mean for
queer, feminist, and disability studies to attend to the realities of climate change, for instance, in their
discussions of urban and rural environments, access, global capitalism, or the future? In part, it seems that in order to
take seriously its immersion in the material, queer crip feminist critique must be informed by an
awareness that questioning of the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the organic and the
inorganic, is central, not merely additive, to its critical projects.
AT: Quare

Quare academic critiques are not mutually exclusive with political action---
engagement with the law is necessary for unifying the struggle to counter hegemonic
systems of oppression
Patrick Johnson 1, African American studies professor at Northwestern, “Quare Studies or (almost)
everything I know about Queer Studies I learned from my grandmother”, January, Black Queer Studies,
http://students.washington.edu/gnn2/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Quare_studies.pdf
Thus far, I have canvassed the trajectory for quare studies inside the academy, focusing necessarily on the intellectual work that needs to be done to advance specific disciplinary goals.

While there is intellectual work to be done inside the academy—what one might call "academic
praxis"—there is also political praxis outside the academy.*" If social change is to occur, gays, bisexuals,
transgendered people, and lesbians of color cannot afford to be armchair theorists. Some of us need to
be in the streets, in the trenches, enacting the quare theories that we construct in the "safety'* of the academy. While keeping in mind
that political theory and political action are not necessarily mutually exclusive, quare theorists must
make theory work for its constituency. Although we share with our white queer peers sexual oppression,
gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people of color also share racial oppression with other
members of our community. We cannot afford to abandon them simply because they are heterosexual, Cohen writes that
"although engaged in heterosexual behavior," straight African Americans "have often found themselves outside the norms and values of dominant society. This position has most often

Quare studies must encourage strategic


resulted in the suppression or negation or their legal, social, and physical relationships and rights" (454).

coalition building around laws and policies that have the potential to affect us across racial, sexual,
and class divides. Quare studies must incorporate under its rubric a praxis related to the sites of public
policy, family, church, and community. Therefore, in the tradition of radical black feminist critic Barbara Smith {"Toward"). I offer a manifesto that aligns black quare academic theory with
political praxis.¶ We can do more in the realm of public policy. As Cohen so cogently argues in her groundbreaking book. The Boundaries of Blackness,

we must intervene in the failure of the conservative black leadership to respond to the HIV/AIDS epidemic ravishing African American
communities. Due to the growing number of African Americans infected with and contracting HIV quare theorists must aid in the education and prevention of the spread of HIV as well as care
for those who are suffering. This means more than engaging in volunteer work and participating in fund-raising. It also means using our training as academics to deconstruct the way HIV/AIDS
is discussed in the academy and in the medical profession. We must continue to do the important work of physically helping our brothers and sisters who are living with HIV and AIDS through
outreach services and fundraising events, but we must also use our scholarly talents to combat racist and homophobic discourse that circulates in while as well as black communities. Ron
Simmons, a black gay photographer and media critic who left academia to commit his life to those suffering with AIDS by forming the organization US Helping US, remains an important role

model for how we can use both our academic credentials and our political praxis in the service of social
change.¶ The goal of quare studies is to be specific and intentional in the dissemination and praxis of quare theory, committed to communicating and translating its political potentiality.
Indeed, quare theory is "bi"-directional: it theorizes from bottom to top and top to bottom (pun intended!). This

dialogical/dialectical relationship between theory and practice, the lettered and unlettered, ivory tower and front
porch is crucial to a joint and sustained critique of hegemonic systems of oppression.
AT: Puar

Puar’s rejection of intersectionality is unfounded – ignores multiplicity


Hall Professor of Philosophy & faculty member Women's Studies and Sustainable Development
programs Appalachian State University 2014 Kim Q. “No Failure: Climate Change, Radical Hope, and
Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures” Radical Philosophy Review 17.1 pg 203–225
While Puar also calls for an end to “anthropomorphisms” in queer and disability studies, her discussion remains focused on human
precariousness that results from the globalized medical industrial complex.49 For Puar, moving
away from anthropocentrisms
toward a posthuman conception of assemblage involves jettisoning intersectional frameworks for
thinking about differences of gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, and nationality. Puar contends that
intersectional frameworks foreclose the future by emphasizing being rather than becoming. According to Puar, intersectionality “presupposes
identity and thus disavows futurity, or perhaps more accurately, prematurely anticipates and thus fixes a permanence to forever,” while
“assemblage and its espousal of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to be known, seen, or heard, allows for becoming beyond or
without being.50 Puar also criticizes identity politics that are informed by intersectional frameworks as examples of “temporal suffocation.”51

While I have no doubt that intersectional analysis can be used in ways that foreclose an openness to the
future (the not yet) by presupposing identities that remain fixed in all contexts, I do not think this
ossified conception of identity is endemic to intersectional frameworks. In fact, Gloria Anzaldúa’s “La
Prieta” arguably offers an example of an intersectional framework that reflects an ontology of
assemblage Puar sees as most conducive to queer futurity. Anzaldúa writes,

The mixture of bloods and affinities, rather than confusing or unbalancing me, has forced me to achieve
a kind of equilibrium. Both cultures deny me a place in their universe. Between them and among others, I build my own universe, El
Mundo Zurdo. I belong to myself and not to any one people. . . . We are the queer groups, the people that
don’t belong anywhere, not in the dominant world nor completely within our respective cultures.
Combined we cover so many oppressions. But the overwhelming oppression is the collective fact that we do not fit, and because we do not fit
we are a threat. Notall of us have the same oppressions, but we empathize and identify with each other’s
oppressions. . . . In El Mundo Zurdo I with my own affinities and my people with theirs can live together and transform the planet.52

I have quoted Anzaldúa at length because this passage demonstrates that intersectional analyses need not oppose an
ontology of assemblage. Anzaldúa attends to the “networks of multiplicities” that shape naturecultural
being and affinities in the world, while also acknowledging differences within those networks. Furthermore,
she offers a conception of queerness oriented toward a politics of possible alliance and planetary
transformation. It is misfitting53 (i.e., the presence and insufficiency of identity borders) that creates the possibility of affinities in El
Mundo Zurdo.

In my reading Anzaldúa presents a way of thinking that shares affinities with Braidotti’s notion of “becoming-earth,” a concept that reflects the
fact that humans are a part of earth systems of life “as embodied and embedded entities.”54 While embedded, we are not fixed. As Nancy
Tuana notes, understanding that distinctions between nature and culture (and between groups) can and perhaps should be made is not the
same as asserting that those distinctions are fixed for eternity and innate.55 According to Tuana, the burden is on those who make distinctions
to take responsibility for the distinctions they make,56 to explain why, in which context, and for what purpose they matter. To explain the non-
fixed but non-random distinctions she has in mind, Tuana offers the metaphor of viscous porosity, not fluidity:

Viscosity is neither fluid nor solid, but intermediate between them. Attention to porosity of intersections helps to undermine the notion that
distinctions, as important as they might be in particular contexts, signify a natural or unchanging boundary, a natural kind. At the same time,
‘viscosity’ retains an emphasis on resistance to changing form, thereby a more helpful image than ‘fluidity,’ which is too likely to promote a
notion of open possibilities and to overlook sites of resistance and opposition or attention to complex ways in which material agency is often
involved in interactions, including but not limited to, human agency.57
Tuana suggests the metaphor of “viscous porosity” as most conducive to understanding and responding to the complex network of multiplicity
that is climate change. This metaphor has affinities with Alison Kafer’s relational model of disability—a way of understanding that moves away
from definitions of disability that are fixed by diagnoses toward future meanings that cannot be known in advance, meanings that emerge in
alliances that remain accountable to the implications of how disability is understood and in which contexts.58 For Kafer, understanding
the “ambiguities” surrounding the meaning and use of disability is crucial for the realization of
“accessible futures” (19). Anzaldúa, Braidotti, Tuana, and Kafer thus offer resistant alternatives for thinking
about queerness beyond failure.

While it is true that queer is, as Alexander Doty pointed out, best understood as a doing not a being—as a verb
not a noun,59 it is also true, as Roderick Ferguson asserts, that queer theory’s critique of identity has always
coexisted with its Eurocentrism.60 In acknowledging the importance of identity to queer of color work, Ferguson writes, “What a lot
of us were trying to do and have been trying to do since is point to the invisible maneuvers of identity precisely in those critical formations that
presume that they have transcended identity—formations that, in the presumption of removal, have only contracted with discourses of
transcendence. We can’t help but ‘do’ totality, so best to know we’re doing it.”61
If it is to be radical, a queer conception of
identity must attend to these “invisible maneuvers” of identity even as it positions itself against identity.
To trace the invisible workings of identity is to return to, as Gayle Salamon puts it, a notion of queer (or, as I would
say, queer crip feminist) as critique.62 A central feature of these invisible maneuvers that attend to any
conception or taking up of identity is our enmeshment in the material world. That world is economic,
cultural, political, and more than human.
AT: Affect
Affective politics like the alternative terminally fail – they can’t influence politics or
create any real and substantial change.
Schrimshaw 12 [Will, "Affective Politics and Exteriority", willschrimshaw.net/subtractions/affective-
politics-and-exteriority/#, published 2012, accessed 06/29/18] BBro

The affective turn in recent politics thereby becomes auto-affective and in remaining bound to an
individual’s feelings and emotions undermines the possibility of its breaking out into collective action
and mobilisation. Yet, referring back to Fisher’s article, it is where this affective orientation is inscribed into the social circuits of musical use and
sonorous production that it perhaps begins to break out of the ideology of individualism through tapping into a
transpersonal or `machinic’ dimension of affective signals that never find a voice yet remain expressive
and hopefully inch towards efficacy. What is important to express here is that much of this affective content is inscribed in the use of music
as much as its composition. As little of the Grime and Dancehall that Fisher and Dan Hancox catalogued towards a playlist of the riots and uprisings expresses in explicitly linguistic
and lyrical content the sentiments of political activism, it is in the use of music and sound as a carrier of affects at the point of both playback and composition that its importance lies.2

Where music is deployed as a more affective than symbolic force in resistance, its
significance becomes obscure and
ambiguous from the perspective and expectations of symbolic coherence. This noted lack of coherence
and communicable message marks, as Fisher points out, a certain exhaustion of recognised channels of musical resistance: the
protest song seems worn out, lacklustre, its own disempowerment, apparent obsolescence and
displacement in pop culture a symptom compounding the apathy and estrangement that has
characterised much of the still fairly recent discourse on youth and `political engagement’.
AT: Suicide Bomber

Suicide bombing is nothing more than a cultural legitimization of violence – the


alternative is nothing more than a recruiter, striving to bring candidates to a higher
level of readiness and desensitization in slaughter
Charny 6
(Israel is an Israeli psychologist and genocide scholar. He is the editor of two-volume Encyclopedia of
Genocide, and executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, “Fighting
Suicide Bombing: A Worldwide Campaign for Life (Praeger Security International) pg.12-14)//ghs-gk

The recruiters of suicide bombers in various cultures get to be very street-wise in picking out promising
candidates. Later we shall see that these recruiters and handlers of the candidate suicide bombers play decisive roles in bringing
them over the threshold to commit their acts of suicide and murder. The handlers* methods of training,
indoctrination, and manipulation are intended to bring a candidate to a higher level of readiness; and the societal

culture which celebrates and lionizes suicide bombers provides an overall legitimation and sense of heroism and honor. One
Palestinian who had participated in a murderous terrorist killing of an Israeli family in their home and was then captured said years later in an Israeli jail. "We
Palestinians have to do a moral reckoning with ourselves. The decision that was taken in the 1970s to attack the civilian population |of Israel) was a terrible mistake.
From the moment we decided to kill civilians, we gave our young people legitimation also to murder
many innocent Palestinians during the intifada. The result has been the development in our culture of a norm of
senseless, unjustified murders."4 In the suicide-bomber blast in Haifa, this Arab woman went to bomb a restaurant which is partly Arab-owned to
kill her own fellow people along with the accursed Jews. From the accounts I have read, she did have true reason for revenge against the Jews—both her brother
and a cousin had been killed by Jews, the brother perhaps even without due cause except that he was with his terrorist cousin when Israeli commandos arrived. Yet
in claiming her revenge against both Jews and Arabs, this woman was saying that she didn't care much about anyone
and that she was abandoning herself lo kill under the umbrella of her culture's permission and approval to

use this method of seIf-and-political-expression for revenge. For me the truth is that the desire to kill human
beings, as an intrinsically evil motivation lurking in all of us. has a horrible life of its own. and that is at the core of
what suicide bombers are really expressing. For those who remember the grounded common sense of longshoreman-philosopher. Eric
Hoffer, he stressed that for the "true believer." meaning someone who is committed to a cause for which he or she is willing to die unthinkingly, ideologies are
amazingly interchangeable. True
believers are people who are extremists, who are attracted to the mass movement that
gives them reason for their self-sacrifice. Hoffer also saw how. even when they arise with a stated intention to
bring a greater decency to human life, mass movements often become demonic insofar as the mass movements are
rooted in extremist thinking, so Christianity became a slaughtering force in the Middle Ages which killed millions,
the French Revolution turned into a tyrannical bloodbath, and the Russian Communists produced a living
hell of totalitarianism and murder of tens of millions/ In every generation there are extremists who .ire as if wailing to
sign up for the contemporary forms of totalitarian and terrorist murdering of their times. Totalitarian
movements influence many additional people to be inducted into their extremis! was of life, so that many people who were
not wailing or looking for the opportunity to IK* extremists end up attracted and won over by a totalitarian move-
ment's calls to ideology, sacrifice, and violence. This is what I believe we have learned from ihe best social science thinking and scientific
experiments, like those of Stanley Milgram on people giving potential!) Ielh.il shocks lo another person just because they are told to do so by the experimenter;
and by Philip Zimbardo on the simulation of a prison where nice, normal university students turned so sadistic in their roles as jailers that the decision was made lo
slop the experiment." In a sense, extremism and fascist thinking are a potential slate of mind in all of us humans, of course nunc so in those (main > specific people
whose personalities are more inclined lo extremism and violence, and also more so in cultures, groups, and historical contexts which encourage and celebrate
extremism. The dread and repulsive mode of suicide bombing is today a growing and spreading phenomenon in the
world in which we live. One writer of an op-ed piece in the New York Times, who has since gone on to author a valuable book, concluded that "suicide

terrorism transcends religious, ethnic, and political boundaries.*'7 Surveying Ihe last twenty-some years, he wrote: "Since the
early 1980s, when Ihe Lebanese Shia llc/holla (with Iranian Khomeinis! funds and (raining) and Ihe Sri Lankan Liberation Tigers of Tamil F.clani—LTTF (Marxisis/I
lindus/Tamil secessionists) initialed the rouline use of suicide terrorists as an instrument of war, suicide bombers have been active in Sri
Lanka, Turkey, Kashmir, India. Lebanon. Israel. Russia, (he U.S.. and Indonesia. Failed suicide bombing attempts (including Ihe use of aircraft) are known from
France. Spain and Turkey, and successful attempts have been made elsewhere by citizens or residents of Germany, and Ihe UK."

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