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This book challenges the resounding scholarly silence about the lives of migrant women who identify as lesbian, queer, or nonheteronormative by complicating and rework binaries of visibility/invisibility, in/out, victim/agent, home/homeless, and belonging/unbelonging.
List of contents
1. Migrant and refugee lesbians: Lives that resist the telling
Eithne Luibhéid
2. Finding sequins in the rubble: The journeys of two Latina migrant lesbians in Los Angeles
Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr.
3. "We have to do a lot of healing": LGBTQ migrant Latinas resisting and healing from systemic violence
Sandibel Borges
4. Challenging the visibility paradigm: Tracing ambivalences in lesbian migrant women’s negotiations of sexual identity
Mia Liinson
5. Coming out and going abroad: The chuguo mobility of queer women in China
Lucetta Y. L. Kam
6. Lesbian refugees in transit: The making of authenticity and legitimacy in Turkey
Elif Sarı
About the author
Eithne Luibhéid is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA. She is the author of Pregnant on Arrival: Making the ‘Illegal’ Immigrant (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and the co-editor of Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation (University of Illinois Press, 2020).
Summary
Lives That Resist Telling challenges the resounding scholarly silence about the lives of migrant women who identify as lesbian, queer, or nonheteronormative. Reworking social science methodologies and theories, the essays explore the experiences of migrant Latina lesbians in Los Angeles; Latina lesbians whose transnational lives span the borders between the United States and Mexico; non-heteronormative migrant Muslim women in Norway and Denmark; economically privileged Chinese lesbian or lala women in Australia; and Iranian lesbian asylum-seekers in Turkey. The authors show how state migration controls and multiple institutions of power try to subjectify and govern migrant lesbians in often contradictory ways, and how migrant lesbians cope, strategize, and respond.
The essays complicate and rework binaries of visibility/invisibility, in/out, victim/agent, home/homeless, and belonging/unbelonging. Tellability emerges as a technology of power and violence, and conversely, as a mode of healing, (re)building a sense of self and connection to others, and creating conditions for livability and queer world-making.
This book was first published as a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.
