In Aberrations in Black, Roderick Ferguson offers what has been seen as the earliest articulation of queer of color critique. He suggests that “[q]ueer of color analysis extends women of color feminism by investigating how intersecting racial, gender, and sexual practices antagonize and/or conspire with the normative investments of nation-states and capital.”¹ As discussed in previous chapters, by virtue of their nonwhiteness, people of color historically and currently are cast as aberrant in their sexualities, genders, and family and household formations. Movements for inclusion and rights – to be seen as deserving of recognition as full legal persons and social subjects – thus involve seeking to distance those who are respectable from persons who may more obviously appear as examples of sexual and gender perversity within dominant (white) norms.² Yet, as queer of color critique illustrates, that bid for belonging tends to overlook how people of color may be “heterosexual but never heteronormative,” how they may be defined as normal in terms of categories of sexual and gender identity (not homosexual, not trans) but will still be marked as deviant as well as being policed and disciplined in their racialization as nonwhite.³ As Ferguson and Grace Kyungwon Hong suggest, drawing on the work of Cherríe Moraga, queer of color scholarship’s “response to this uneven devaluation of racialized life is decidedly not the opposite reaction of valuing life, of seeking comfort in the pockets of safety where certain forms of racialized life escape such devaluation.”⁴ Queer and trans of color analysis highlights how seeking the protections of the state and civil society can involve investing in racialized ideals in ways that perpetuate white norms of gender and sexuality.

Certain kinds of queers who reaffirm the supposed goodness and justice of the nation-state are seen as properly rights-bearing subjects even as the state extends and intensifies racializing forms of discrimination and domination. As Chandan Reddy argues, “In our current moment, it seems that every movement to validate a claim of social freedom produces a disparate and adversarial claim by the state elsewhere against what it determines to be irrational cultures and practices,” a dynamic he characterizes as “freedom with violence,” rather than freedom from violence.⁵ Queer and trans of color critique, then, traces how gender and sexuality operate as part of historical and ongoing projects of racialization while also refusing to see inclusion into existing political and economic systems as a way of remediating ongoing forms of state-enabled violence. As Jian Neo Chen observes, most of the early social service and advocacy organizations ostensibly focused on transgender needs “were founded and accessed by white transgender people,” and they tended to privilege the “narratives of identity and bodily transition … in alignment with the white gender binary under the management of psycho-medical professionals.”⁶ The resistance to such inclusion also involves a wariness toward explicitly or implicitly white-centered intellectual frameworks in queer and trans studies. Hong and Ferguson explain that they “narrate queer of color critique as emerging from women of color feminism rather than deriving from a white Euro-American gay, lesbian, and queer theory tradition.”⁷ The editors of “We Got Issues: Toward a Black/Trans* Studies” note that “the institutionalization of transgender studies as a discipline functions as a scene of subjection for blackness,” treating the “Black subject as a springboard to move toward other things, presumably white things” while also “configur[ing] the trans-of-color subject as the always belated arrival to the (white) archive.”⁸

Developed primarily with reference to the United States, queer and trans of color scholarly work cuts across conventional racial distinctions, understanding those very distinctions as a function of the ideological and institutional dynamics that are the object of analysis and critique. In this chapter, though, I’ve opted to discuss Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American studies separately. The reason is not because these areas of study are utterly discrepant or mutually exclusive (in terms of the issues at play in them, the intellectual frameworks they employ, and persons belonging to more than one of these groups), but, instead, because the processes of racialization and attendant histories of domination that created these distinctions have led to differences in experiences of oppression, collective identity, and traditions of thought and organizing. While not wanting to overemphasize or reify those differences, I also do not want to ignore them and the ways those differences have affected knowledge-production in queer and trans studies.

Native American and Indigenous Studies

Work in Native American and Indigenous studies raises an additional set of conceptual and political concerns often not addressed in – and at times at odds with – other kinds of queer and trans of color critique. Native people are racialized as Indians in ways that resonate with the issues at play for various racialized populations in the United States, including the roles played by gender, sexuality, and notions of deviance in shaping how such racialization works. However, Native people are also part of Indigenous peoples, self-governing political entities whose relation to the lands and waters that comprise the United States precedes the existence of the (settler-)state and whose presence as peoples continually challenges the legitimacy of the existence of the United States in ways that must be colonially disavowed, managed, and assaulted. Indigenous peoples precede the existence of the states that claim jurisdiction over them and their territories. Settler-states like the United States and Canada are created through the seizure of Native lands and the assertion of a right to exert authority over them, a colonial process of invasion, theft, imposition, and expropriation through which the supposedly domestic space of the nation-state is created and maintained. Joanne Barker characterizes Indigenous peoples’ authority, which precedes and exceeds claims by the colonizing state, as “the polity of the Indigenous – the unique governance, territory, and culture of Indigenous peoples in unique and related systems of (non)human relationships and responsibilities to one another.”⁹ If sovereignty is often seen as an expression of state oppressions in queer and trans studies, for Native peoples it often operates as a way of acknowledging their rightful governance over themselves and their territories, serving as a way of contesting state-legitimized modes of dispossession even as Euro-American political forms do not capture many Indigenous ways of understanding networks of relation, respect, and accountability. Rather than being excluded from belonging in the nation-state, Native people(s) are subjected to colonial violence through their forced inclusion in it, as racialized domestic subjects – as Indians. Queer and trans work in Native American and Indigenous studies traces the roles played by heteronormativity and cisnormativity in settler colonialism while also addressing Indigenous eroticisms, social roles, and modes of embodiment that do not fit Euro-American models.

While many Indigenous peoples on lands claimed by the United States and Canada take part in legal and political relations with the national government, the terms of such state recognition largely hinge on heteropatriarchal assumptions that reinforce the legitimacy of settler frameworks and work to replace Indigenous modes of self-understanding and forms of social organization.¹⁰ As Jennifer Denetdale observes, colonial policy “has reconfigured tribal nations as heterosexual patriarchies”: “modern settler nations such as the United States value only those aspects of Indigenous knowledge, culture, and practice that do not threaten the structure of heteronormative patriarchy.”¹¹ That process historically has involved treating Native modes of social organization and governance as primitive and perverse in their supposed failure to emulate Euro-American models of home, family, property, and gendered personhood. That putative deficiency has helped legitimize massive and sustained interventions by the state into all aspects of Indigenous life, casting Native peoples as uncivilized and unable to govern themselves and, thus, validating the expropriation of their lands and their forced assimilation. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson suggests that “heteropatriarchy isn’t just about exclusion of certain Indigenous bodies” – of persons deemed deviant in Euro-American terms due to their desires or ways they embody their gender – but “is about the destruction of the intimate relationships that make up our nations.”¹² As Marie Laing suggests, “to destroy our ways of doing gender is to destroy our ways of being together – in effect, to destroy our nations,” and Sarah Hunt observes, “The near-total erasure of two-spirit and trans people that was accomplished through the imposition of the gender binary is integrally related with the hierarchy that continues to perpetuate the violent marginalization of Indigenous girls and women.”¹³ Among other ways, that destruction occurs through transforming Indigenous modes of social reproduction by insisting that they need to look like the nuclear family, treating political forms based on networks of genealogical connection – like clans – as not really governance (because they don’t resemble the supposedly impersonal bureaucracies of state institutions), supporting gendered modes of production and authority that subordinate women, and targeting what appear to Euro-Americans as expressions of sexual and gender nonnormativity for criminalization and state-sanctioned assault (a process that Deborah Miranda has described as “gendercide”).¹⁴ In this way, heteropatriarchy “is a foundational dispossession force because it is a direct attack on Indigenous bodies as political orders,” the ways Indigenous “bodies and … constructions of gender, sexuality, and intimate relationships” serve as the building blocks for “Indigenous orders of government,” which threaten the asserted sovereignty of the state over Native people and lands.¹⁵ We can see this work as building on the arguments offered by earlier queer Native feminists, such as Beth Brant and Paula Gunn Allen (discussed in Chapter 2). Kim TallBear observes, “We must collectively oppose a system of compulsory settler sexuality and family that continues building a nation upon Indigenous genocide and that marks Indigenous and other marginalized relations as deviant.”¹⁶ In contrast, scholars have emphasized the importance of Indigenous systems of kinship. Joseph Pierce has characterized such dynamics as creating kinstillations that speak to “how to negotiate our beings-with and beings-in-relation as a form of ongoing enactments of Indigenous sovereignty, mutuality, and care.”¹⁷

Native peoples have at times themselves adopted forms of hetero- and cisnormativity within their own governing institutions as part of efforts to be seen as civilized. With respect to the US effort to eliminate polygamy among the Navajos, Denetdale notes, “The uprising at Beautiful Mountain provides an example of how federal Indian policies are intended to eliminate the Diné as Diné by transforming the Navajo nation into a heterosexual patriarchy.”¹⁸ The forceful intervention into Diné social forms gets narrated in both US and official Navajo history, though, as “a movement from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’” (which includes the Navajo Tribal Council in 1940 passing a resolution “which defined marriage as between one man and one woman”).¹⁹ Denetdale argues that efforts to “minimize the level of violence and coercion that was used to transform Navajos into American citizens,” such as in the criminalization of Diné marital and familial forms, can also entail Dińe people “internal[izing] colonial values” (like monogamous couplehood) as well as institutionalizing them as part of tribal law and policy.²⁰ Addressing nineteenth-century Hawai’i (prior to US annexation in 1898), J. Kehaulani Kauanui illustrates how the “major reorganization of social forms as a strategy to fight Western racism through independent nationhood” depended on the performance of civilizedness. The effort to get European countries and the United States to see Hawai’i as “a competent modern nation of people capable of self-governance rested on the rejection, repression, and restraint of sexual practices deemed savage within a new Christian order that cannot be separated from colonial forces.”²¹ These measures included instituting Euro-American marriage (monogamous, lifelong, hetero-romantic couplehood) as the legal norm as opposed to the much more fluid and expansive sets of sexual and genealogical relations that had shaped kinship networks, connection to lands, and political authority. These changes included requiring that married women take their husband’s name, mandating that inheritance be based on legitimacy (descent from a proper marriage), and pathologizing same-sex intimate connections (known as aikāne).²² In this way, “the linkages between sexuality and sovereignty cannot be overstated”: “Hawaiian chiefs enacted forms of colonial biopolitics in order to secure sovereign recognition” by Euro-American states.²³

Such colonial efforts to interpellate Indigenous peoples within Euro-American norms and Indigenous efforts to seek such recognition efface the sexual and gender diversity and expansiveness at play in Indigenous languages, histories, philosophies, cultural expressions, and practices. With respect to Native peoples in what currently is southern California, Deborah Miranda has tracked the ways the precontact social role of ‘aqi (in Chumash), characterized by Spanish soldiers as “Indian men … observed in the dress, clothing, and character of women” and ritually responsible for caretaking the deceased, has survived in the archive under the Spanish term joya. In use from early in the Spanish conquest of the region, by the mid-1770s this term registers the continuing presence of such persons in Indigenous societies throughout the period of missionization into the 1830s, when baptisms of people listed as joyas were still being recorded.²⁴ Miranda also suggests how information on such persons, deemed hermaphrodites and sodomites in the accounts of soldiers and priests (see the discussion of these terms in Chapter 3), came to appear in the accounts of early-twentieth-century anthropologists, including speculating that one of J. P. Harrington’s informants – Kitsepawit Fernando Librado – may themself have belonged to this category.²⁵ Similarly, Kai Pyle explores the trans*temporal kinship between contemporary queer and trans Native people and nineteenth-century Ojibwe and Plains Cree persons who were seen as gender nonnormative by Euro-American traders, missionaries, and officials in the Great Lakes region.²⁶ Pyle addresses the presence of terms that may have been used to indicate such persons, including ayakwao/ayekkwe, but they also indicate that “the Cree language does not use gendered pronouns,” suggesting greater potential for acknowledging gender variability.²⁷ The kinds of archival and lexical work in which Miranda and Pyle are engaged open up not only possibilities for registering the diversity of Indigenous genders historically but of positioning that historical evidence as a vital part of projects of resurgence and self-determination in the present.

In addition to documenting terms and roles on which contemporary Indigenous people might and do draw, work in queer and trans Indigenous studies attends to the broader potentials in Indigenous philosophies for thinking beyond Euro-American conceptions of identity, intimacy, and embodiment. Writing about peoples in what is currently the US Southeast, Daniel Heath Justice suggests that they possess an affirmative sense of anomaly that can speak to forms of queer indigeneity. Justice turns to shared regional conceptions – articulations “of difference drawn from Mississippian cosmology and iconography.” Rather than designating a particular kind of sexual/gender identity or practice, anomaly refers to “beings and states of being” that belong to or cross among otherwise distinct social categories.²⁸ The anomalous and the normal are less antagonistic, with the former disruptively displacing the latter and therefore needing to be policed, than operate in productive and ultimately balanced tension that defines them both. As opposed to ideas of perversity or aberrance, anomaly suggests the importance of difference, a way of thinking that exceeds queerness and transness but that can provide Indigenous conceptual resources for valuing them. In a different vein, Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio shows how Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) stories connect all manner of interpersonal intimacies, desires, and sensory experiences to deep and ongoing relations to their lands and waters. Drawing on the mo`olelo (story/chant) of Hi`iakaikapoliopele (a powerful ancestral figure in the movement to the lands of Hawai’i), Osorio illustrates how aloha ‘āina (love for and responsibility to the land) comprises a “diverse and vibrant collection of multibodied relationships between Kānaka Maoli, our ancestors, peers, descendants, and the environment,” “an internal love for place and community so strong that it cannot be overcome.” That network of love includes erotic relationships and pleasure, including how the mo`olelo Osorio interprets features a “spectrum of sexualities” and forms of desire. Those connections, though, “come from the `āina [land]; it is our pilina [bonds/connections] to it that we share between us, that makes pleasure possible”: “Being intimate and pili with our `āina teaches us how to be intimate and pili to each other.”²⁹ Across a range of Indigenous modes of self-expression, as Lisa Tatonetti demonstrates, we can see forms of “gender expansiveness” and “an erotics of responsibility.”³⁰ She defines “the Indigenous erotic” as “a topography of desire that includes a felt relationship between bodies and landscape,” and she shows how various Native authors, themselves queer and not (such as Louise Erdrich), present nonnormative expressions of gender and desire “as part of the everyday fabric of Native communities,” including representations of “non-cis genders.”³¹

The term Two-Spirit has gained prominence as a way of signifying Indigenous genders and sexualities in ways that distinguish them both from histories of sexology (see Chapter 3) and identity categories that tend de facto to center white experiences – like gay and transgender. The term Two-Spirit emerged from the 1990 meeting of the Third International Gathering of American Indian and First Nations Gays and Lesbians held in Winnipeg, and it was coined by a Cree community member and scholar named Myra Laramee.³² In various usages, it can indicate historical persons whose identities among their peoples do not map onto Euro-American concepts of gender and sexuality, contemporary persons in those Indigenous roles/statuses, and Native persons who otherwise (and sometimes simultaneously) might be seen or see themselves as LGBTQ but who want to foreground their indigeneity. In this way, “the term cannot be drawn along an analytical distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘nontraditional,’” and the concept of Two-Spirit “may be an especially fruitful way to challenge assertions of a radical disconnect between the Indigenous past and present without resorting to overly romanticized or atemporal ideas about the past.”³³ Pyle observes that the term Two-Spirit speaks to the “need to find ways to talk about LGBTQ Indigenous life among Indigenous people in a way that makes cultural sense to other community members.”³⁴ The concept’s multiplicity and complexity, which is its strength, also can produce a desire for clarification that can be oppressive. In her study of self-definition among queer, trans, and Two-Spirit youth in Toronto, Laing indicates that “many of them noted that they are frequently coerced into educating people … on what two-spirit does and does not mean,” a pedagogical demand that can leave them without, in one participant’s terms, “opportunities to philosophize” that (range of) meaning(s) for themselves. Laing characterizes the concept and its community of usage as “a container that can hold multiple truths,” one that “holistically links Indigeneity with the ways in which people experience their gender, their roles in community, and their sexuality.”³⁵ Also, while recognizing the frequent association of Two-Spirit with specific spiritual dynamics or roles in ceremony, Pyle warns of how presuming that connection can impose “exclusionary” notions of “traditionalism” that limit recognition for a variety of kinds of contemporary Indigenous gendered being, and Hunt cautions, “in recounting pre-colonial gender roles, it is important to avoid generalized statements that idealize pre-contact Indigenous societies as uniformly balanced, accepting, and appreciative of non-gender-conforming individuals.”³⁶

As acknowledgment of Indigenous queer, trans, and Two-Spirt presence has grown in academic and activist contexts, scholars have been attentive to a potential disconnect between apparent acceptance of such presence and continuing indifference to the lives and well-being of queer, trans, and Two-Spirit people. While noting the uptick in the phrase “women and 2spirits” in discussions of “gendered violence and heteropatriarchy in indigenous communities,” Pyle observes that this repetition tends to efface rather than engage the multidimensional experiences of Two-Spirit people, while also leaving intact ongoing forms of denigration. Moreover, prominent ideas about Indigenous activism – conceived of as “large anti-state agitation” – tend not to address the strategies of mutual care adopted within queer, trans, and Two-Spirit communities.³⁷ With regard to the role of sovereignty and modes of Indigenous collectivity within Native American and Indigenous Studies, Billy-Ray Belcourt has suggested that the notions of Native subjectivity in the field (what he terms “Native Studies’ Native”) appear as given while also not engaging forms of Indigenous queer, trans, and Two-Spirit everyday feeling and experience.³⁸ Those ordinary modes of living – and the pleasures, vulnerabilities, and quotidian interdependencies that shape them – are, in Belcourt’s terms, stomped out by “the genre and form of politics speak”; those kinds of emotions and sensations, including forms of negative feeling, seem to have no place in discourses of clear and self-assured collective political identity, which “cherry-picks feelings that will get held up as national sentiments.”³⁹ Discussing writings by Native lesbians, Janice Gould observes, “I am aware that in speaking about a lesbian American Indian erotics, and even more in speaking about lesbian love, I am being disloyal and disobedient to the patriarchal injunction that demands our silence and invisibility,” further noting that her own lesbianism, which she refers to as “disobedience,” “led … to my being emotionally and psychically cast out from my family, cast away from the most intimate affectional bonds I knew.”⁴⁰ Discussing writings by self-identified Native lesbians, Craig Womack notes that “a significant reality for these working-class writers has to do with the fact that out Native lesbians do not receive approval from the Native literary mainstream.” Womack characterizes the effort to locate same-sex desire within Native writings, especially when the author has not publicly identified themself as queer, as an interpretive act of suspicioning: “A suspicioner brings up taboos, secrets, impolite observations normally off-limits in states of self-assurance and control. Suspicioning takes advantage of doubt to go out on a limb and blurt out or whisper.”⁴¹

The presumption of an inherent alignment between indigeneity and queerness and/or gender nonnormativity can vacate the possibility of engaging with queer and trans Native persons by presenting them as always-already included. Jodi Byrd argues that “critiques of heteropatriarchy [within Indigenous feminisms] have queered all Indigenous peoples and have flattened Indigenous women’s bodies into land.” In doing so, such analyses present Indigenous “embodied materiality as always already decolonial” in ways that portray such embodiment as queer while “den[ying] any ground for the difference queer [and one could add trans] might make.” In contrast to Black feminisms, which Byrd suggests engage the queering of Black bodies “within racial capitalism … without ever losing the material and lived particularities of” Black queer and trans bodies, “Indigenous queer bodies go missing” in Native American and Indigenous Studies, raising questions about the work done by apparently critical/radical indications of queerness.⁴² Thus, while attending to the ways heteronormativity and cisnormativity have shaped settler interventions into Indigenous governance and collective life, and addressing alternative conceptions of desire, sociality, embodiment, and personhood present in Native practices and philosophies, scholars in Indigenous studies also need to be wary of turning queer and trans into metaphors that help coalesce Indigenous sovereignties at the expense of effacing actual queer, trans, and Two-Spirit persons.

Black Studies

The understanding of blackness as expressive of deviance has been a crucial part of ideologies of sexuality and gender in the Americas and beyond. As Roderick Ferguson notes, “African American communal and corporeal difference became the symbol of the nonheteronormative perversions of industrializing and urbanizing economies.”⁴³ Demonstrations of Black “compliance with heteropatriarchal cultural standards,” though, served “as a way of claiming access to state and civil society,” including in the formation of Black studies in the 1960s and 1970s, which enacted “an exclusionary agenda that effectively cordoned off all identity categories that were not primarily based on race.”⁴⁴ Sidestepping questions of sexual and gender nonnormativity, then, was part of a broader institutionalized politics of respectability but also a result of the specific cultural and political implications of engaging Black women’s sexuality. As Evelyn Hammonds observes, even Black feminists tended to enact a “silence about sexuality” in order to avoid the “racist sexual terms” used to characterize all Black women, a threat both individually and “to the race as a whole,” making Black women’s erotics into something of a “black hole” – not visible in conventional ways but still felt in their effects.⁴⁵ In contrast to such ostensibly tactical evasions, work in Black queer and trans studies has sought to read for such deviance – the ways blackness is constructed as aberrant and the significance of the lived and felt patterns of desire, expression, and association presented as deviant within dominant (white) norms. Cathy Cohen has argued for a Black “politics of deviance” that takes up behaviors and relations deemed not respectable and draws on their “transformative potential” in shifting existing normative ideals, including those that have been internalized by Black people.⁴⁶ In a similar vein, Marshall Green offers trans method as an important complement to and extension of the ways Black feminism has opened up “multiple possibilities of gender within the category ‘woman,’” further capacitating scholarship “attuned to difference rather than sameness.”⁴⁷ Such intellectual projects enact what Patrick Johnson has described as quare studies, a “vernacular” mode of theorizing that attends to everyday life as well as the possibilities and difficulties at play in finding and occupying a Black “homeplace.”⁴⁸ This section will explore these issues by focusing on discussions of the contemporary implications of the history of enslavement, the specificity of Black genders, and the relations between blackness and pleasure.

The history of enslavement, including its afterlives in ongoing structures of racial capitalism and antiblackness, can be seen as fundamentally shaping the ways Black people are cast as aberrant and, therefore, disruptive, dangerous, and criminal. Stephen Dillon argues that “the whiteness of heterosexuality came into being through its parasitic relationship to the fabrication of racialized inhumanity. ‘Forced queering’ is a name for the way the state and capital produce nonnormative genders and sexualities through racial violence.”⁴⁹ Similarly, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman suggests that enslaved people’s availability for sexual use and violation – “the violence, the illegitimacy, and the inchoateness of rape that produced the body, the status, and the (non)identity of the slave” – makes “the slave … not simply the product of sexual criminality but its very incarnation.”⁵⁰ Not only are enslaved people fatherless, in the sense of being denied access to legally recognized paternity and being placed outside of the framework of the (white) heteropatriarchal family, but, in freedom, Black people continue to be represented and disciplined as failing to inhabit proper erotics, embodiment, and domesticity.⁵¹ In discussing efforts to elude containment, intervention, assault, and criminalization, Dillon presents “the fugitive” as “a queer figure who is the site of a dramatic reimagining of freedom,” suggesting that “the forces that create difference do not determine its future. Something takes flight and escapes even as capture is always immanent.” He draws on Audre Lorde’s notion of “the erotic” to name “an unrecognized, unnamed force that is prior to the powers of white supremacy, capital, and heteropatriarchy” that engenders such possibility for queer Black fugitivity in the face of the enforced queering of blackness.⁵²

Historical and ongoing processes of being made deviant, though, can lead to narrating Black histories in ways that edit out desires and kinds of embodied expression that are treated as perverse anomalies. Treva Ellison has tracked the double dynamic by which Black queer and trans people have been effaced in Black history while being incorporated/appropriated in a deracialized and whitened LGBT history. For example, the story of the arrest of “three young Black femmes” in 1950 in Los Angeles can be included in a Los Angeles Public Library collection focused on LGBT pride in ways that leave aside how that arrest (and its linkage of gender nonconformity with criminality) was part of the expansion of the role of policing in intensifying geographies of segregation. Conversely, “depictions and discussions of Black gender and sexual deviance in Jet and Ebony during the 1950s” reaffirm the disorderliness of Black queer and trans presence.⁵³ Similarly, the prosecution of the Black performer Sir Lady Jay in 1950s Los Angeles for violating police commission rules about impersonating the “costume or dress [of] a person of the opposite sex” can get folded into “genealogies of male-to-female transgender activism” in ways that efface the role of antiblackness in her arrest and her protests. However, such police action also dovetailed with attempts by Black middle-class reformers to push out and punish what they saw as seedy elements in their communities, adopting “a script of gender and sexual conformity as a method of building class power.”⁵⁴ In response to the straightening of Black histories, lesbian writers have offered their own fictional rewritings of history that “offer reference toward history and push back against it through rebellious narratives” that do not accept “the familiar heterosexual and normatively gendered story of the past,” instead “creating anachronism centering queers who ‘don’t belong’ in the historical narratives as they are currently known.”⁵⁵ As Matt Richardson illustrates, such projects of reclamation and invention include depictions of pleasurable same-sex eroticism within conditions of enslavement, the emergence of possibilities for greater Black gender expression and fluidity in the movement to urban spaces from the South, the presence of queer relations and West African spiritual practice in the spaces of the South, and complex queer and trans networks of relation across the Black diaspora.⁵⁶

While tying the present to the past of enslavement – and to African belonging prior to enslavement – envisions forms of generational and ancestral relation, some scholars have suggested it can also reinforce a deeply heteronormative logic of reproductive inheritance. Diaspora often is represented in Black studies through “hetero-genealogy” and “hetero-futurity” that posit something like a line of descent from “Mother Africa” that continues to bind together Black people.⁵⁷ As against this somewhat reproductive rendering of belonging, Keguro Macharia argues for conceptualizing “black diaspora as proximity and rubbing rather than descent.” He observes that “focusing on the erotic as the meeting place for Africa and Afro-diaspora … interrupt[s] the scholarly tendency to frame this meeting place through tropes of hetero-kinship,” instead attending to how that meeting is shaped by “mourning [for] the loss of erotic diversity because of the disruptions of colonial modernity.” Foregrounding the role of Euro-American discourses of sexuality in “histories of unhumaning,” including enslavement and the colonization of Africa, underlines both “the ruptures of the black diaspora” and the role of embodied experiences of contact, movement, and relation in shaping felt senses of blackness.⁵⁸ Offering perhaps the strongest version of the argument against historical continuity, Stephen Best suggests that “a shared queerness” emerges from “shared blackness” in a running “sense of alienation” that also undoes “conceptions of black collectivity and community across time.” In “extending the queer acknowledgment of non-relationality between the past and the present,” Best critiques melancholy historicism – “the idea that the slave past provides a ready prism for understanding and apprehending the black political present.” Instead, attending more directly to the queerness of blackness, Best argues, highlights forms of unbelonging and displaces “the need for it to all add up to something in terms of collective identity.”⁵⁹

Queer and trans engagements with diasporic blackness highlight how it troubles notions of genealogical connection and racial sameness. As Jafari S. Allen notes, “To follow the route of black/queer/diaspora is to interrogate dynamic, unsettled subjects whose bodies, desires, and texts move.”⁶⁰ More than simply or solely indicating forms of dislocation and flight, that movement itself suggests a desire to encounter forms of difference – people, places, and experiences that do not coalesce into an easy sense of home or belonging. Nadia Ellis characterizes diaspora as “the urgent sensation of a pull from elsewhere” in which “places and people of black identification” are felt as “horizons of possibility.” Ellis links this sense of diasporic blackness to queerness, which she, drawing on José Esteban Muñoz, describes as “that thing that lets us feel that the world is not enough” and that enables forms of affect that work against the need for “compulsory sameness.”⁶¹ Similarly, Rinaldo Walcott argues that blackness in the Americas cannot “be conditioned by a search for an authentic African sexuality but rather might concern itself with the ‘new’ and recombined sexualities of the Black diaspora.” Doing so enacts what Walcott calls a homopoetics that also refuses to insert Black genders and sexualities into a developmental narrative of “normative queer history” that posits the rights-bearing citizen-subject of the liberal nation-state as the inherently desirable model and goal – a vision of blackness that erases the complex “refusals of heterosexual monogamy” at play across the diaspora, particularly in the Caribbean.⁶²

Much of the queer and trans scholarship in Black studies can be traced back in some fashion to the work of Hortense J. Spillers, whose essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” has profoundly influenced discussions of enslavement and its aftermaths. Spillers describes the distinction between the body and the flesh as “the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions.” If the body indicates institutionalized social conceptions of embodiment for those who count as persons, including forms of patriarchal gender differentiation, the flesh speaks to the “ungendered” understanding of enslaved beings as quantifiable objects equally available for white use (including sexual objectification and violence, which Spillers registers through the notion of the pornotrope). Those enfleshed beings further are alienated from “notions of the domestic” and are denied any legally recognized familial bonds – what Spillers terms kinlessness. Within this frame, blackness entails a “loss of gender,” which is a crucial part of how Black people are cast outside of personhood. However, rather than arguing for inclusion into (white) gender norms, and their accompanying ideologies of home and family, Spillers indicates, “we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness” than “claiming the monstrosity” of experiences of embodiment within blackness.⁶³ She suggests, then, that flesh is not simply the absence of gender and its legal forms but may entail ways of being in the world beyond the normative framework of the body.⁶⁴

This analysis helps give rise to scholarship that addresses how Black modes of gender expression and identity are overdetermined by historical and ongoing forms of antiblack imposition, regulation, and consumption. For example, within US popular culture, Black drag queens often serve as supplements whose aid helps secure heteroperpetuity – the idea that “(white and middle class) heteronorms are desirable, natural, essential, and eternal.” Black gender nonnormativity can then be circulated and consumed as a happy spectacle in the service of a white cisnormative future.⁶⁵ These dynamics of racialized gender, though, are not simply part of public discourse and dominant ideologies but can come to be lived as part of Black self-understanding and self-representation. The marginalization of Black sissiness provides an example of this process. Marlon B. Ross has illustrated how the figure of the sissy – the effeminate man – has come to be seen as an indication of “unfit black manliness” and often has been read, including by queer critics, as a sign of hidden “homosexual subjectivity.” However, emphasizing the idea of conduct over notions of ingrained sexual and gender identity, Ross traces the ways the forms of gendered behavior tied to the sissy – and the disdain often expressed toward them – gain meaning within the history of white supremacy due to the gendering of Black service (particularly in domestic spaces) as contrary to “white hegemonic masculinity,” which itself “has been haunted by and constructed on the unstable category of multiply marginalized black sissiness.”⁶⁶ He also shows how the enactment of nonnormative gender and the disavowal of it have been significant in the history of the Black church (which “nurtures sissy character and conduct” while expressing a deeply “patriarchal doctrine”) and to gay Black men’s assertion of public presence (such as the use in multiple media of the phrase “Brother to Brother” rather than, say, “Sissy to Sissy”).⁶⁷

In response to the ways oppressive social forms shape the possibilities for Black gender, some scholars have issued calls to move beyond gender entirely. Connecting to other abolitionist movements, such as with respect to police and the prison system, these efforts envision the potential for ways of being, individual and collective, not organized around the matrix of social roles and forms of embodiment that currently operate as gender. In this vein, Marquis Bey argues that “Black trans feminism cannot abide such classificatory violences, so it urges us to abolish the categories we may love.” They add, “I am in the business of dissolving borders and boundaries,” including those that shape the terms of racial and gender identity: “My commitment to the nonnormative is thus a commitment to what has not been permitted to appear on the scene. The nonnormative must be carefully distinguished from the ‘counter’ or the ‘oppositional’ inasmuch as these, to me, express a reaction to what has been established.” From this perspective, “the nonnormative” is “not predicated on legitimizing identities, knowledges, or sense-making apparatuses already in place” for understanding, categorizing, and regulating bodies and the ways they move through the world. Bey presents this movement beyond extant frameworks of identity and selfhood, which affect everyday kinds of perception and interaction, as a project of “gender radicality” that is also a process of “fugitive un/gendering.”⁶⁸

Other scholars, though, point to existing Black genders that offer possibilities for generating livable presents and futures. Kara Keeling addresses what she terms the Black femme function, which she argues gets denigrated and displaced in conventional conceptions of Black collectivity and political movements. Within them, “a notion of femininity” appears to “designat[e] passivity or receptivity to sensations from the outside and one’s currency as an object for desire”: “Masculinity and its affectations and accoutrements appear as the terms adequate to Black Liberation.” Within this masculinist vision of blackness, the Black femme, Keeling suggests, remains present but “out-of-field” – outside extant ways of representing Black collective identity. Black femme-ness encapsulates the “invisible affective labor [that] ensures the survival of forms of sociality that were never meant to survive.”⁶⁹ In this way, the Black femme less complements masculinity than indicates practices and relations of care and protection necessary for everyday Black flourishing, which get gendered as feminine and seen as less valuable or even as a hindrance to more supposedly revolutionary action. Extending Keeling’s analysis, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley illustrates how enacting forms of femininity defies “commonsense expectations of butchness for black queer ciswomen” – “the persistent masculinization of black lesbians.” She argues that non-trans forms of Black lesbian femininity also should be seen “as fundamentally troubling binaries of gender and sexuality,” although in ways that are different from yet allied with expressions of transfemininity.⁷⁰ Tinsley, though, approaches such gender through engagement with “Caribbean authors” whose “vision of creative genders and sexualities” draws on the figure of Ezili – a lwa, or powerful ancestral spirit, within Haitian Vodou. Such portrayals and experiences of Black gender, then, emerge out of a cultural development in the Americas that “also enacts resistance to slavery and its aftermath.”⁷¹ Focusing on another form of creative adaptation, Marlon M. Bailey attends to how Ballroom culture provides ways to “perform gender, create kinship, and forge community” amid varied dynamics of “marginalization.” Highlighting how experiences of antiblackness are intensified through forms of family and community rejection due to being queer and trans, Bailey presents the Ballroom community as a network that provides members “a means of altering their ways of being in the world and of creating an alternative world together.” The balls are events where people from different houses – teams that also serve as part of alternative kinship relations beyond legal/biological families – compete in specified categories to see who can best achieve realness in that category. The categories themselves are gendered – such as Butch Queens (gay men), Butches (transmasculine), Femme Queens (transfeminine) – but not in ways that readily map onto heteronormative and cisnormative ideals: “Ballroom members … view categories of sex as open and unfinished, just as they do gender. Akin to their notions of gender and sexuality, the sex of a body is the result of an ongoing process or activity as opposed [to] being a biological fact.” These complex gendered relations also affect ordinary life outside the balls through the houses, which “challenge conventional notions of marriage, family, and kinship by revising gender relations and redefining gendered labor within the kin unit.”⁷² Thus, while marking the force of interwoven racial and gender norms, scholars show how existing Black genders contribute to possibilities for everyday thriving.

As discussed previously, a politics of respectability can shape discussions of Black life in ways that disallow discussion of erotic life and that displace the sense of deviance that attaches to blackness onto non-straight and non-cis subjects. Robert Reid-Pharr suggests that in anti-queer Black discourses, such as certain strains of Black nationalist writing, “the homosexual stands in for the fear of crisis and chaos,” serving as a figure for “that which is unauthentic, base, and perverse in order to adequately define the borders of black ‘realness.’”⁷³ In the face of such disavowal, scholars emphasize the importance of turning toward forms of Black embodiment, pleasure, and desire that do not fit within the parameters of bourgeois visions of family, work, and morality. L. H. Stallings describes such kinds of pleasure that likely would be seen as perverted, hypersexual, or criminal as funky erotixxx, which she argues “provides alternative knowledge about imagination and sexuality.” Focusing on funk – “radical configurations of family, love, and relationships where monogamy and marriage are not situated as the ideal praxis” – opens possibilities for engaging sex and erotic relations in ways that refuse both pathologizing narratives of Black deviance and desexualizing narratives of Black normativity.⁷⁴

Black studies scholars, though, also have critiqued the tendency in queer studies to cast desire as inherently liberatory, rather than as itself potentially animated by race in ways that reinforce the givenness of racial difference. Dwight McBride notes that “the realm of desire for queer theorists seems ever to represent the possibility for a kind of idealized freedom and liberality,” and he contrasts this portrait with the powerful roles played by racialized imagination and hierarchy within the “gay marketplace of desire.”⁷⁵ The story that eroticism can transcend existing social relations, critics have argued, works in the service of consolidating whiteness as the invisible norm. As Sharon Holland argues, “we can’t have our erotic life – a desiring life – without involving ourselves in the messy terrain of racist practice.”⁷⁶ Holland suggests that the celebration of desire and pleasure in queer studies, as well as in some earlier Black feminist formulations (such as Audre Lorde’s notion of the erotic), “works its magic because it functions in a very neat nonreproductive zone.”⁷⁷ Queer studies, then, de facto can treat racial identities, like blackness, as given rather than addressing the ways they are (re)created through forms of sexual contact that bear racial meanings for all involved. As both Holland and Reid-Pharr illustrate, the Black body does not simply immanently bear its blackness but is attributed blackness as an identity due to understandings of the sexual union out of which that body comes, and the ongoing process of naturalizing the blackness of that body includes normalizing the social institution of the Black family as the self-evident crucible from which blackness generationally emerges.⁷⁸ Without attending to the racial significance and sentiments that animate forms of desire, race as an identity and a history of domination appears to attach to some bodies and not others in ways that efface how race as an ideology is embedded in everyday interactions and intimacies – including queer ones – that continue to generate the color-line and blackness itself.

If eroticism does not operate outside of or beyond forms of racialization, how do we understand the workings of pleasure within Black lives, particularly Black queer and trans lives? How can Black pleasure be addressed in ways that engage the role of existing racial and racist dynamics in shaping erotic subjectivity and experience without only seeing Black desire, sensation, and ecstasy in terms of the effects of ongoing antiblackness? One way of addressing these questions is through consideration of forms of Black kink – Black people’s participation in forms of eroticism that do not fit conventional notions of romance, intimacy, and coupledom. Beyond contesting limiting ideas of respectability, these kinds of sexual play can involve staging fantasies that tap into modes of racial hierarchy and objectification. Talking about porn made by Black lesbians, Jennifer Declue observes, “Rather than working to free black lesbian sexuality from the legacy of sexual violence and trauma, the films … engage with loss, trauma, and unspoken violence by creating scenarios in which black lesbian characters explore sexual domination and submission, pleasure and pain, as ecstatic modes that can release the trauma of sexual violence and racial oppression.” She adds, “The perception that black and brown bodies do not engage in kinky queer sex culture avoids having to contend with the messiness of racialized power dynamics within sexuality.”⁷⁹ Thinking in broader terms about what she calls brown jouissance, Amber Jamilla Musser considers the ways that Black fleshliness (in Hortense Spillers’s sense discussed earlier) has a “sensuous materiality that brings together pleasure and pain” and that “takes joy and pain in the gesture of radical openness toward otherness,” which is irreducible to “only woundedness and pain.”⁸⁰ Connecting desire and erotic sensation to histories of racial objectification opens up the complex relays among “abjection, pleasure, and pleasure in abjection” that do not transcend ongoing forms of racism but that also are more than merely acquiescence to those forms, instead indicating a living within and working through of such histories as part of “project[s] of recovery and survival” that refuse to take dominant notions of selfhood as given.⁸¹

Everyday attempts to find joy and pleasure within existing circumstances of antiblackness themselves require forms of individual and collective labor. Considering Black queer women’s participation in Chicago nightlife, Kemi Adeyemi situates their efforts to feel right within existing urban economies in which “the value of financial profit is bound to the accumulation of certain kinds of good feeling for certain kinds of people in certain kinds of places,” feelings “made possible only by removing certain people to the margins of the city’s zones of profitability.” Working to find pleasure within these dynamics of displacement and erasure, Black queer women “interrupt, manage, and redirect the racialized territorialization of feeling in the neoliberal city toward the production of sustainable black queer community in its midst.” In the words of one of Adeyemi’s interviewees, the pursuit of Black joy “exists in connection to us being oppressed and living.” Adeyemi insists on the importance of the everyday and a scholarly focus on people’s efforts to feel normal, not in the sense of conforming to dominant ideas of proper personhood but of being left to live one’s life without being seen as a spectacle or subjected to violence. Instead of searching for topics and subjects that seem to “model how to be better, more radical, or more ethical” and that are imagined as pointing to ways of being beyond current oppressive conditions, what she characterizes as the event–potentiality matrix, Adeyemi argues for the importance of considering “the lived materiality of black queer life” in all its complex ordinariness.⁸²

Latinx Studies

Latinx may be the most geopolitically and conceptually dense of the kinds of racialization/minoritization considered in this chapter.⁸³ It encompasses persons from territories that now are part of US domestic space, made so in varied moments of conquest, as well as people who come from other countries in the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking Americas. This category also is quite complex in terms of its relation to whiteness. While all racial identities are crosscut by others (with people, families, and communities that belong to more than one), Latinx emerges at the intersection of racial frameworks derived from Spanish and Portuguese colonialisms as they are transposed into frames largely inherited from English law and colonialism. That conversion (or translation) means that persons who may be white in one imperial formation are not in another – or sometimes are, or at certain times and places are while being not at other times. Moreover, while the African slave trade was a significant part of Spanish Caribbean and Latin American histories, and many people of African descent live in and trace their genealogies to these spaces, Latinx identity often is discussed as if it were not substantially constituted by blackness and Black people. In this way, Latinx less indicates a unified perspective or identity than a shifting array of diasporas, displacements, and identifications in which the complexity of relations across the Americas and Caribbean are at play. The United States has colonized territories and exerted ongoing imperial influence in ways that produce patterns of mobility and border-crossing (both moving across national borders and having such borders shift around you). While highlighting such effects of US intervention and policy, queer and trans frameworks also challenge normalized ideas of national identity organized around heteronormative and cisgendered notions of family, purity, and belonging.

The notion of an encompassing latinidad can indicate continuities of experience and shared goals while also effacing profound disjunctions among those persons and groups collected together through this category. Even at the level of terminology, pato, bugarrón, marícon, loca, cuir, travesti, joto/a, tortillera, and marimacha, among many other terms, all can indicate kinds of nonnormative gender and sexuality. Their meanings and usage, though, vary greatly among different groups, and the ideas and associations they convey also do not necessarily translate easily into English terms/concepts like gay and trans.⁸⁴ In this vein, Cole Rizki uses “the term Latin/x America to mark both Latinx and Latin American contributions and to insist on the entanglements of ‘US’ and ‘Latin America’ as geopolitical categories, underscoring their inherent instabilities” and refusing the idea of an easy distinction between the “Global North” and the “Global South,” especially one in which the former is seen as leading the way for the latter’s development.⁸⁵ Similarly, the editors of “Cuir/Queer Américas” seek to emphasize the “tensions, resonances, and contradictions” at play in seeking to think about relations, identities, and movements across the Americas with regard to gender and sexuality, an aim that they describe as “the contrapunte [contrapuntal] cuir … a process of encuentros [meetings/encounters] and desencuentros [disagreements] that constitutes a forum for decolonizing knowledge.”⁸⁶ In mapping these multiple, dense, and intersecting kinds of imperial relations, queer and trans scholars in Latinx Studies have challenged the ways other scholarly work and political discourses invoke a supposed “Latin culture” to address expressions of gender, sexuality, and collective identity. From this perspective, the oppression of queer and trans people is due to the privileging of supposedly distinctly Latin cultural forms of heteropatriarchal masculinity, while positioning US culture (de facto seen as white and Anglo) as inherently more progressive and inclusive. As Lionel Cantú notes, appeals to a supposedly shared culture as a way of explaining Latinx identities, social patterns, and movements are “reified and monolithic (Latino culture is defined as static regardless of location)” while such culture “is also called on as the explanation of the ‘symptoms’ of social inequalities” among Latinx people and in Latin American and Caribbean places.⁸⁷

Within queer and trans Latinx Studies, attending to hemispheric networks, mobilities, and differences occurs against the background of US imperialism and its increasingly draconian forms of immigration control. As Verónica Mandujano suggests of the most recent waves of undocumented migration to the southern US border, “Immigrants from Central America are fleeing their homelands due to deteriorating living conditions that are the aftermath of years of U.S. intervention in the region,” including a seven-fold increase in asylum seekers largely from El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras.⁸⁸ These refugees include “caravans of LGBTQ people,” which itself is “not a new phenomenon,”⁸⁹ but when they reach the US border, they are subject to processes of racialization, criminalization, and containment that do not recognize their claims to having been oppressed, often subject trans women to misgendering and sexual assault, and even when acknowledging refugees’ claims cast the countries from which they come as backward rather than as destabilized due in many ways to US policies and actions.⁹⁰ This pattern builds on a long history in which migrants from the south are both racialized as a threat to and/or burden on the United States and in which normative conceptions of gender, sexuality, and family serve as the basis for deciding who could be considered to be a healthy potential citizen. Such policy has included barring persons deemed immoral due to their sexuality (expressing “sexual deviation” or “moral turpitude” – a restriction not changed until 1990) and, as of 1965, pegging legal entry for most people to “family reunification,” based on a heteronuclear model of family that some mainstream LGBT organizations have sought to expand to include same-sex and trans couples but in ways that do not undo the broader “normalizing visions of which families, relationships, and individuals ‘deserve’ protection and incorporation.”⁹¹ The undocuqueer movement emerged over the course of the 2010s as a way of challenging the calls to give citizenship status to currently undocumented migrant youth based on various criteria and hierarchies of worthiness, including educational performance and the absence of a record in the criminal punishment system.⁹²

While decades of US imperial intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean and subsequent patterns of migration appear more prominently in public discourse, the US annexation of Mexican and Spanish territories in the nineteenth century continues to shape the lives of Latinx people. About half of Mexico’s territory was seized by the United States in the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), and while the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war promised citizenship to Mexican nationals now in US domestic space, the prominent racialization of them as nonwhite and disregard for their legal geographies and property claims vitiated that promise. This control over once-Mexican space and populations involved managing political, economic, and social relations at multiple scales: not just, in Mary Pat Brady’s terms, “monumental spaces like the border” but extending to “microspatial practices that weave together to form the [everyday] norms of gender and sexuality.”⁹³ The history and continuing implications of the conquest further are effaced in the demonization of “Mexican” people as a foreign intrusion. As Cantú observes, the power the United States exerts that “legitimizes migration across its borders depends on its ability to differentiate the citizen from the foreigner,” a distinction that itself relies on “normative discourses of race/ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality.”⁹⁴ Puerto Rico was claimed by the United States in the Spanish–American War (1898), and while Puerto Ricans are US citizens who can move freely between the island and the continental United States, Puerto Rico officially remains an unincorporated territory subject to direct federal oversight in ways that produce intervention, underdevelopment, and an expansive diaspora, with almost two-thirds of Puerto Ricans living elsewhere in the United States: “Our stay in the United States, permanent or not, is a curiously continuous experience that produces cultural anxiety precisely because of its ambiguities.”⁹⁵ For non-straight and non-cis Puerto Ricans, these effects have been even more intensive, including federally-led efforts to modernize Puerto Rico in the mid-twentieth century (including seeking to discipline Puerto Ricans into dominant Anglo forms of family, gender, and sexuality and attendant Puerto Rican government efforts to push those who were not compliant to leave the island) and twenty-first-century efforts to increase white gay tourism to Puerto Rico while continuing to discriminate against queer and trans Puerto Ricans and to see them as deviant subjects who have failed to embody Puerto Rican values/nationalism.⁹⁶

Latinx Studies scholars highlight how queer and trans mobilities illustrate patterns of diaspora that are influenced by transnational political and economic dynamics, and such scholarly work also shows how queer and trans diasporic networks challenge dominant visions of nationalism. Migration by queer and trans people is not just one-way, nor does it necessarily indicate a desire to “come out” within dominant US notions of sexual and gender identity. As Frances Negrón-Muntaner argues, moving to the United States for some Puerto Ricans may be a response to a nationalist ideal organized around the white heteropatriarchal family: “Where do those expelled from the nation – the poor, the mulattoes and blacks, the sexiles – go?” Forms of Puerto Rican nationalism, though, emerge within the context of a longstanding “subjection to American colonialism” that profoundly influences such self-articulations, especially in response to racializing US narratives of Puerto Rican backwardness.⁹⁷ Yet, the movement into diaspora also took “the nation with it,” expanding the boundaries of Puerto Rican identity. Negrón-Muntaner also emphasizes “Puerto Ricans’ constant and circular migratory patterns,” indicating that Puerto Rican sexual and gender identities on-island and off have been influenced greatly by engagement with discourses and social formations in the continental United States, and vice-versa.⁹⁸ Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes has referred to such movements and reciprocal influence as translocality in which “persons in diverse geographic locations, whether in the country of origin or in the diaspora, … are in complex and constant daily, weekly, or yearly contact, be it through travel, migration, communications, or other forms of exchange,” and he sees what he calls transloca performance (drawing on the association of loca with madness, femininity, gender nonconformity, and deviant sexuality as a way of speaking about “drag and trans embodiments”) as helping “create, challenge, and disorganize” such expansive networks and relations.⁹⁹ Similarly, in his study of immigrant Dominican men who have sex with men, Carlos Ulises Decena describes New York City as “another part of a Dominican world,” with migration as part of “the multiplication of sites for ‘being’ Dominican” in ways that make places like New York less “a final destination” than “another site for relationships that are multisited.”¹⁰⁰

Feminist accounts of Latinx genders and sexualities illustrate how everyday feeling and desire opens up toward other kinds of relationships, networks, and possibilities for collective self-organization that are not defined by inclusion into the nation, whether the United States or that of a “home” country. Juana María Rodríguez draws on the concept of gesture as a way of thinking about how ordinary forms of feeling, fantasy, and pleasure can be seen as the basis for kinds of community-building and political imagination that do not depend on naturalizing dominant notions of family, gender, and sexuality. She suggests that for Latinx people, “Our racialized excess is already read as queer, outside norms of what is useful or productive.” As part of that supposed excess, the habit of gesturing too much serves for Rodríguez as a way of “metaphorically” linking the violation of Anglo-American ideas of order and proper bodily comportment with “activist interventions that push, jam, open, block, and twist social forces”: “As a mode of critique, gesture emphasizes how a cascade of everyday actions is capable of altering political life,” as against the notion that “in order to enter the fold of collectivity, be it familial or revolutionary, we must first be liberated of our sexual deviance and our politically incorrect desires.”¹⁰¹ Considering how rhetorics of national revolution tend to consolidate a heteropatriarchal image of who and what the nation is, and how such rhetorics get taken up in later social and political movements (including Latinx and Chicanx ones), Emma Pérez argues for the importance of a decolonial imaginary that can attend to forms of Latinx collectivity and consciousness that do not replicate “uncompromising nationalist movements in which feminisms are dismissed as bourgeois” and in which “queer voices are scoffed at as a white thing.” She defines such an imaginary as looking for “borderlands” and “interstices” that “introduce the possibility of a postcolonial, postnational consciousness,” addressing the ways people move within, across, and among national spaces even as they seek to transform them (with scholars often drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in doing so, discussed in Chapter 2).¹⁰² Focusing specifically on trans of color political movements and mobilities, micha cárdenas draws on figures from programming – such as algorithms, cutting, and stitching – to consider how ordinary trans embodiment is tied to reimagining relations across the Americas. Cárdenas highlights possibilities for alternative ways of networking persons and groups than those based on nation-state identities and the capitalist and imperial political economies through which they are linked. She notes that “stitching” refers to “the mechanism for holding variables together in lines of code, grouping instructions into cohesive units,” but cárdenas suggests it can be connected to the stitching involved in the gender-affirming remolding of bodily form, thinking of them together as ways of recoding possibilities for personal identity and community formation that open potentials for connection across language difference and national boundaries. As she notes, “Solidarity is an act of stitching.”¹⁰³

Although much work in queer and trans Latinx studies seeks to challenge national ideals and identities that are tied to constructing and policing borders, there are also forms of minority and oppositional nationalism that seek to make visible and counter the absorption of Latinx lands and populations into US national space. In particular, Chicanx nationalism emerged out of movements in the 1960s and 1970s to reconceptualize Mexican American identity and politics in what is now the US Southwest, drawing attention to the violence of the US conquest of the region, emphasizing Mexican American people’s longstanding connection to those lands, and highlighting forms of US racism and extractivism.¹⁰⁴ These efforts coalesced around the idea of the Southwest as the conquered nation of Aztlán, drawing on Aztec (Nahua) terminology and imagery to present Mexican Americans – renamed as Chicanos/as – as indigenous with regard to this national homeland. This vision of semi-national identity, though, has tended to be articulated through patriarchal imagery in ways that also are tied to a heteronormative vision of la familia. As Alicia Gaspar de Alba suggests, “In Aztlán aesthetics, … we could say that familia becomes the primary signifier for place of origin, and place of origin often amalgamates mother’s womb, barrio or neighborhood, and regional landscape – all of which constitute the list and living homeland in the Chicago imagination.”¹⁰⁵ Furthermore, as Catrióna Rueda Esquiel argues, “It’s crucial to recognize that the first articulations of feminist goals and struggles within the Chicano/a movement were marked by a homophobic backlash in which all Chicana feminists were subject to lesbian-baiting, at both personal and professional levels.”¹⁰⁶ Reciprocally, gay men also challenge notions of nationalist continuity and inheritance, given both the “cultural and historical deployments” of “la familia … as an organizing principle” and the equation of being sexually penetrated with a “nonfertile” sexuality that “signals the end of reproduction” as well as the refusal of the “patriarchal authority” that shapes “the naturalized family.”¹⁰⁷ Yet, rather than simply refusing nationalist conceptions of community and related ideas, such as the notion of Aztlán and mestizaje (collective identity as mestizo/a), Chicanx intellectuals and artists often appropriate and reconfigure them. These include recasting homeland in terms of the female/lesbian body, embracing and recasting in queer-friendly ways iconic Mexican and Chicanx figures such as La Virgen de Guadalupe and the Aztec Princess Ixtacihuatl, finding and inventing narratives of queer and trans Chicanx people in the more distant past of what is now the US West, and taking up the nationalist language of brotherhood as signaling both homoerotic connection and alternative forms of kinship to dominant notions of la familia.¹⁰⁸

The question of how to understand Latinx identity within the United States is complicated not only by the differences among the various groups that fall into this category, but the ways those people, populations, and social forms are racialized. Even while Latino/a is officially considered an ethnicity rather than a race, such as in the US census, latinidad partially gains meaning through its distinction from the cultural dominance of whiteness. As Rámon H. Rivera-Servera observes, “Being Latina/o in the United States” involves “negotiating the assumption of criminality not just in terms of citizenship status but in reference to myriad other xenophobic, racist, and classist stereotypes.” Work in queer studies, though, has tended “to subsume all latinidades into one abstract class category,” assuming “a primarily working-class aesthetics as a challenge to the codes and conventions of a homonormative whiteness” in ways that can efface, among other things, how forms of “tropicalization” – stereotypical ideas about “ethnoracial difference” – can circulate among queer Latinx people.¹⁰⁹ There’s a need to attend to how Latinx people are racialized for their “culture, color, language, class, legal status, religion, and sexual practices” while also addressing how latinidad “contains within it the complexities and contradictions of immigration, (post) (neo)colonialism, race, color, legal status, class, nation, and the politics of location.”¹¹⁰ In this vein, one might consider the ways that all Latinx people are affected by forms of “racialized sexuality.” Discussing Chicanx cultural production, Sandra K. Soto indicates the value of “reading like a queer,” by which she means looking for “the unpredictable, polymorphous, and often contradictory representations of the mutual constitution of racialization and sexuality” in ways that are neither about finding and affirming same-sex eroticism nor necessarily looking for the ways Chicanx desires and feelings directly contribute to some clear political project or movement.¹¹¹

José Esteban Muñoz explores these tensions through his development of the concept of brownness. Unlike other colors used to indicate forms of racial identity (such as white, black, red, and yellow), brown does not refer to what is imagined as a clearly defined group; instead, it gestures toward a more amorphous nonwhiteness, which attaches to Latinx people but not them alone. Muñoz suggests, “I want to think about how different kinds of brownness touch but do not fuse. Brownness as a grounded experience, for a brown commons, is often borne out of what we could call a shared sense of harm.” That harm comes from being seen as in some sense failing to enact dominant ideas of decorum, respectability, propriety, and morality that are associated with whiteness – a perceived “inability to act properly within majoritarian scripts and scenarios” by being “over-the-top subjects” and, thereby, “failing to conform to the affective protocols of normative cultural citizenship.” However, even as such brownness may extend across Latinx groups, that shared racialization does not produce sameness or inherent agreement: “To be of the brown commons is not to be in sync, or to be lined up; conflict and disagreement are central to the commons.”¹¹² Francisco J. Galarte builds on this sense of brownness, addressing how “transness and brownness work in proximity to each other”: “representation[s] of brown trans subjects … are framed by sensational and formulaic narratives,” as in public accounts of the murders of trans Latinas, in ways that aim to make “trans bodies, narratives, and embodiments intelligible to nontrans audiences.” For example, he illustrates how the effort by the district attorney supposedly to seek justice for the killing of Gwen Amber Rose Araujo – a seventeen-year-old trans Latina murdered in 2002 in Newark, California – contributed to the national push for hate crimes legislation. However, while the conviction of Araujo’s killers “should signal that the system is more inclusive, the outcome is instead an enhancement of prosecutorial, police, and immigration enforcement in the area.”¹¹³ Instead of pursuing claims to rights and respectability in the face of racialization and criminalization, then, queer and trans work in Latinx studies turns toward those persons, practices, behaviors, and spaces seen as “lewd, obscene, offensive,” an analytic orientation Deborah Vargas calls “lo sucio,” drawing on a popular Latinx term for “dirty, nasty, and filthy.” In this vein, Eddy Francisco Alvarez, Jr., argues for “finding sequins in the rubble,” looking for forms of “aesthetics, worldmaking, and self-fashioning” that occur amid ongoing forms of displacement, police harassment, and personal and collective trauma.¹¹⁴

Asian American Studies

Asian American is perhaps the racial category least often treated as one. Anti-Asian sentiment and policy has been a staple across the longue durée of US history – from the forms of legal exclusion and denial of citizenship in the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, to the animus against Korean and Vietnamese people in the midst and wake of US wars in those countries, Japanese internment during World War II, and the meteoric rise of the figure of the Islamic/Middle Eastern terrorist in the early 2000s. David Eng has characterized Asian Americans as “a group alternately seen as the most foreign, racialized, and unassimilable in the era of exclusion (the myth of the yellow peril) and the most invisible, colorless, and compliant in the post-1965 era (the model minority myth).”¹¹⁵ Despite the ways Asian Americans continue to be treated as foreigners, seen as perpetually alien to the nation, Asian American identity tends not to be understood as marked in powerful ways by institutionalized and ongoing dynamics of racism. As against what Dana Takagi has referred to as a “counting practice,” in which sexuality and gender expression are simply “additive” with regard to matters of Asian American race and class, queer and trans work within Asian American studies not only marks the ways heteronormativity and cisnormativity affect Asian Americans but how notions of nonnormative sexuality and gender are central to the various ways that persons and groups are racialized as Asian.¹¹⁶ In addition to tracing the importance of sexuality and gender as analytical frames through which to conceptualize Asian American identities, histories, political movements, and forms of everyday experience, this scholarship explores how notions of diaspora can in varied ways both contest and reinforce dominant ideas about nationality, belonging, and cultural authenticity.

In their groundbreaking collection Q & A: Queer in Asian America, David Eng and Alice Hom indicate

That process of being rendered deviant dovetails historically with the defining of particular groups as inabsorbably alien and, thus, dangerous to the health and welfare of the nation. Such legal measures include the following: the Page Act (1875), a supposed ban on prostitutes that effectively prevented immigration by most East Asian, particularly Chinese, women; the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) that sought to bar entry of Chinese laborers into the United States; the Gentleman’s Agreement (1907) in which Japan agreed to limit the immigration to the United States of its citizens; a 1907 congressional act that stripped citizenship from US women who married foreign nationals; the creation of the “Asiatic Barred Zone” by congressional act (1917); the Immigration Act of 1924, which eliminated lawful immigration from Asia; the internment of Japanese Americans starting in 1942; and the passage of numerous state laws banning interracial marriage as well as alien land laws that prevented property ownership by those ineligible for naturalization.¹¹⁸ Cumulatively, these policies sought to prevent the formation of nuclear families – denying entry to Asian women, penalizing marriage to white women, denying access to property and inheritance – and to cast Asian people(s) as threats due to the kinds of immorality, perversity, and degeneration attached to their racial difference. They are made abnormal, in Eng’s and Hom’s terms, through attributions of sexual and gender disorder, in which the conditions produced by US policy (such as the presence of bachelor communities) are seen as expressions of their ingrained deviant inclinations and in which such supposed tendencies are portrayed as expressions of their dangerously foreign cultures. In this way, “queerness comes to affect and encompass a much larger Asian American constituency – whatever their sexual identities or practices – whose historically disavowed status as U.S. citizen-subjects under punitive immigration and exclusion laws renders them ‘queer’ as such.”¹¹⁹

While Filipinos have had a different relation to the US state than other “Asians,” it has equally been shaped by racial ideologies of sexual normality. As Martin Joseph Ponce suggests, engagement with the Philippines requires a framework that “begins with the notion not of immigration but of imperialism” as “the point of departure.”¹²⁰ The history of the Philippines has been described as “Three hundred and fifty years in a convent, fifty years in Hollywood.”¹²¹ The United States occupied the Philippines from 1898 to 1946, truncating the Philippine movement to gain independence from Spain (which had held the territory for several centuries) and conducting a genocidal counterinsurgency against the population to establish acquiescence to US imperial rule.¹²² Such governance was presented as a temporary and tutelary, until Filipinos had developed the civilized capacity to govern themselves: “No matter how much evidence was presented before Congress ‘proving’ the Filipinos’ capacity for self-rule, the colonial rulers held the power to recognize or not recognize those appeals.”¹²³ For most of that time, Filipinos were designated as US nationals, not citizens, which did give them the ability to live, attend school, and work in the United States despite existing bans on Asian immigration. They were, in the words of the US Supreme Court, “foreign in a domestic sense,” a status shared with other colonized but not incorporated territories such as Puerto Rico: “Filipino America is a simultaneously inassimilable and assimilable entity in the ‘house’ of the American empire,” in ways that make “Filipinos structurally queer to the United States.”¹²⁴ Moreover, US imperial governance was justified through narratives of Filipino racial perversity: “if colonialism was likened to marriage, even hastened by it, what possible affirmations about sexuality did U.S. colonialism’s ‘white love’ for the Philippines make?”¹²⁵ Such modes of, in Victor Román Mendoza’s terms, colonialnormativity included the policing of Filipino sexual acts through charges of “vagrancy” (“to regulate, on local and national levels, a range of nonnormative, unproductive, and habitually immoral bodies”).¹²⁶ Ongoing US influence in the Philippines, including support for the decades-long dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and continued military intervention since that time in the name of counterterrorism, has helped engender large-scale immigration of Filipinos to the United States, alongside the Philippine government’s investment in promoting labor migration to other countries to support the economy through remittances from abroad.¹²⁷ Thus, as Martin Manalansan observes, “the Filipino gay immigrant arrives in the United States not to begin a process of Americanization but rather to continue and transform the ongoing engagement with America.”¹²⁸ That process confronts the foregrounding of heteronormative and cisnormative conceptions of family in representations of both US and Philippine national identity.

In the wake of the major shift in US immigration law in 1965, which ended national quotas and inaugurated the privileging of professional contributions and family reunion as the framework for lawful immigration, the number of emigrants and refugees from places of US military intervention, such as Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia, increased exponentially. While people of Asian descent continued to be seen as racially and culturally alien, this policy change helped give rise to a transformation in dominant ideas about Asian presence, from a narrative of the United States as likely to be overwhelmed by foreign hordes to one of grateful families finding a better life in the United States – in ways that were contrasted implicitly and explicitly both to African American unrest and illegal Latinx border-crossing. This larger story, though, can mask how various Asian groups were contrasted with each other at different moments (such as flip-flopping assessments of Chinese and Japanese savagery and civility, cast in terms of forms of sexual and gender self-regulation and decorum)¹²⁹ and how the same group could be viewed in very different terms at different times (South Asian men seen as backward, perverse British colonial subjects versus as upstanding, respectable, and entrepreneurial patriarchs).¹³⁰

While conceptions of deviance and dangerousness have attached to varied Asian populations in ways that have shifted historically, the ascription of model minority status seems to promise an entry into normalized citizenship, one that leaves aside the racialized queerings of the past. This desire for national inclusion has animated “the rather static cultural nationalist conception of racial identity around which Asian American studies was originally formed (the assumed but unspoken subject of the field was male, heterosexual, working class, American born, and English speaking).”¹³¹ Eng further suggests the value of reading for the sexual and gender dynamics at play in the “expensive psychological toll” (which he refers to as “internal exile”) exacted by model minority discourse, due to the way it effaces the historical and continuing effects of Asian racialization and anti-Asian racism – forms of “everyday exclusion and disenfranchisement, material and psychic,” that live on despite “changes to immigration law” and the ending of explicit, official forms of anti-Asian exclusion.¹³² Those same ideals, though, also can be (re)cast as Asian cultural values, presenting queer and trans people as inauthentic outsiders within their communities. As Karin Aguilar-San Juan says with regard to Asian American gays and lesbians being out within their families, “Many of us simply cannot do so, at least not openly, because of the intolerance of parents, relatives, or friends who bristle at our ‘lifestyles’”: “It seems that for many Asian Americans home is a place where ‘Asianness’ originates, a place made more compelling by the negation of an Asian American presence elsewhere.”¹³³ Thus, even as notions of home may be shaped by Euro-American discourses and institutions, they often are enacted as expressions of Asian realness in ways that reaffirm their centrality to articulations of Asian American identity. Examining contemporary Asian North American novels (from the United States and Canada), Stephen Hong Sohn highlights how “queerness endangers the next generation of model minorities …, polluting the narrative of progress,” and he traces forms of inscrutable belonging through which queer characters establish networks of connection and support for themselves, which exceed the nuclear family and “are unrecognized by larger cultural and legislative entities.”¹³⁴

Work in queer and trans studies specifically has considered the ways Asianness is positioned outside of dominant conceptions of (white) hetero-masculinity. Addressing the feminization of Asian American men and the prevailing portrayal of gay Asian men as sexually passive and penetrated, almost always by white men, Richard Fung argues in his much-cited article “Looking for My Penis,” “antiracist strategies that fail to subvert the race-gender status quo are of seriously limited value .… Race is a factor in even our most intimate relationships,” and he adds that although “established racial hierarchies may be experienced as oppressive, we are not necessarily moved to scrutinize our own desire,” including the psychological effects of Asian people being understood as “undersexed” and “assigning the Asian the role of bottom.”¹³⁵ As Eng notes, if “the Asian American male is both materially and psychically feminized within the context of a larger US cultural imaginary,” the answer is not seeking access to “the dominant heterosexist and racist structures through which the Asian American male is historically feminized and rendered self-hating in the first place.”¹³⁶

Foregrounding feminization and bottomhood, other scholars have explored the potentials at play within such gendered discourses of Asian deviance. In A View from the Bottom, Tan Hoang Nguyen argues “for a politics of bottomhood that opposes racism and heteronormativity without scapegoating femininity,” one that “accounts for the sense of vulnerability, intimacy, and shame” associated with supposed sexual passivity/receptivity.¹³⁷ He sees in portrayals of feminized submission a model of Asian American subjectivity and relationality not based on an investment in normative masculinist ideas about assertive, autonomous selfhood. As opposed to largely white gay male efforts to rescue bottomhood from its association with femininity, illustrating a “continuing investment in phallic masculinity,” Nguyen seeks to “make space for a plurality of gender expressions” while also opening possibilities for exploring “the ways negative affects – such as shame, loss, grief, and anger – underline our social alliances and political identifications.”¹³⁸ If Asian bottomhood often is associated with the figure of the “rice queen,” white gay men who are attracted to a feminized vision of Asianness, some have suggested “sticky rice” pairings – gay Asian men having erotic/romantic relationships with each other – as the answer to forms of gay racial objectification. Rather than emerging only recently as a rejoinder to white exoticization within queer discourses and dynamics, eroticized Asian–Asian male pairings long have served as a way of negotiating various forms of difference and privilege among Asian American men. Cynthia Wu argues, “the reason this figuration of same-sex contact remains alluring is precisely because the halves of these pairs are not equal even as they seem to be.” Such pairings, then, register the difficulties “for a population that has often struggled with coalition building.”¹³⁹ Even as Asianness may appear as racial sameness, it incorporates a range of groups who have complex, shifting, and often fraught relations among themselves and with each other, such that Asian American as a category is less simply descriptive than itself a political project – “aspirations” toward “collectivity and to a fragile yet crucial coalition of multiple communities.”¹⁴⁰ Sticky rice figurations, then, can point toward such desires for alliance across difference while also registering the difficulties and failures of such aspirations: “It is having these hierarchies in place, no matter how hard we pretend they are not there, that makes the figure of a set of intraracially paired men so attractive as a metaphor.”¹⁴¹

The prominence of considerations of bottomhood and male homoeroticism, though, can leave aside the implications of racialized femininity for Asian American women – cis, lesbian, and trans. As Vivian L. Huang shows, dominant representations of Asian femininity convey the idea of it as an inscrutable surface in which women are ornaments, self-effacing hosts and helpmates, and endlessly available for erotic service. That very sense of inscrutability, though, Huang argues, also serves as a basis for queer and trans aesthetics. Emphasizing relationality, the power of silence, and the dynamism of apparent impassivity, such aesthetics move away from the understanding of “Asian forms” as “spectacular surfaces with mysterious interiors to penetrate or cut into” – “an anti-woman ontology of ‘Asia’ premised on forceful penetration.” Instead, Huang suggests that a queer and trans vision of inscrutability displaces such models of racialized hetero-masculinist dominance with the potentials of surface relations, such as the pleasurable tactility of skin-to-skin contact and the ways “feeling distant” enables layered emotional work that acknowledges forms of difference.¹⁴²

If certain notions of Asianness constellate around feminized passivity, particularly with regard to East Asia, others take shape around images of perverse barbarism associated with the figure of the terrorist. Talking about “the consolidation of new racial populations” targeting “Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians,” which has characterized the post-9/11 “War on Terror,” Jasbir Puar illustrates how the “racialized queernesses” attributed to such populations are differentiated from the performance of home and family by the “good straight ethnic.”¹⁴³ Drawing on much older exoticizing discourses that present sexual and gender deviance as endemic to the Middle East and South Asia (see Chapter 3), a set of ideas often characterized as Orientalism,¹⁴⁴ the depiction of the terrorist relies on racializing ideas of sexual depravity. Such “Orientalist constructions of ‘Muslim sexuality’” depend on creating a kind of racial identity in which “Muslim=Islam=Arab” and in which aberrant modes of gender and desire are thought to give rise to irrational, uncivilized, and uncontrollable impulses, including violence, thereby constructing the terrorist as a social type – “a body almost too perverse to be read as queer.”¹⁴⁵ Such efforts to “produce a coherent idea of the ‘Muslim enemy Other’ from disparate populations of Arabs, Middle Easterners, and South Asians” is part of the ideological and institutional process of legitimizing what Ronak K. Kapadia has characterized as the forever war, the post-9/11 forms of US assault abroad (including expansive use of drone strikes) and systems of racial profiling that build on “a longer history of US imperialism that has been erased or evaded.”¹⁴⁶ The racialized image of the terrorist relies on conceptions of sexual and gender nonnormativity in ways that construct persons and populations as deviant threats to the civilized order ostensibly represented by the United States, thereby licensing various forms of surveillance, invasion, discrimination, and detention by distinguishing terrorist-producing groups from those seen as viable citizens or participants in the rule of law.

Citizenship and national belonging, however, are not the goal for much Asian Americanist scholarship, instead addressing the significance of diasporic networks and identities. Addressing Korean American identity and genealogy, JeeYeun Lee asks, “How do I claim a past that seems both mine and not mine? How do I negotiate a history located in another continent in another tongue?” The notion of diaspora, she suggests, aims to undermine the prevalent narrative of immigration in which “the so-called Third World is an inherently bad and undesirable place to live,” particularly for queer and trans people, “and the United States and the rest of the West are the fount of all opportunity and good.”¹⁴⁷ Instead, a focus on diaspora highlights ongoing relations among places, including the ways (as noted previously) migration to the United States often results from forms of US military, political, and economic intervention and support for authoritarian regimes abroad. As Lu Thuy Nguyen asks specifically with regard to Vietnamese American refugees and their children, “what do we make of the many worlds supposedly ended, whose inhabitants must go on, even when their legacy and memory are of trauma and war debris?”¹⁴⁸ This emphasis on the racialized political economies that help produce dislocation unsettles discourses of “cultural authenticity” among migrants that emphasize their status as “model minorities” committed to “self-help, the sanctity of marriage, and intact families,” in which sexual and gender nonnormativity appear as a culturally inauthentic adoption of white forms of deviance.¹⁴⁹ As Lee observes, “Diasporic queers cannot inscribe themselves into an imagined or real homeland without radically changing its terms, since many forms of nationalism are constructed around assumptions of normative heterosexuality.”¹⁵⁰

Attending to such dislocations and claims to authenticity from a queer critical perspective also involves raising questions about how diasporic relations with the homeland can reinforce sexual and gender norms in both. Gayatri Gopinath observes the value of “foreground[ing] notions of impurity,” drawing attention to how, for example, “Hindu nationalist organizations in India are able to effectively mobilize and harness diasporic longing for authenticity and ‘tradition’ and convert this longing into material linkages between the diaspora and (home) nation,” particularly in terms of “nationalist framings of women’s sexuality.” In response, she suggests that aligning queer and diaspora “recuperates those desires, practices, and subjectivities that are rendered impossible and unimaginable within conventional diasporic and nationalist imaginaries.”¹⁵¹ She further observes that “the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora make apparent how all spaces of ‘home’ and dwelling are shot through with contradictions and fissures, there is … no return to an unsullied past, no secure space of safety.”¹⁵² From that point of view, diaspora is not a dyad – the abandoned “home” country and the new one in which full inclusion is sought – but a web of shifting inhabitances and movements.¹⁵³ Eng-Beng Lim argues for “an inter-Asian diasporic framework that produces new models of cross-cultural understanding about queer sexuality” that also “imagine alternative ways of conceptualizing traditions, affiliations, kinship, genealogies, and citizenship,” moving away from defining “transnational Asian queerness [and transness] … in contradistinction to Western epistemic categories.” Referring to this kind of analysis as glocalqueering, connecting the global and local in ways not necessarily routed through national identities and nationalist ideologies, Lim suggests that it can “shift the discourse from one about complicity, resistance, or subversion to one about comparativity, lateral relationality, and coalition,” and within this framework, “the United States is a nodal point rather than the center of the world.”¹⁵⁴ In this vein, Gopinath offers “a queer regional imaginary” as an alternative to one fixated on the scale of the nation-state, offering “the possibility of tracing lines of connection and commonality” in a “South-South relationality” – one that is not the same as “a metronormative ‘global gay’ imaginary” in which there is a singular, US-centric vision of modern sexual identity.¹⁵⁵

The sexual and gendered subjectivities and sensibilities of such networks, however, do not necessarily translate well into Euro-American categories, and such differences, scholars argue, cannot be understood in terms of a developmental timeline – as simply on the way to taking proper shape as LGBT identity. Discussing how forms of queer desire circulate transnationally, particularly in the reception of Bollywood films, Gopinath suggests that “looking for ‘lesbians’ in Bollywood … would falsely presume that queer representation … rests on the same logic of visibility as do dominant Euro-American constructions”; instead, it less involves “characters who are explicitly marked as sexual or gender deviants” than moments and scenes that “exploit the slippages between homosociality and homoeroticism that occur in representations of gender-segregated spaces.”¹⁵⁶ In his study of “Filipino immigrant gay men,” Martin F. Manalansan highlights the discrepancy between bakla and gay: “Bakla is the Tagalog term that encompasses homosexuality, [being intersex], cross-dressing, and effeminacy.” This concept and its modes of social relation differ notably from dominant notions of gayness in being marked definitionally by a pronounced sense of gender nonnormativity, not conforming to a vision of “coming out” (an idea “premised on the idea of a truer inner self”), and being shaped by a collective performative ethos of “transformation” (rather than as revealing an aspect of individual selfhood).¹⁵⁷ As these examples suggest, attending to the complexities of diaspora entails an engagement with modes of pleasure, identity, and gender expression that neither can be measured against a Euro-American standard nor can be viewed as expressive of a kind of cultural essence from the supposed home country.

Conclusion

Queer of color and Indigenous critique refuses the lure of recognition and inclusion as upstanding, respectable citizens. Instead, such work addresses the complex and multifaceted subjectivities, kinds of embodiment, identifications and forms of belonging, placemaking, and mobilities generated by ongoing histories of racialization, imperialism, and colonial occupation. This work helps map out the ways the United States is both itself a colonial formation (through its status as a settler-state and its expansions and annexations) and is transected by geographies of diaspora, imperial investment and intervention, and networks of capital. In doing do, these scholars also show how sexuality and gender are inextricable from racial differentiation, hierarchy, regulation, and forms of everyday felt experience. As Kyla Wazana Tompkins notes, queer of color work has argued that “the state, the nation, and citizenship” are “articulated as universals that are normatively heterosexual and white, both producing and obscuring populations of color as always and already non-heteronormative and sexually deviant,” and for such scholarship “the nation-state emerges as more of a problem than as a site for solutions.”¹⁵⁸ Although there may be overlaps among forms of racialization, those forms are not equivalent, and different kinds of racist conceptions attach to different populations. While not presenting racial groups as hermetically sealed off from each other, queer and trans scholarship grapples with these differences, their effects on how varied groups are interpellated within dominant ideologies of sexuality and gender, and the diverse ways that such groups may contest those ideologies and envision possibilities for freedom, justice, and self-determination. Moreover, work in queer and trans studies illustrates the range of conceptual and cultural frames groups have for naming the matrix of desire, pleasure, gender expression, and social belonging, as well as the ways such frames do and don’t transit to other places and people(s). In these ways, Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American studies draw on allied sets of questions, concerns, and methodologies but remain distinct in important ways that reflect complex and multifaceted ongoing histories of racialization and empire.