Unruly Imaginaries: The Relational Lives of Queer and Trans Migrants

Unruly Imaginaries: The Relational Lives of Queer and Trans Migrants, focuses on the lives of subjects who are rendered impossible within national imaginaries: LGBTQ migrants. I argue that while LGBTQ migrants do not escape the frameworks of the nation-state, they are nevertheless not bound to it. Through textual analysis of cultural productions by and about LGBTQ migrants, I demonstrate how they establish relational bonds as a tool for survival. As I suggest, relationality demands a careful engagement with difference; thus, women of color feminism and queer of color critique guide my analysis of these texts. My dissertation engages the coming together of trans women and gay men at the U.S.-Mexico border through the embodiment of femininity in the 2017 Trans Gay Caravan; the flexible subject positions and identity practices of undocuqueer migrants in film and digital media; the use of sitios y lenguas (spaces and discourses) by migrant and diasporic lesbians in film that enable them to reclaim their differences on their own terms; the strategic use of material object relations to express an impossible subject position of non-belonging; and finally, I analyze how a queer migrant performer reconceptualizes dominant notions of personhood by challenging nation-state documents. Throughout my dissertation, I ask: What can we learn about nation-state formations from the vantage point of LGBTQ migrants? What are the possibilities of creating sites of subversion within the regulatory structures of the nation-state? And how can power emerge from the very subjects who are rendered impossible in the national imaginary? It is the impossible and fabulous lives of LGBTQ migrants that construct new subject positions from which egalitarian social relations are built across differences. Most importantly, Unruly Imaginaries contends that relationality offers a blueprint for LGBTQ migrants to survive and thrive in their everyday lives