UndocuQueer Disidentifications: “Being undocumented and gay, just like death, means having to navigate between two worlds”

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2017-06This thesis seeks to center undocumented queer migrant leaders’ use of care to reframe the state as heterogeneous and to conceptualize how this engagement with care creates worlds for these actors. Geographers have conducted research that examines sexuality and racialization; however, work explicitly examining UndocuQueers within the discipline remains nearly nonexistent. This article presents a study of how people have engaged in caring for themselves, others, and communities primarily in Seattle, highlighting interactions with, away from, and to the periphery of state processes and flows. UndocuQueers deploy care to navigate spatial configurations of geopolitical and cultural exclusion. This thesis grounds literature around queer people of color critique, black geographies, and feminist geopolitics to nuance how we think about identity, the state, and producing space. In the first section, I draw on UndocuQueers’ narratives of what identifying as UndocuQueer means to establish how they perceive their relation to the world around them. The following section proposes that a centering of UndocuQueer experiences allows a reframing of state apparatuses as heterogeneous, moving, and partial. I conclude that the vulnerability UndocuQueers experience does not preempt them from being agents in the production of social, political, and spatial practices; rather, they are constantly engaged in a process of world-making that is caring, expansive, and relational