#Migration: The COMPAS Anthology » Sexuality and Migration Comments Feed alternate alternate -- * [logo.png] Sexuality and Migration Towards Emotion -- Eithne Luibhéid How are sexuality and migration shaped and reshaped by one another? Varied definitions of sexuality have made this a challenging question to answer. Until recently, sexuality was frequently conflated with gender, or else addressed under rubrics like crime, deviance, morality, or disease (Manalansan, 2006). Moreover, sexuality was commonly understood as a private matter and irrelevant to the ‘big’ questions about migration. Studies of sexuality were often framed around the modernist belief that everyone has an individual sexual identity – even though this belief is not applicable to other times and places. -- Queer theory, which emerged in the early 1990s, challenged these approaches and opened up new possibilities for thinking about the connections between sexuality and migration. Refusing essentialist and transhistorical constructs of sexual identities, queer theory instead explores the production of sexual subjectivities, how distinctions between normal and abnormal get created, and the relations of domination and subordination involved. It addresses sexuality as a regime of power that thoroughly shapes families, communities, state institutions, and economies; and it underscores that sexual norms, -- extraterritorial locations. In this context, exploring connections between sexuality and migration often begins with the recognition that today’s global order emerged through colonial processes. According to Ann Laura Stoler (2002), -- left to chance,’ and migration possibilities were organized accordingly (Stoler, 2002). With the shift to a world of nation states that supposedly controlled their own borders, sexuality retained its importance in creating and naturalizing inequalities, this time through constructs of nation, citizenry, social ordering, and economy – and enforced by expanding state migration controls. These processes variously shaped migration. For instance, sexuality has impelled migration by individuals such as: lesbians, gay men, and unmarried pregnant women seeking to avoid discrimination or -- women and men using marriage as a strategy for legal migration; those going abroad to sell sex; individuals seeking HIV/AIDS treatment; sex tourists; and others. Sexuality also shapes people’s access to social networks that provide the information, resources, and contacts that enable migration. Nation states, in turn, often decide whether to admit -- instance, legal admission often depends on fitting into normative definitions of family, kinship or marriage, or claiming fear of persecution that takes sexualized form or is based on sexuality. Conversely, migrants are often denied legal status when they cannot fit into normative definitions of family, or are believed to present sexual -- generation (especially daughters); experiences of migrant sex workers; the politics of migrants’ childbearing; migration and HIV/AIDS; sexuality, migration and asylum claims; experiences of transnational intimacies and families; and to some extent, the lives of migrant gay men and transgender people (lesbians have received little attention). -- Given that both migration and sexual controls are intimately tied to histories of colonialism, global capitalism, and slavery, scholars have posed challenging questions about interconnections among sexuality, migration, and struggles to end inequalities. Some explore how the criminalization of unauthorized migrants, the rise of the prison -- populations to exploitation, violence, and shortened lives. Others problematize how global human rights discourses used in asylum cases, including those involving sexuality, may at once reinscribe colonial, racial and gender inequalities but nonetheless present opportunities for change. These and other analyses ask us to question critically how the connections between sexuality and migration may reinforce, or offer opportunities to transform, multiple inequalities at different scales. References Manalansan M. F. (2006) ‘Queer Intersections: Sexuality and Gender in Migration Studies’, International Migration Review 40(1): 224-249.