[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: GLQ Call for Proposals: Special Issue on Queer/Migration

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: Eithne Luibhéid <eithne@email.arizona.edu>

GLQ Call for Proposals: A Special Issue on Queer/Migration

The centrality of sexual and migration control regimes to contemporary 
practices
of empire, war, and the security state in the context of globalization and
neo-liberalism has been individually theorized from varied perspectives. But
what are the connections, overlaps, and points of articulation between both
sexuality and migration regimes within these larger frameworks? This special
issue of GLQ seeks to address these questions, and in the process to 
extend the
growing interdisciplinary body of scholarship that critically examines the
interface between queer and migration theories.

Historically, state-controlled immigration regimes emerged as a tool of
nation-building in the context of empire. Practices of identification,
surveillance, detention and expulsion, which differentially produced and 
policed
or expelled migrant subjects, developed accordingly. Sexual norms have 
always
been central to these practices, and remain so today in ways that demand
interrogation. In particular, increasing reliance on information
technology-based surveillance including biometrics (with which individuals
must "voluntarily" cooperate in accordance with neo-liberal logics of 
subject
formation and governance), continued militarization, and the growing
prison-industrial complex extend but rework earlier practices of sexual
surveillance, which were thoroughly imbricated with racial, gender, 
colonial,
and class logics at different scales. Moreover, these re-workings of border
control are intimately connected to, draw on, and reinforce the policing of
"domestic" populations in relation to empire, patriotic nationalism,
post-industrial capitalism and enduring warfare. In these scattered 
sites and
assemblages through which borders are continually reproduced, sexuality 
serves
as a double mechanism through which some populations become refashioned into
"proper" self-governing subjects for the state, while others are 
?differentially
excluded? (Espiritu), enduringly subalternized, or expelled.

Through a distinctly queer feminist of color genealogy, Borderlands 
Studies has
emerged as a vibrant field of study engaged in conversation with migration
theories as well as contemporary social justice questions. Among other
contributions, Borderlands Studies challenges concepts that are framed by
trajectories of evolutionary development within the boundaries of the
nation-state and instead pays attention to contradiction, relationality, and
transnational and transcultural dynamics, and makes efforts to undo 
binaries,
theorize liminal positions, resituate the border as a contact zone, connect
material conditions to subject formation processes, and rethink 
immigrant agency
and resistance?while always emphasizing multiple, interlocking equalities at
various scales. Emma Pérez has called for the further development of 
Borderlands
Studies within a decolonial queer framework.

The questions raised by Borderlands Studies and issues of immigration 
control
are powerful examples of the larger problem of governing mobility which
confronts the modern nation-state. Empire, capitalism, and liberalism
historically require not simply to pre-empt or prevent mobility by certain
individuals or populations, but equally, to foster varied forms of 
"appropriate"
mobility by others. Thus, the interface between queers and migration must be
considered at this larger scale, too, in relation to multiple modes of 
mobility
that the nation-state and capital seek to foster/prevent, including 
immigration,
tourism, business travel, and war-making. In particular, where and how 
sexuality
figures into fostering/preventing multiple forms of mobility "and how this
articulates racial, heteropatriarchal, bourgeois, and imperial logics" 
demands
consideration both from a queer perspective and in relation to queer
populations. The extent to which queers may become not only 
subalternized but
also complicitous with dominant relations of rule, through sanctioned 
mobility,
must also be addressed.

These histories are being extended and reworked in the present, in the 
context
of mutating practices of empire; the so-called "war on terror"; the 
nation-state
emphasis on security with associated practices of surveillance, 
detention and
abrogation of the law; and neo-liberal economic and cultural practices, 
policies
and forms of subject making.

Thus, this special issue seeks contributions that address the conjunctions,
intersections and articulations between sexual and migration control 
regimes, as
these participate in and are transformed by the larger context. The editor
particularly seeks essays that address queerness not solely in relation to
sexuality, but rather, in terms of how sexuality at once structures and is
restructured by race, gender, culture, class, and colonial logics. 
Essays that
consider possibilities of resistance, challenge and transformation are also
particularly welcomed.

The editor invites proposals that address such questions as:

?	What are the points of conjunction, articulation, and contradiction
between the regulation of sexuality and the regulation of migration by the
state and by capital, historically and at present (including in the context
of the so-called war on terror, practices of empire, patriotic nationalism,
and global capitalism)? What possibilities for contestation do these
present? How can queerness (as identity, subjectivity, practice, and/or
politics) disrupt or transform these regimes of governance?

?	How do strategies, technologies, knowledge formations, and/or
assemblages that are deployed to monitor both sexuality and migration extend
but rework earlier institutional arrangements and intellectual genealogies,
and how are these being negotiated or contested?

?	How are queer migrants surviving and transforming regimes of state,
capital, family, and community governance? How are queer migrants
negotiating and building relationships with established queer, racial,
gender, and/or cultural communities and organizations, and with what
results?

?	How should we document and theorize ?queer immigrant acts? (Roman),
identities, cultural performances, and politics within and across multiple
borders?

?	How do regimes of governance designed to foster heteronormativity
intersect with the demand for migrant assimilation? How are these being
refashioned by, while at the same time serving as a crucial support for,
dominant state, neo-liberal, and imperial policies and practices? How do
migrant communities variously negotiate this intersection (including through
complicity, resistance, resituating the demands to a transnational or
diasporic sphere, and/or hybrid/mixed strategies, as shown by histories of
?ethnic? beauty pagents and struggles for publicly funded housing to shore
up domesticity)?

?	What are the connections between state regimes for governing
sexuality, migration, and potential terrorism? What strategies are
developing among queers of color, migrant queers, and others for surviving
and challenging these connections?

?	How does racialized heterosexuality, which has typically been
understood as representing the apex of development, articulate with
teleologies of ?civilization? that are driving empire and war?and how does
this play out in relation to both fostering and preventing certain kinds of
mobility?

?	How have neo-liberalism, war, and empire transformed the terrain of
queer politics, and where and how do queer migrants fit in?

?	When and how are immigration, transnationalism, and/or disapora
frameworks most useful in the study of queer histories, theories, politics,
and cultures? In what ways do these frameworks, as well as the lived
histories of migrant queers, necessitate a transformation of foundational
concepts, methodologies, assumptions, and standards of evaluation in
queer/sexuality studies?

?	Equally, how does centering queer histories, cultures, politics,
practices and labor necessitate revision to standard immigration,
transnationalism, and/or disapora scholarship?

?	In what ways can Borderlands Studies be further queered, and for
what purposes should this occur?

?	How are "family values" deployed to structure both sexuality and
migration, and to foster hegemonic political projects and coalitions, 
and how
can and do queers, including queer migrants, challenge, resituate, 
transform,
and/or become abjected by these regimes?

Proposals that address histories and politics in locations other than the
United States are particularly welcomed.

Submission of Proposals.

Abstracts for proposed articles should be submitted by May 31, 2006, at the
latest. Abstracts should be 500-700 words, and state clearly the 
questions that
will be examined and the materials on which the analysis will be based. 
Please
indicate how the proposed paper relates to the issues listed above. 
Please also
send a short CV (2 pages). Notification of acceptance will be sent by 
June 30,
2006, and final articles must be ready for submission to the editor by 
December
1, 2006. This special issue is scheduled to be published as Vol. 14, 
Nos. 2/3,
of GLQ.

Send materials to: Eithne Luibhéid, c/o LGBT Studies, 1731 East 2nd Street,
Box 210014, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0014, USA. Email
eithne@email.arizona.edu.

Eithne Luibhéid
<eithne@email.arizona.edu>