Full Description
Contrasting works by queer Chicano writers against the legal landscape of sexuality and migration to interrogate the "lawful fiction" that denies queer migrants citizenship and community.
Activists for immigrants and queer people under assault by US authorities focus overwhelmingly on protections presumed to be afforded by citizenship through narratives that have rarely had a place for queer immigrants, who have consistently faced special obstacles to legal entry and citizenship that only recently are being applied more widely. Queer in a Legal Sense studies literary works by gay Chicanx writers alongside instruments of law, showing through this juxtaposition how racialized queer people have been imagined as nonviable from the standpoint of citizenship. In stories by John Rechy, Arturo Islas, Rigoberto GonzÁlez, Michael Nava, and Jaime Cortez, JosÉ de la Garza Valenzuela finds what has gone missing in the migrant movement's pursuit of gendered avenues to civic participation. Further, these works illuminate the production of fictions in canons of law, like those announced by the Florida legislature's "Purple Pamphlet" and by the US Supreme Court in Boutilier v. INS and Bowers v. Hardwick. Queer in a Legal Sense argues that, through selective ommissions and inclusions, legal fictions place queerness outside the boundaries of citizenship and powerfully undermine queer representation in pro-migrant advocacy.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Author's Note
Introduction: Habeas Chicanx Corpus
Chapter 1. "(A Separate Issue)": Identification in the Absence of Legal Address in John Rechy's City of Night
Chapter 2. Not Fit to Be Named Among Citizens: Unwarranted Queer Criminality in Bowers v. Hardwick and Michael Nava's The Death of Friends
Chapter 3. Queer in a Legal Sense: Narrative Presence in Arturo Islas's The Rain God
Chapter 4. Dissident Residence: Undocumented Disruptions in Rigoberto GonzÁlez's Crossing Vines
Chapter 5. (Un)Documenting Queer Migrant History: Jaime Cortez's Graphic Authorizations
Conclusion. Con Pluma: Citizen on Paper
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
