The Homoerotics of Immigration Control
This essay begins with a twelve-year old hiss. Some twelve years
ago, I was in a UC Berkeley audience listening to Anthropologist Leo
Chavez discuss the images of immigration that had appeared on the covers
of major news magazines over the previous thirty years.[1] The images
he presented were tacky but provocative. Not surprisingly, the covers
confirmed that in the popular press the narrative of immigration
circulated in an unrelenting celebratory-threat loop: "Isn't America
terrifically welcoming?" bounced to "The nation is under siege!"
But then, another aspect of those images struck me and I leaned over
to a friend and whispered, "This stuff is so homoerotic." "No it
is not." She hissed back, "It's a heterosexual rape fantasy." A bit
chastened, I thought, "Of course. Nation as woman. Men as protectors
against the penetrative, rapacious impulses of other men."[2] But, I
later wondered, as I reconsidered the images that had struck me: a man
climbing through what might be an anus made from the U.S. flag? Police
groping or maybe searching men while the image itself draws our
attention to the tight butts and crotches of the supposed "aliens."[3]
Did the one interpretation really cancel the other out?
Copyright 1979 U.S. News & World Report, L.P. Reprinted with permission.
Copyright Business Week. Reprinted with permission.
What was not in question for either of us was whether or not
sexuality was part of the story. Mexicans have always had a curiously
eroticized role in the U.S. popular imaginary. From the 19th century
forward, the sex life of Mexicans, or rather white men's fantasy of it,
has subtended expansionist efforts.[4] Certainly, after 1848, a
concerted effort to feminize Mexican men in order to hypermasculinize
white men and boys found its way into nearly every fictional account
that involved Mexico. Over the course of the twentieth century this
feminized stereotype gave way in part to that of the drug addled rapist
and the domineering, macho cad.[5]
"Gay," however, could not be said to
constitute a large percentage of stereotypes proffered about Mexican men
in the U.S. press. So I remained puzzled by these insinuations of
homoeroticism.
I subsequently tangled with what felt like a half-baked insight and
the largely unanswered question: How might a homophobic response to
homoerotic portrayals of Mexican men help to structure anti-immigrant
hysteria? And could an analysis of anti-immigrant hysteria in concert
with homophobia help us understand the ongoing violence in the
Southwestern U.S.? It is obviously not enough to assert that these
images are simply or merely suggestive of a subtle play with a
homoerotics that participates in the grand discourse of othering. Not
really interested in the realm of analogy (i.e., othered queers are,
like "aliens", strangers to the normative), I first approached the
question by considering the work of the border—analyzing it as an
abjection machine and as a state-sponsored aesthetic project, and as a
practice, not a static, violent, hybrid place, or a refulgent metaphor
but rather as a network of regulatory mechanisms and disciplinary
triggers.[6]
Significant work on immigration and sexuality has been produced since
that confounding hiss.[7]
Eithne Luibhéid, for example, offered one of
the first monographs to consider how the U.S. uses sexuality to regulate
immigration and reproduce sexual categories. Other crucial studies
began to unpack the interanimating work of sexuality and citizenship
showing, as Jacqui Alexander would insist, that "heterosexuality is at
once necessary to the state's ability to constitute and image itself,
while simultaneously marking the site of its own instability."[8] More
recently Alexander has called for further study of the state's
investments in sexuality so that we might understand the "ideological
traffic between and among formations that are otherwise positioned as
dissimilar."[9]
I hope to take up that challenge in an effort not simply
to understand the stakes of heterosexualizing citizenship, but also to
see how those stakes are immersed in a nativist homophobia that lays
siege to the nation and enables the slow-motion massacre of migrants.
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