Similarly, Mary Pat Brady calls attention to the homoerotic desires and heteronormative anxieties shaping U.S. public attitudes towards “illegal” immigration. In “The Homoerotics of Immigration Control,” Brady argues that homophobic responses to unacknowledged homoerotic fantasies of immigrant men and non-normative forms of social belonging and enjoyment highlighted by the gay rights movement helped to structure contemporary anti-immigrant hysteria and the new Nativism. Brady compellingly shows how the homophobic panic sparked by queer mobilization around AB101, a bill extending protection of gays and lesbians against discrimination on the job, came to be channeled into widespread support for the anti-immigrant referendum, Proposition 187. As she writes, “What tied 101 and 187 together was in part the presumed assumption that both ‘the gay agenda’ and the ‘immigrant agenda’ took aim at the patriarchal white family, threatening to expose its homoerotic implications on the one hand, its vulnerability to multiple forms of desires, and on the other, its presumed status as a privileged, racialized site of consumption and protected locale for national reproduction.”
Brady demonstrates that the dovetailing of anti-gay rights and anti-immigrant sentiments of the 1990s into the new Nativist nationalism of the contemporary moment rested on a deep public investment in, and anxiety about, the regulation and promotion of a heteropatriarchal white family structure as the proper site of consumption and reproduction.1 Public anxiety about the family and its right to social service and resources also depended on the broad economic and social changes brought about by the financialization and globalization of the U.S. economy and its debilitating effects on the single-wage “nuclear family.” Such anxiety promotes the nation as a sanctified domestic space (homeland as property) for heteronormative Anglo-patriarchal enjoyment.
Brady argues that President Clinton marshaled these national anxieties into new programs for welfare reform and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, shifting the focus of debate away from the “rights” immigrants deserved and/or the “burdens” they caused and placing a new emphasis on their “illegality.” This “new grid of intelligibility where legality became the central hermeneutic” is fundamental to the intensified criminalization of immigrants, which we’ve seen, and to the sheer indifference that meets what Brady calls “the slow-motion massacre of immigrants,” which has been enabled by the new Nativism and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. It is this legal hermeneutic that allows the recontextualization of the 3,000 plus deaths that have occurred on the border since its militarization in 1994 as “a kind of passive capital punishment for an immigrant’s willingness to skirt entry regulations,” making any sympathy for these losses of life out of bounds. What Brady compellingly highlights in her analysis are the ways in which racialization and sexualization are productive of each other and, further, constitutive of immigrant “illegality,” a limit-category that places affective borders on human belonging and feeling.
Nadine Naber also attends to racial, sexual and gendered processes of affective containment in the policing of Arab/Muslim immigrants in the aftermath of 9/11. In “‘Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!’ Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism, and the Intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11,” Naber describes what she calls the “emotive incarceration” or circumscription of emotions, identities and behaviors that Arab immigrants and Arab Americans experienced as a result of federal government, media and popular discourses on terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, and the forms of racist harassment directed against them as “enemies” of the nation. Such discourses attributed the malleable and incoherent category of “Arab-Middle Eastern-Muslim” immigrant men with an inherent potential for violence and terrorism, thus inciting a whole range of judicial, legislative, administrative measures and policies that targeted non-citizens from Muslim-majority countries as well as naturalized U.S. citizens from Muslim-majority countries. Hate crimes and harassment disproportionately targeted a whole range of persons on the basis of bodily features perceived as signifiers of an inherent spiritual inheritance that constituted a moral, cultural, civilizational, as well as political-military threat to the “American” nation. Situated in the context of the war against terrorism and the inordinate concern with national “security” this war fosters, Naber’s essay draws attention to the way racist, sexist and homophobic discourses that conflate Islam, Arabs, and terrorism into an amorphous and malleable category of civilizational threat to liberal democracy, constitute an entire semiotics undergirding and guiding the targeting of immigrants and non-immigrants.
Miriam Ticktin, Paola Bacchetta and Ruth Marshall discuss the role of anti-Islamic discourses as well as many of the above issues comprising the “immigration crisis” as they play out in the context of France and Côte d’Ivoire, providing another lens for understanding this urgent question and its global dimensions. In “A Transnational Conversation on Colonialism, Immigration, Violence and Sovereignty,” Ticktin, Bacchetta and Marshall all observe the revival of discourses of colonialism in political discourses in France today, and in particular the revival of a colonial notion of world history that is also shared by French postcolonies in Africa, from where much of immigration to France comes. Bacchetta notes how public discussions about Islam and immigrant communities become framed through a colonial grid of intelligibility, shaping anti-immigrant laws and attitudes (such as the 2004 law banning the Islamic headscarf in schools and the racist representations of the 2005 revolts in suburban slums) even as, as Ticktin observes, a historical amnesia that allows current forms of discrimination against immigrants and their children to be disconnected from colonialism. And Marshall argues that the radical pro-regime youth, militias and student organizations in Côte d’Ivoire defend neo-nativist or ethno-nationalist conceptions of citizenship that are precisely about struggling against colonial visions of history, even as they themselves reproduce the terms of that history. All three underscore the continuing legacies of colonialism in debates about immigration today, both in France and in its African postcolonies, demonstrating that what appear to be national problems must in fact be understood within a global context, irrevocably shaped by long-standing relations between metropolis and periphery, or between the global North and the global South. In this view, the seemingly contradistinctive “cultures” that now appear to find themselves inevitably, even fatally (civilizationally) opposed to each other, are the products of conjoined, mutually-determined histories, bound as well as separated by the violence of those relations.
Ticktin and Bacchetta discuss the ways in which this violence comes to be troped in dominant narratives of immigrant subjects in highly gendered ways. Echoing Naber’s ethnographic observations in the U.S., they point out how, within the colonial grid of intelligibility everywhere operative in French public life, Muslim women must take on the role of victims of a violence attributed to Islam itself while barbaric Muslim men take on the role of the agents of such violence. Indeed, despite the fact that people of color in France are the objects of a whole range of racist forms of violence, public discourses about the violent acts of immigrant people of color (in particular men of color, and especially Muslim men) continue to hold sway, reinforcing dominant notions of their being subjects-out-of-control, as State and media narratives of the 2005 riots attest (for which Ticktin and Bacchetta provide alternative accounts). At the same time, Marshall observes that while such acts of violence within the metropolis are assimilated into categories of delinquency (and, as we’ve seen, criminality), the violence of war, as it is coded in Côte d’Ivoire as well as in other places in the periphery, is beginning to be understood as a legitimate exercise of sovereign power, of the individual self as much as, if not more than, of the collective. This modality of power (“to dominate others, to seize what one wants to seize”), which is privileged in the social imaginary by the prevalence of a form of government “in which extraction, unproductive expenditure, predation, the extravagance and excess of violence are central,” Marshall argues, is implicated in redefinitions of manhood that entail the violent treatment of women as objects and signs of masculine power.
In their discussion, Ticktin, Marshall and Bacchetta connect gendered and racialized coding of violence as a modality of expression and power to both the emergence of new forms of religion and to global problems of labor. In contrast to dominant discourses about the relation between religion and violence, Marshall notes how both neo-nativist discourses against local immigration within Côte d’Ivoire as well as in Africa more generally, and Islamic reformism and Pentacolism, which have emerged throughout the continent, are modes of engaging with questions of origins, selfhood and belonging in a context of profound global unsettlement and mobility. Ticktin situates these connections between religion and violence in the context of the astronomical growth of unemployed urban slum populations as a consequence of global neoliberalism. While Marshall suggests that the territorialization of citizenship and fixing of identity and belonging in specific spaces, land and heritage, is tied precisely to the global crisis of labor and labor mobility, Bacchetta remarks on the negative coding of this mobility of postcolonial labor in the French context in terms of illicit trade and contaminating flows (drugs, trafficking)—constructions we also witness in the U.S.
What this discussion highlights for us are the ways in which global problems come to be articulated and coded through conflicting narratives about “immigration” and nationhood. Structured by gender, race, and sexuality, such narratives shape the actions of individuals as well as states, and the forms of conflicts we now witness emerging everywhere. While West African youth commit “immigration-suicide,” as Marshall says they call it, an act of escape from the dead-end conditions they face at home that is also conceived as a form of possible resurrection or miracle, and, as Baccheta points out, their forms of revolt in the metropolis are acts of survival and profound affirmations of the desire to live, the French and U.S. governments frame their own policies and measures toward immigrants in unacknowledged secular-Christian and Christian fundamentalist ways. They thus produce for their societies normative and therefore acceptable forms of Islam compatible with normative forms of selfhood, belonging and being in the world. These contradictions between dominant and subordinate ways of engaging with crises and problems whose origins and sources are global rather than local spell grave differences for the fates of peoples. Constructed through social differences of race, gender, sexuality and nationality, the borders on belonging erected to contain these contradictions create “life zones” where some may thrive, and “death zones” where others are left to perish. And yet, even as these borders continue to be reified, hardened, and fixed in both the metropolis and the periphery, the irony and the hope is that transnational connectivities continue to define the current moment—both the transnational connectivities of states and private corporations, and the transnational connectivities of global culture and social movements—attesting to the powerful operation of social imaginaries that are increasingly global and transnational.
- As George Lipsitz shows, the coding of the homeland and property associated with the American way of life (and the space of the family) as white was accomplished by means of U.S. government support of suburban development after World War II (in response to Black migration into urban centers and increased migration from Mexico and Latin America). George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Cited in Paula Ioanide, “American Cultural Fantasies: Gendered Racism and Ethical Witnessing in the Post-Civil Rights Era.” [↩]
