Similarly, the heterosexual rape fantasy implicit to the images of threatening men seeking entry to a nation gendered female reinscribes the importance of homosociality to national management. If, as Craig Smith argues, homosocial bonding establishes “domination and structures masculinity,” then it is a fairly useful tool for nation-building. Perhaps for this reason men populate the majority of images of migrants in the popular press. Women are much less likely to be represented as actually crossing, entering, penetrating, borders. When shown, women are more often depicted as abjected mothers. But of course the homosociality suggested here is an uneven one—fractured by race and inequality.
The object of the rape fantasy is important here as well. The nation as woman is also the family as homeland and property. While it might be easy to understand that queer desire offers alternative venues for desire, intimacy, and consumption, and thereby poses a challenge to the normative heterosexual family structure, it is less easy to see why immigrants might be seen to threaten that structure—or why they should be narrated as such. As Calavita points out, immigrants came to be the symbolic release valve for a political economy that no longer needed the nuclear family structure with its patriarchal single-bread winner. They took the blame for policies that had rendered vulnerable every type of household but the wealthiest.
It doesn’t actually matter to the nativist agenda then how family-friendly Latinos “really are” or claim to be. Jacqui Alexander’s insights are helpful here. She points out that “family values” campaigns signal that the “ideological dominance of heterosexuality” is endangered. 1 Homophobia and nativism come together around “family values” and reveal the ongoing project of the state to manage sexuality, to educate desire and consumption, to restrict the targets of its largesse. But they also reveal paradoxically, that “family values” mean Anglo hegemony. That said, we can indeed see how a neoliberal narrative of rights has been harnessed to much of the discourse about both homosexuality and immigration. Both are narrated as “choices” and hence as moral acts. As Alexander notes, this process defines status as conduct and then makes that conduct into a propensity for criminality.
- Alexander, 226.[↑]
