Abstracts
Abstract
Emerging from in-depth research on mobility and displacement in relation to gender and sexual diversity on the Mexico-Guatemala border, this paper reflects on the complexities of lived, queer mobility over space and time as told by Andrea, a 27-year-old Salvadoran trans woman. Her narrative – told to the reader through video – provides a rich account of her affective journeys and the forces behind them, which go beyond movement as migration. The work is part of an improvised mobile, longitudinal ethnography which evolved as a way of exploring the small and large-scale realities of mobility as lived over time. The discussion engages with Andrea’s mobility as non-linear, multi-scalar, spatially and sensorially significant, and emotionally ambiguous. It invites reflection about the powerfully productive and damaging edges of precarious queer mobility, and points to the radical potential of an affective engagement with queer narratives. The queerness of mobility and survival exists not only as an abstract or symbolic edginess, but rather in, and as, constant frictions produced by the struggle for a life worth living.
Keywords:
- displacement,
- mobility,
- affect,
- video narrative,
- queer,
- trans,
- Central America,
- Mexico
Download the article in PDF to read it.
Download
Appendices
Bibliography
- Ahmed, S. (2006). Orientations: Toward a queer phenomenology. GLQ: A journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 12(4), 543-574.
- Alldred, P., and Fox, N. J. (2015). The sexuality-assemblages of young men: A new materialist analysis. Sexualities, 18(8), 905-920.
- Amin, A., and Richaud, L. (2020). Stress and the ecology of urban experience: migrant mental lives in central Shanghai. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.
- Anzaldúa, G. (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.
- Arriola Vega. L.A. and Coraza de los Santos, E. (eds.). (2018) Ráfagas y vientos de un sur global. Movilidades recientes en estados fronterizos del sur-este de México. San Cristóbal de las Casas: ECOSUR.
- Basok, T., D. Bélanger, M. L. Rojas Wiesner, and G. Candiz. (2015) Rethinking Transit Migration: Precarity, Mobility, and Self-making in Mexico. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Bates, C. (2014). Introduction: Putting things in motion. In Bates, C. (Ed.). (2014). Video methods: Social science research in motion. Routledge.
- BenEzer, G., and Zetter, R. (2015). Searching for directions: Conceptual and methodological challenges in researching refugee journeys. Journal of Refugee Studies, 28(3), 297-318.
- Butler, J. (2006). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.
- Butler Burke, N. (2016). Connecting the Dots: National Security, the Crime-migration Nexus, and Trans Women’s Survival. Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities, 113-121.
- Campos Delgado, A.E. and Odgers Ortiz, O. (2012). Crossing the Border: Mobility as a Resource in the Tijuana/San Diego and Tecún Umán/Tapachula Regions. Estudios Fronterizos 13 (26), 9-32.
- Cantú, L. (2009). The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men. N.A. Naples and S. Vidal-Ortiz (eds.), New York: New York University Press.
- Chávez, K. R. (2013). Queer migration politics: Activist rhetoric and coalitional possibilities. University of Illinois Press.
- Collins, F. L. (2018). Desire as a theory for migration studies: temporality, assemblage and becoming in the narratives of migrants. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(6), 964-980.
- Conradson, D., and McKay, D. (2007). Translocal subjectivities: mobility, connection, emotion. Mobilities, 2(2), 167-174.
- Cresswell, T. (2012). Mobilities II: Still. Progress in Human Geography 36: 645-653.
- Cresswell, T. (2010). Towards a politics of mobility. Environment and planning D: society and space, 28(1), 17-31.
- Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
- Doná, G. (2010). Rethinking well-being: from contexts to processes. International Journal of Migration, Health and Social Care 6 (2), 3-14.
- Eastmond, M. (2007). Stories as lived experience: Narratives in forced migration research. Journal of refugee studies, 20(2), 248-264.
- García García, A. y Oñate Martínez, S. (2008). Transexuales ecuatorianas: el viaje y el cuerpo. In, G. Herrera and J. Ramírez (eds.), América Latina migrante: estado, familias, identidades. Quito: FLACSO, Ministerio de Cultura del Ecuador, pp.343-360.
- Ghannam, F. (2011). Mobility, liminality, and embodiment in urban Egypt. American Ethnologist, 38(4), 790-800.
- Gill, N., Caletrío, J., and Mason, V. (2011). Introduction: Mobilities and forced migration. Mobilities, 6(3), 301-316.
- Gorman-Murray, A. (2009). Intimate mobilities: emotional embodiment and queer migration. Social and Cultural Geography 10: 4, 441-460.
- Griffiths, M. B. (2014). Out of time: The temporal uncertainties of refused asylum seekers and immigration detainees. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40(12), 1991-2009.
- Hannam, K., Sheller, M., and Urry, J. (2006). Mobilities, immobilities and moorings. Mobilities, 1(1), 1-22.
- hooks, b. (1989). Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, (36), 15-23.
- Howitt, R. (2001). Frontiers, borders, edges: liminal challenges to the hegemony of exclusion. Australian geographical studies, 39(2), 233-245.
- Hunter, L. (2017). If you see what I mean? Visual narratives–stories told through, with and by visual images. R. Dwyer, I. Davis and E. emerald (eds) Narratives Research in Practice: Stories from the Field, 89-116.
- Jacobs, J. M (1996). Edge of empire: Postcolonialism and the city. Routledge.
- Jansen, S. and Spijkerboer. T. (eds.) (2013). Fleeing Homophobia: Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Asylum. New York: Routledge.
- Jensen, A. (2011). Mobility, space and power: On the multiplicities of seeing mobility. Mobilities, 6(2), 255-271.
- Kochan, D. (2016). (Re) placing migrants’ mobility: A multi-method approach to integrating space and mobility in the study of migration. Migration Studies, 4(2), 215-237.
- Kokanović, R., and Božić-Vrbančić, S. (2015). Being marked as different: The emotional politics of experiences of depression and migrant belongings. Emotion, Space and Society, 16, 130-137.
- Lawson, V. A. (2000). Arguments within geographies of movement: the theoretical potential of migrants' stories. Progress in Human Geography, 24(2), 173-189.
- Lewis, R.A. and Naples N.A. (2014). Introduction: Queer migration, asylum, and displacement. Sexualities 17 (8): 911–918.
- Lind, J. (2020). The Continuous Spatial Vulnerability of Undocumented Migrants. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 19(1), 385-396
- Linstead, S., and Pullen, A. (2006). Gender as multiplicity: Desire, displacement, difference and dispersion. Human Relations, 59(9), 1287-1310.
- Lucero Rojas, M. (2020). Evadir lo necro: el desplazamiento forzado de mujeres trans centroamericanas hacia México. In Varela Huerta, A. (ed) (2020). Necropolítica y migración en la frontera vertical mexicana. Un ejercicio de conocimiento situado. UNAM: Mexico
- Luibhéid, E. (2004). Heteronormativity and Immigration Scholarship: A Call for Change. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10 (2): 227–235.
- Lutz, C. (2017). What matters. Cultural Anthropology, 32(2), 181-191.
- Mai, N., and King, R. (2009). Love, sexuality and migration: mapping the issue (s). Mobilities, 4(3), 295-307.
- Manalansan, M.F. (2006) Queer Intersections: Sexuality and Gender in Migration Studies. International Migration Review 40 (1): 224-249.
- Massey D. (1999) Imagining Globalization: Power-Geometries of Time-Space. In: Brah A., Hickman M.J., an Ghaill M.M. (eds) Global Futures. Explorations in Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London
- Montegary, L., and White, M. A. (2016) The Politics and Erotics of Mobility Justice: An Introduction, in L Montegary, L., and M.A. White (Eds.). (2016). Mobile desires: The politics and erotics of mobility justice. Springer. Pp. 1-14
- Nunn, C., Gifford, S. M., McMichael, C., & Correa-Velez, I. (2017). Navigating precarious terrains: Reconceptualizing refugee-youth settlement. Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees/Refuge: revue canadienne sur les réfugiés, 33(2): 45-55
- Pink, S., Hogan, S., and Bird, J. (2011). Intersections and inroads: Art therapy's contribution to visual methods. International Journal of Art Therapy, 16(1), 14-19.
- Psoinos, M. (2010). Forced migration and psychosocial health: meaning-making through autobiographical narratives in the UK. Migration Letters, 7(1), 79-90.
- Raffaetà, R. (2015). Hope emplaced. What happens to hope after arrival: The case of Ecuadorian families living in Italy. Emotion, Space and Society, 16, 116-122.
- Ringrose, J., and Renold, E. (2014). “F** k rape!” Exploring affective intensities in a feminist research assemblage. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 772-780.
- Rogaly, B. (2015). Disrupting migration stories: Reading life histories through the lens of mobility and fixity. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33(3), 528-544.
- Shakhsari, S. (2014). The queer time of death: Temporality, geopolitics, and refugee rights. Sexualities, 17(8), 998-1015.
- Sólveigar-Guðmundsdóttir, L. (2018). Exclusionary moments: Queer desires and migrants' sense of (un) belonging. Emotion, Space and Society, 28, 32-38.
- Sutton, R., Vigneswaran, D., and Wels, H. (2011). Waiting in liminal space: Migrants' queuing for Home Affairs in South Africa. Anthropology Southern Africa, 34(1-2), 30-37.
- Throop, J.C. (2016) “Ambivalent Happiness and Virtuous Suffering.” In I. Kavedžija and H. Walker (eds.) Values of Happiness: Towards and Anthropology of the Purpose in Life. HAU: Chicago: 29-58.
- Tsoni, I. W. (2019). Parsing the Aegean affective borderscape. Journal of Narrative Politics, 6(1).
- Vartabedian, J. (2014). Migraciones trans: travestis brasileñas migrantes trabajadoras del sexo. cadernos pagu, 42, 275-312.
- Vigh, H. (2009). Wayward migration: On imagined futures and technological voids. Ethnos, 74(1), 91-109.
- Vigh, H. (2006). Navigating terrains of war: Youth and soldiering in Guinea-Bissau (Vol. 13). Berghahn Books.
- Vukov, T. (2015). Strange moves: Speculations and propositions on mobility justice. In Mobile desires: The politics and erotics of mobility justice (pp. 108-121). Palgrave Pivot, London.
- Walker, H., and Kavedžija, I. (2015). Values of happiness. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5(3), 1-23.
- Whatmore, S. (2006). Materialist returns: practising cultural geography in and for a more-than-human world. Cultural geographies, 13(4), 600-609.
- Winton, A. (2019) “‘I’ve got to go somewhere’: Queer displacement in Northern Central America and Southern Mexico.” In A. Güler, M. Shevtsova, & D. Venturi (eds.) LGBTI Asylum Seekers and Refugees from a Legal and Political Perspective (pp. 95-112). Springer, Cham.
- Zarco Ortiz, E. A. and Chacón Reynosa, K. J. (2020). Dispositivos de seguridad y sexualidad en la frontera sur de México: biopolíticas en mujeres transgénero centroamericanas. Tabula Rasa,33, 137-163.