Fluent Essays

2 pages : movie paper Movie name: forbidden undocumented and queer in rural america Reading: 1. Looking like a Lesbian: The Organization of Sexual Monitoring at the United States-Mexican Border BUILDING AN ABOLITINIST TRANS AND QUEER MOVEMENT WITH EVERYTHING WEVE G0T talk about or something that you learned and then you know, want to connect that to the readings. watching the film seeing what stands out is there any. Reflection. University of Texas Press Looking like a Lesbian: The Organization of Sexual Monitoring at the United States-Mexican Border Author(s): Eithne Luibheid Source: Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Jan., 1998), pp. 477-506 Published by: University of Texas Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3704873 Accessed: 22/04/2009 17:17 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTORs Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. 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For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected] University of Texas Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the History of Sexuality. http://www.jstor.org http://www.jstor.org/stable/3704873?origin=JSTOR-pdf http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=texas Looking Like a Lesbian: The Organization of Sexual Monitoring at the United States-Mexican Border EITHNE LUIBHEID Doctoral candidate, Ethnic Studies University of California, Berkeley I WHILE RETURNING by taxicab from Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas, on January 6, 1960, Sara Harb Quiroz was stopped for ques- tioning by an immigration service agent. Quiroz was not a newcomer to the United States. She had acquired permanent U.S. residency in July 1954, at the age of twenty, and lived in El Paso where she worked as a domestic. We do not know why she traveled to Juarez on that par- ticular occasion, but her parents and her nine-year-old daughter lived there. Other familial, economic, and social ties also drew the residents of El Paso to Juarez. Documentation that explains why Quiroz was stopped no longer exists. But Albert Armendariz, the attorney who handled her case, believes she was stopped because of her appearance. Based on looks. Based on the way she dressed. The way she acted. The way she talked. In the eyes of the immigration inspector who This article is dedicated to Hiroko Taira. I also gratefully acknowledge the many forms of support that made this article possible. Support included funding from the Vice Chan- cellor for Research at the University of California, Berkeley; generous assistance from Al- bert Armendariz, Sr., Esq., and his staff; Shannon Minters suggestion that I locate and interview Mr. Armendariz; legal information from Professor Carolyn (Patty) Blum and Su- san Lee; theoretical assistance from David Lloyd; helpful suggestions from Jill Esbenshade, JeeYeun Lee, Jose Palafox at the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Jasbir K. Puar, Carla Trujillo, and audience members at the American Studies Association Conference in 1996; encouragement from Jean Molesky Poz; interviews with four anony- mous lesbian immigrants; critical feedback from Arlene Keizer and Alberto Perez; and the continued support of my dissertation committee. The mistakes are mine. Albert Armendariz, Sr., interview by author, El Paso, Texas, March 18, 1996. [Journal of the History of Sexuality 1998, vol. 8, no. 3] ? 1998 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 1043-4070/98/0803-0004$02.00 477 478 EITHNE LUIBHEID stopped her, Quiroz seemed like a lesbian. Until as recently as 1990, lesbian immigrants were excludable and deportable from the United States. II The case of Quiroz provides us with a window into immigration service efforts to identify and exclude foreign-born women who were believed to be lesbians. Some scholars date lesbian and gay exclusion from 1917, when constitutional psychopathic inferiors, including those with ab- normal sexual instincts, became excludable.2 However, the most exten- sive records about immigration service efforts to police the border against lesbians and gay men date from after the passage of the 1952 McCarren-Walter Act. In anticipation of the act, the Senate Committee of the Judiciary recommended in 1950 that classes of mental defectives [who are excludable] should be enlarged to include homosexuals and other sex perverts.3 However, the final wording of the McCarren-Walter Act did not explicitly mention homosexuals. Instead, homosexual exclu- sion became rolled into the provision that barred entry by psychopathic personalities. A Senate report explained, The Public Health Service has advised that the provision for the exclusion of aliens afflicted with psy- chopathic personality or a mental defect... is sufficiently broad to pro- vide for the exclusion of homosexuals and sex perverts. This change in nomenclature is not to be constructed in any way as modifying the intent to exclude all aliens who are sexual deviants.4 In 1965, lesbian and gay exclusion was recodified, this time under a provision barring entry by sexual deviates. To date, only cases involving men who were alleged by the Immigra- tion and Naturalization Service (INS) to be gay have received substantive scholarly analysis. Little is known about the experiences of women.5 By providing information about Quirozs case, which is the only docu- mented case involving a woman that has been uncovered to date, I renar- rate the history of lesbian and gay immigration exclusion in a way that 2Cited in Matter of LaRochelle, 11 I&N December 436 (Board of Immigration Ap- peals, 1965). 3 Senate Committee of the Judiciary, The Immigration & Naturalization Systems of the United States, 81st Cong., 2d Sess., 1950, S. Rep. 1515. 4Revision of Immigration & Nationality Laws, Senate, 82d Cong., 2d sess., 1952, Rep. 1137, 9. 5A significant amount of information about the history of gay and lesbian exclusion has been reconstructed from the records of court cases. To date, Quiroz v. Neelly, 291 F 2d 906 (1961), is the only female court case that has been identified. Looking Like a Lesbian 479 centers, rather than subsumes, specifically female experiences.6 In addi- tion, Quirozs case raises questions about the complexities of mapping histories of immigrant, refugee, and transnational women while using sexual categories that substantially derive their meanings from metro- politan centers.7 This articles methodological and theoretical frameworks are drawn from Michel Foucaults The History of Sexuality (vol. 1). Though Fou- cault never explicitly addressed immigration, his work usefully points out that sex became something for the state to administer and manage. The nineteenth-century multiplication of discourses about sex unquestion- ably affected the U.S. immigration system, which took up these dis- courses and developed procedures for administering sex in relation to multiform objectives (that concerned not only sex but also gender, race, class, and constructions of nation). Foucaults discussion of how homo- sexual acts became reconstructed, as evidence of the existence of homo- sexual types, illustrates the general process whereby the administration of sex enabled relations of power to become organized and extended.8 The example also draws attention to the specific ways that sexual catego- rizations became freight[ed] . . with epistemological and power rela- tions, through which immigration monitoring became organized.9 The incorporation of sexual categorizations into exclusion laws, as well as the development of procedures to detect and deter entry by those who fit 6This article focuses on the exclusion of lesbians and gay men, specifically, in U.S. immi- gration. Though the contemporary notion of queer also includes people who are bisex- ual and transgendered, as well as various heterosexualities, these were not identities around which the policing of immigration was organized. Rather, the historical record suggests that Congress and the immigration service were specifically concerned with a homosexual threat. Court cases indicate that individuals who were sexually involved with both men and women were considered homosexual, rather than bi- or heterosexual. Indeed, they were considered to be particularly pernicious homosexuals, who deceitfully tried to hide their condition by becoming involved with people of the opposite sex. 7Kieran Rose, The Tenderness of the Peoples, in Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland: Towards the Twenty-First Century, ed. ide OCarroll and Eoin Collins (London, 1995), p. 74. 8 Foucault argues that, though particular sexual acts had a long history of being forbid- den and subject to punishment, it was only in the nineteenth century that these acts became reconstructed as the signs of distinct types of personages, each endowed with a discrete sexual identity that the state needed to monitor and manage. For example, homosexual acts became reconstructed as the sign of a homosexual type. As a result, the homosexual be- came a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and a possibly mysterious physiology ... the homosexual was now a species. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1990), p. 43. 9Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990), p. 9. 480 EITHNE LUIBHEID the categorizations, is a key piece of how the immigration system came to exclude individuals on the basis of sexuality.10 That Quiroz encountered difficulties when entering at El Paso, be- cause an agent suspected that she was a lesbian, clearly demonstrates that sexuality functioned as a dense transfer point for relations of power at the border. But in analyzing her case, I resist making efforts to deter- mine whether she was a lesbian, since such efforts participate in power relations that recirculate and naturalize dominant cultural notions of sexual types. 2 Instead, my approach to Quirozs case focuses on prob- lematizing how mainstream institutions, including the INS, remain in- vested in constructing fixed boundaries around what homosexuality is. Such boundary marking involves operations by which mainstream insti- tutions empower and legitimize themselves while producing diverse mi- noritized populations. III INS monitoring techniques contributed to the construction of the very sexualities against which they guarded the nation.13 This fact becomes L?The immigration service also excluded those who had committed sexual acts that were forbidden by immigration law, whether or not the person fit within a sexual identity cate- gory. As Janet Halley usefully reminds us, sexual types and sexual acts are not mutually exclusive descriptors (p. 184), but rather, they interrelate in the production of categories of people who are marked out for exclusion. See Janet Halley, The Status/Conduct Dis- tinction in the 1993 Revisions to Military Anti-Gay Policy: A Legal Archaeology, in GLQ 3 (1996): 179-251. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:103. For Quiroz, the density of the relations of power also have to do with the fact that she was a Mexican woman, and as such, was con- nected to a larger history of strict immigration monitoring directed at people of Mexican origin attempting to enter the United States. See Leo Chavez, Shadowed Lives: Undocu- mented Immigrants in American Society (Fort Worth, TX, 1992); Kitty Calavita, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the INS (New York, 1992); Roger Rouse, Making Sense of Settlement: Class Transformation, Cultural Struggle, and Transnational- ism among Mexican Migrants in the United States, in Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration, ed. Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences no. 645 (New York, 1992); and other writings on Mexican migration. 12There is a double problem here. Efforts to determine whether Quiroz was a lesbian sustain sexual categorizations, even if the efforts are motivated by affirmation of resistant and minority sexual subjects. Furthermore, these sexual categorizations substantially derive their meanings from metropolitan centers, which are materially and ideologically impli- cated in the production of immigrant women as racial or ethnic minorities. Thus, uncritical application of the term lesbian to a woman such as Quiroz can easily erase her different historical formation and complex positionality, without revealing anything about her sexu- ality. 3For a discussion of how the U.S. is constituted as heterosexual, see Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, Queer Nationality, in boundary 2 (1992): 149-80. Looking Like a Lesbian 481 clear when we examine how immigrants came to be designated as ex- cludable on the basis of homosexuality. Since there is no easy way to differentiate lesbians and gay men from heterosexuals, what led certain people to be singled out? On looking through case histories, it appears that immigrants came to INS attention as possible lesbians or gay men on the basis of checkpoints that were set up within the immigration pro- cess. These checkpoints served as particularly dense points where domi- nant institutions constructed (and individuals contested) the possible meanings of lesbian or gay identity, and of who should be included within these categories. In thinking through the operation of these checkpoints, we must avoid two common and related mistakes. First, we should not imagine that coherent, predefined lesbian or gay identities always existed among immigrant applicants, and that the checkpoints simply captured these preformed queer subjects. To frame the issue in this way is to miss the myriad ways that these checkpoints often regulated the terms by which formation of identity occurs.14 Second, and conversely, we have to conceptualize lesbian and gay identities as being never reducible to these checkpoints. Though the checkpoints were dense power points in the dominant cultures produc- tion and policing of homosexuality, not all (potential) lesbian/gay sub- jects were equally affected. This is because lesbian and gay identities are also inflected by race, class, gender, cultural, and religious features that defy the possibility that there can be any uniform queer identity; equally, the checkpoints themselves reflected some degree of bias, such that they captured males more than females, and Latin Americans and Europeans more than Asians. Consequently, in looking at who was liable to become ensnared by these checkpoints, we should never imagine that this was the totality of the kinds of lesbian, gay, or queer identities that were passing into the United States.5 One of the richest sources of information about these immigration 14 Thanks to Judith Butler for this succinct formulation. Two examples may help to illus- trate how immigration checkpoints can regulate the terms by which identity is formed. I interviewed a woman who had had a sexual relationship with a woman in her country of origin and thought nothing of it-until she was asked by a State Department official, while applying to immigrate, if she was a homosexual. The fact of being asked, and the manner in which she was asked, made her rethink the significance of that sexual experience. A sec- ond, rather different, example concerns a woman who came to the United States, lived here for several years, and began to think of herself as a lesbian. But she knew that in order to adjust from immigrant to citizen status, she would one day be asked to account for her activities before immigration officials. Therefore, the woman did not feel free to join lesbian groups or activities until she held citizen status. 5The fact that certain forms of queer identities were unlikely to be captured by these checkpoints does not make the fact of policing any less salient for all queer people, however. 482 EITHNE LUIBHEID checkpoints comes from court records. Perhaps not surprisingly, almost all of the court cases that have been reconstructed concern men. Very striking are the numbers of men who ended up being targeted by the INS because of criminal convictions related to sexual activity. Writing about German-born Horst Nemetz, who had no criminal record con- nected to his sexual activities with men, Shannon Minter describes the extent to which male-male sexual practices remain heavily criminalized: His denial of public activity [for which he could have been con- victed] means that he never made love on a beach, in a car, in a park, or in any of the other quasi-public places in which heterosex- ual couples occasionally engage in sexual relations. His denial of recruiting means that he never sexually propositioned a man in a bar, at a party, on the street, or anywhere outside his home. His denial of ever being arrested or questioned by the police means either that he was fortunate, or that he avoided gay bars, gay bath- houses, gay cruising areas in parks and bathrooms, and other places that gay men informally gather and socialize. It also means he never had the misfortune of expressing sexual interest to an under- cover police officer posing as a gay man.16 Court cases confirm that significant numbers of immigrant men came to INS attention on the basis of sexual criminalization. But given that lesbian sexual activity is not usually as heavily policed, how can we map lesbians onto this history of immigration exclusion? Less policing does not mean that lesbian sexuality is more socially ac- ceptable than gay male sexuality. However, disbelief that women can have sex without the presence of a male penis-and the ways that gender, in conjunction with race and class, has differentially shaped the acquisition and formation of spaces where women could come together to have sex-means that lesbian sexuality has not been scrutinized and policed in the same ways as gay male sexuality. The result was that INS criminal record checks were more likely to affect men, rather than women, who engaged in same-sex activities. Were lesbians therefore relatively unaf- fected by the historic practices of homosexual exclusion? That is one pos- sibility. A second possibility is that indicators other than criminal record checks were used to identify women who might be lesbians. Given the dearth of known lesbian exclusion cases, it is difficult to know what these 6Shannon Minter, Sodomy and Public Morality Offenses under U.S. Immigration Law: Penalizing Lesbian and Gay Identity, Cornell International Law Journal 26 (1993): 799. Looking Like a Lesbian 483 indicators were.17 The Quiroz case provides one (possibly unrepresenta- tive) example.18 As mentioned earlier, the lawyer who handled Quirozs case believes she was stopped because she looked, spoke, and acted like a lesbian. Quiroz was also unlucky enough to encounter an immigration inspector who had undertaken a personal campaign to identify and expel women who he believed were sexual deviates: There was this fellow who was at the International Bridge.... He had a thing for people, especially women ... who were lesbian, or in his mind were deviates, and met the requirements of the statute [for exclusion] .... They would go to Mex- ico on a visit, and on the way back he would send them to secondary [inspection] where he would determine they were ineligible to enter. This officer was very, very good at making people admit that they were sexual deviates. 19 The importance of appearance is confirmed by testi- mony that was given to the INS by Quirozs employer, to the effect that the respondent usually wore trousers and a shirt when she came to work and that her hair was cut shorter than some womens.20 The use of visual appearance to monitor the border against possible entry by lesbians connects to a complex history. A 1952 Public Health Service (PHS) report to Congress mentioned visual appearance as one possible index of homosexuality. In some instances considerable diffi- culty may be encountered in substantiating a diagnosis of homosexuality or sexual perversion. In other instances, where the action or behavior of 7 But we should not treat this dearth of court cases as further evidence that lesbians were unaffected by immigration policing; instead, we need to remain attuned to the ways that women are historically excluded/unrepresented within official documents, but were present historically and had an impact. See Yolanda Chavez Leyva, Breaking the Silence: Putting Latina Lesbian History at the Center, in The New Lesbian Studies: Toward the Twenty-First Century, ed. Bonnie Zimmerman and Toni McNaron (New York, 1996), pp. 145-52. 8Aside from Quiroz, the only other lesbian immigration case I have ever seen cited is In re Schmidt, 56 Misc. 2d 456, 459-60 NY Sup. Ct. (1961). This case is cited by Minter, who describes the issue as follows: A New York court applied Judge Hands standard to a lesbian seeking naturalization after living and working in the United States for fourteen years. The woman testified to having had a series of relationships with women, both before her entry to the country and after. Citing a New Jersey court that found few behavioral deviations ... more offensive to American mores than ... homosexuality, the New York court dismissed the womans petition for citizenship despite the fact that her behavior was private and violated no law. See Minter, p. 794. 19Armendariz interview (n. 1 above). Armendariz estimates that this officer was single- handedly responsible for the exclusion or deportation of several hundred women for sex- ual deviation. 20Decision of the Special Inquiry Officer, case A8 707 653, U.S. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, El Paso, TX, March 25, 1960, p. 3. 484 EITHNE LUIBHEID the person is more obvious, as might be noted in the manner of dress (so called transvestism [sic] or fetishism) the condition may be more easily substantiated [emphasis added].21 This passage suggests that monitor- ing based on visual appearance operated around the notion of gender inversion-that is, homosexuals could be visually identified by the fact that gay men looked effeminate or lesbians looked masculine.22 The PHS formulation connects to a broader cultural history of conceptualizing homosexuality as a problem of one gender being trapped in the other genders body. Linked to that conceptualization were a range of endeav- ors to scientifically delineate, in a measurable and absolute way, the dif- ference between homosexual and heterosexual bodies. Jennifer Terry has documented the activities of the Committee for the Study of Sex Vari- ants, active in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. Members of the committee included psychiatrists, gynecologists, obstetricians, sur- geons, radiologists, neurologists, as well as clinical psychologists, an ur- ban sociologist, a criminal anthropologist, and a former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Corrections. 23 This truly impres- sive array of professionals, scientists, and academics, connected together through their efforts to delineate how the homosexual was distinct from the heterosexual, conducted its research under the assumption that the female sex variant would exhibit traits of the opposite sex. In other words, she would invert her proper gender role.24 Under this guiding assumption, Pathologists looked at skin complexion, fat distribution, coarse- ness of hair, the condition of the teeth, and commented on the overall facial and bodily structure of each subject. Radiologists took x-rays to determine cranial densities of the skull and carrying angles of the pelvis in order to identify anomalous gender charac- teristics. A dense skull was presumed to be masculine. Graceful and delicate pelvic bones were feminine. Endocrinologists measured hormonal levels.... Sketches of genitals and breasts were drawn in order to document particular characteristics of sex variance. ... In analyzing the thirty pages of graphic sketches of breasts and genitals, Dr. Dickinson reported on the general genital differences recognizable in the female sex vari- 21House, 82d Cong., 2d sess., 1952, Rep. 1365, 47. 22Of course, masculinity and femininity are culturally coded in very specific ways, so when one deals with culturally different and diverse populations of immigrants, this stan- dard would provide only a shaky basis for identifying deviants. 23Jennifer Terry, Lesbians under the Medical Gaze: Scientists Search for Remarkable Differences, Journal of Sex Research 27 (1990): 319 24 Ibid., p. 321. Looking Like a Lesbian 485 ant population. He identified ten characteristics which he argued set the sex variant apart from normal women.25 These and other studies were formed around, and helped to keep alive, the notion that lesbians were visibly different from heterosexuals (and that lesbianism and heterosexuality were opposites). Thus, it was not surprising that immigration officers tried to identify immigrants who might be lesbians by using the index of gender-inverted appearance. Gay men were similarly sought. The notion that lesbian and gay immigrants could be identified on the basis of appearance marks out an area where homophobia, racism, and sexism share some commonalities but also significant differences, in terms of an individuals ability to mediate costs associated with looking different. bell hooks, for example, frames the issue by writing, While we can acknowledge that gay people of all colors are harassed and suffer exploitation and domination, we also recognize there is a significant dif- ference that arises because of the visibility of dark skin.26 Nice Rodriguez has described altering her sexuality and gender ap- pearance, so as to pass official scrutiny, during her migration from the Philippines to Canada: On the day of her interview [for a visa at the embassy] she wore a tailored suit but she looked like a man and knew she did not stand a chance. They did not want masculine women in that underpopulated land. They needed babymakers.... Her wife got mascara and lip- stick and made her look like a babymaker. During her interview with the consular officer she looked ovulating and fertile so she passed it. Canada had strict immigration laws, but even bugs could sift through a fine mosquito net.27 This account captures the process of straightening up that many lesbi- ans undertake when they expect to deal with immigration officials. Straightening up includes practices like growing ones hair and nails, buying a dress, accessorizing, and donning makeup. Clearly there is priv- ilege involved in the fact that the visual markers of lesbianism-unlike visual markers of race or gender-can usually be altered or toned down, 25 Ibid., pp. 323, 332. 26bell hooks, Homophobia in Black Communities, in her Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston, 1989), p. 125. 27Nice Rodriguez, Big Nipple of the North, in Piece of My Heart: A Lesbian of Colour Anthology, ed. Makeda Silvera (Toronto, 1992), pp. 35-36. 486 EITHNE LUIBHEID so as to pass homophobic border guards.28 But at the same time, the fact that one has to straighten up so as to avoid a penalty serves as a reminder that lesbianism is a difference. Consequently, Rodriguez suggests that her self-presentation as an ovulating and fertile woman wearing lipstick and mascara did not erase her lesbian difference, but instead confirmed the bug-like status of lesbians within the immigration system. Moni- toring the border on the basis of visual appearance does lend itself to lesbian and gay male subversion, yet at the same time it marks out an area where the identity the INS is trying to contain and expel is also reestablished and reinforced. The experiences of women of color like Quiroz further complicate analysis of visually based border monitoring. The visual, or that which gets seen, is driven by and redeploys particular cultural knowledges and blindnesses. Though the inspector who stopped Quiroz for … Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex Edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith All essays © 2011 by their respective authors This edition © 2011 AK Press (Edinburgh, Oakland, Baltimore) ISBN-13: 978-1-84935-070-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2011920478 AK Press 674-A 23rd Street Oakland, CA 94612 USA www.akpress.org [email protected] AK Press UK PO Box 12766 Eqinburgh EH8 9YE Scotland www.akuk.com [email protected] The above addresses would be delighted to provide you with the latest AK. Press distribution catalog, which features several thousand books, pamphlets, zines, audio and video recordings, and gear, all published or distributed by AK Press. Alternately, visit our websites to browse the catalog and find out the latest news from the world of anarchist publishing: www.akpress.org I www.akuk.com revolutionbythebook.akpress.org Printed in Canada on 100\% recycled, acid-free paper with union labor. Cover image: Marie Ueda, photo from the White Night riots, San Francisco, CA 1979 Courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society. Cover by Kate Khatib I www.manifestor.org/ design Interior by Michelle Fleming with Kate Khatib BUILDING AN AB LITI NIST TRANS AND QUEER VE ENT WITH EVERYTHING WEVE G T Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, Dean Spade As we write this, queer and trans people across the United States and in many parts of the world have just celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. On that fateful night back in June 1969, sexual and gender outsiders rose up against ongoing brutal police violence in an inspiring act of defiance. These early freedom fighters knew all too well that the NYPD-New Yorks finest-were the frontline threat to queer and trans survival. Stonewall was the culmination of years of domination, resentment, and upheaval in many marginalized communities coming to a new consciousness of the depth of violence committed by the govern- ment against poor people, people of color, women, and queer people both within US borders and around the world. The Stonewall Rebellion, the mass demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, and the campaign to 15 Captive Gender!, free imprisoned Black-liberation activist Assata Shakur were all powerful examples of a groundswell of energy demanding an end to the business as usual of US terror during this time. Could these groundbrealdng and often unsung activists have imag- ined that only forty years later the official gay rights agenda would be largely pro-police, pro-prisons, and pro-war-exactly the forces they worked so hard to resist? Just a few decades later, the most visible and well-funded arms of the LGBT movement look much more like a corporate strategizing session than a grassroots social justice movement. There are countless examples of this dramatic shift in priorities. What emerged as a fight against racist, anti-poor, and anti-queer police violence. now works hand in hand with local and federal law enforcement agen- cies-district attorneys are asked to speak at trans rallies, cops march in Gay Pride parades. The agendas of prosecutors-those who lock up our family, friends, and lovers-and many queer and trans organizations are becoming increasingly similar, with sentenc:e-and police-enhancing leg- islation at the top of the priority list. Hate crimes legislation is tacked on to multi-billion dollar defense bills to support US military domination in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Despite the rhetoric of an LGBT community, transgender and gender-non-conforming people are repeatedly abandoned and marginalized in the agendas and priorities of our lead organizations-most recently in the 2007 gutting of the Em- ployment Non-Discrimination Act of gender identity protections. And as the rate of people (particularly poor queer and trans people of color) without steady jobs, housing, or healthcare continues to rise, and health and social services continue to be cut, those dubbed the leaders of the LGBT movement insist that marriage rights are the way to redress the inequalities in our communities. For more and more queer and trans people, regardless of marital status, there is no inheritance, no health benefits from employers, no legal immigration status, and no state protection of our relationship to our children. Four decades after queer and trans people took to the streets throwing heels, bottles, bricks, and anything else we had to ward off police, the official word is that, except for being able to get married and fight in the military,2 we are pretty much free, safe, and equal. And those of us who are not must wait our turn until the priority battles are won by the largely white, male, upper-class lawyers and lobbyists who know better than us.3 Fortunately, radical queer and trans organizing for deep transfor- mation has also grown alongside this trickle-down4 brand of equality 16 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement politics mentioned above. Although there is no neat line between official gay equality politics on the one hand, and radical justice politics on the other, it is important to draw out some of the key distinctions in how different parts of our movements today are responding to the main problems that queer and trans people face. This is less about creating false dichotomies between good and bad approaches, and more about clarifying the actual impact that various strategies have, and recognizing that alternative approaches to the official solutions are alive, are politi- cally viable, and are being pursued by activists and organizations around the United States and beyond. In the first column, we identify some of these main challenges; in the second, we summarize what solutions ·are being offered by the well-resourced5 segments of our movement; and in the third, we outline some approaches being used by more radical and progressive queer and trans organizing to expand possibilities for broad- based, social-justice solutions to these same problems. The Current Landscape BIG PROBLEMS OFFICIAL SOLUTIONS TRANSFORMATIVE APPROACHES Queer and trans Legalize same·-sex Strengthen Medicaid and Medicare; people, poor marriage to allow win universal healthcare; fight for people, people people with health transgender health benefits; end of color, and im- benefits from their deadly medical neglect of people in migrants have jobs to share with state custody minimal access to same-sex partners quality healthcare Queer and trans Pass hate crimes leg- Build community relationships and in- people experience islation to increase frastructure to support the healing and regular and often prison sentences transformation of people who have fatal violence from and strengthen lo- been impacted by interpersonal and partners, family cal and federal law intergenerational violence; join with members, com- enforcement; collect movements addressing root causes munity members, statistics on rates of . of queer and trans premature death, employers, law violence; collaborate including police violence, imprison- enforcement, and with local and federal ment, poverty, immigration policies, institutional of- law enforcement to and lack of healthcare and housing ficials prosecute hate vio- Jenee and domestic violence 17 Captive Genders BIG PROBLEMS OFFICIAL SOLUTIONS , TRANSFORMATIVE APPROACHES Queer and trans Eliminate bans on Join with war resisters, radical vet- members of the participation of gays erans, and young people to oppose military experience and lesbians in US military intervention, occupation, and violence and dis- military war abroad and at home, and demand crimination the reduction/elimination of defense budgets Queer and trans Legalize same-sex End the use of immigration policy to people are targeted marriage to allow criminalize people of color, exploit by an unfair and same-sex internation- workers, and maintain the deadly punitive immigra- al couples to apply wealth gap between the United States tion system for legal residency for and the Global South; support current the non-US citizen . detainees and end ICE raids, deporta- spouse tions, and police collaboration Queer and trans Legalize same sex Join with struggles of queer/trans and families are vul- marriage to provide non-queer/trans families of color, nerable to legal a route to legalize imprisoned parents and youth, na- intervention and families with two par- tive families, poor families, military separation from ents of the same sex; families, and people with disabilities the state, institu- pass laws banning to win community and family self-de- dons, and/or non- adoption discdmina- termination and the right to keep kids, queer people tion on the basis of parents, and other family members in sexual orientation their families and communities Institutions fail Legalize same-sex Change policies like hospital visita- to recognize fam- marriage to formally tion to recognize a variety of family ily connections recognize same-sex structures, not just opposite-sex and outside of hetero- partners in the eyes same-sex couples; abolish inheritance sexual marriage of the law and demand radical redistribution of in contexts like wealth and an end to poverty hospital visitation and inheritance 18 Building cm Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement BIG PROBLEMS OFFICIAL, SOLUTIONS TRANSFORMATIVE APPROACHES Queer and trans Advocate for cultural Build ongoing, accountable relation- people are dis- competency training ships with and advocate for queer and proportionately for law enforcement trans people who are locked up to policed, arrested, and the construction support their daily well-being, healing, and imprisoned, of queer and trans- leadership, and survival; build com- and face high rates specific and gender- nmnity networks of care to support of violence in state responsive facilities; people coming out of prison and jail; custody from of- create written policies collaborate with other movements to ficials as well as that say that queer address root causes of queer and trans other imprisoned and trans people are imprisonment; work to abolish pris- or detained people equal to other people ons, establish community support for in state custody; stay people with disabilities and ellminate largely silent on the medical and psychatric institution- high rates of impris- alization, and provide permanent onment in queer and housing rather than shelter beds for all trans communities, people without homes communities of and poor com- munities I. How Did We Get Here? The streams of conservative as well as more progressive and radical queer and trans politics developed over time and in the context of a rapidly changing political, economic, and social landscape. Although we cant of- fer a full history of how these different streams developed and how the more conservative one gained national dominance, we think it is impor- tant to trace the historical context in which these shifts occurred. To chart a different course for ou,r movements, we need to understand the road weve traveled In particular, we believe that there are two major features of the second half of the twentieth century that shaped the context in which the queer and trans movement developed: (1) the active resistance and chal- lenge by radical movement to state violence, and subsequent systematic bacldash,7 and (2) the massive turmoil and transformation of the global economy. 8 Activists and scholars use a range of terms to describe this era in which power, wealth, and oppression were transformed to respond to these two significant crises-including neoliberalism, the New World Order, empire, globalization, free market democracy, or late capitalism. 19 Captive Genders Each term describes a different aspect or take on the current historical . moment that we are living in. It is important to be clear that none of the strategies of the New World Order are new. They might work faster, use new technologies, and recruit the help of new groups, but they are not new. Oppressive dynamics in the United States are as old as the colonization of this land and the founding of a country based on slavery and genocide. However, they have taken intensified, tricky forms in the past few decades-,-particularly because qur governments keep telling us those institutions and practices have been abolished. There were no good old days in the United States-just times in which our movements and our communities were stronger or weaker, and times when we used different cracks in the system as op- portunities for resistance. All in all, we might characterize the past many decades as a time in which policies and ideas were promoted by powerful nations and institutions (such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund) to destroy the minimal safety nets set up for vulnerable people, dismantle the gains made by social movements, and redistribute wealth, resources, and life changes upward-away from the poor and toward the elite.9 Below are some of the key tactics chat the United States and others have used in this most recent chapter of our history: • Pull Yourself Up by Your Bootstraps, Again Ihe US government and its ally nations and institutions in the Global North helped pass laws and policies that made it harder for workers to organize into unions; destroyed welfare programs and created the image of people on welfare as immoral and fraudulent; and created interna- tional economic policies and trade agreements that reduced safety nets, worker rights, and environmental protections, particularly for nations in the Global South. Together, these efforts have dismantled laws and social programs meant to protect people from poverty, violence, sickness, and other harms of capitalism. EXAMPLE: In the early 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented by the United States under Democratic President Clinton to make it easier for corporations to do business across borders betv?een the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Unfortunately, by allowing corporations to outsource their labor much more cheaply, the agreement also led to the loss. 20 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement of hundreds of thousands of US jobs and wage depression even in job receiving countries. lO Additionally, human rights advocates have documented widespread violations of workers rights since NAFTA, including favoritism toward employer-controlled unions; firings for workers organizing efforts; denial of collective bargaining rights; forced pregnancy testing; mistreatment of migrant workers; life-threatening health and safety conditions; and other violations of the right to freedom of association, freedom from discrimination, and the right to a minimum wage.11 Loss of jobs in the United States reduced the bargaining power of workers, now more desperate for wages then ever, and both wages and benefits declined, with many workers now forced to work as temps or part-time with no benefits or job security. EXAMPLE: In 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which ef- fectively dismantled what existed of a welfare state-creating a range of restrictive and targeting measures that required work, limited aid, and increased penalties for welfare recipients. lhe federal government abdicated its responsibility to provide minimal nets for poor and working-class people, using the rhetoric of personal responsibil- ity and work to justify the exploitation and pain caused by capi- talism and racism. Sexist, racist images of poor people as immoral, fraudulent drug addicts fueled these policy changes. Since then, differ- ent cities have adopted local measures to gut economic safety nets for poor, homeless, and working-class people. In San Francisco, Mayor Newsoms notorious 2002 Care Not Cash program slashed welfare benefits for homeless people, insisting that benefits given to the home- less were being spent on drugs and alcohol.12 Scapegoating The decrease in manufacturing jobs and the gutting of social safety nets for the poor and working class created a growing class of people who were marginally employed and housed, and forced into criminalized economies such as sex work and the drug trade. This class of people was blamed for the poverty and inequity they faced-labeled drug dealers, welfare queens, criminals, and hoodlums-and were used to justify harmful poli- cies that expanded violence and harm. At the same time, criminal penal- ties for behaviors associated with poverty, like drug use, sleeping outside, . 21 Captive Genders graffiti, and sex work have increased in many parts the United States, and resources for policing these kinds of crimes has also increased. EXAMPLE: In the 1990s, states across the· United States began to sign into law so-called Three Strikes measures that mandated standard, long (often life) sentences for people convicted of three felonies, many including non-violent offenses. Californias law has re- sulted in sentences of twenty-five years or more for people convicted of things like shoplifting. The popularity of Three Strikes laws have been fueled by a growing cultural obsession with criminality and punishment that relies on images of violent and dangerous career criminals while functioning to imprison enormous numbers oflow- income people and people of color whose behaviors are the direct results of economic insecurity. EXAMPLE: Under President Clintons 1996 welfare reforms, any- one convicted of a drug-related crime is automatically banned for life from receiving cash assistance and food stamps. Some states have since opted out of this ban, but for people living in fifteen states, this draconian measure presents nearly insurmountable barriers to becom- ing self-sufficient. Unable to receive cash assistance and subject to job discrimination because of their cr.iminal histories, many people with drug-related convictions go back into the drug trade as the only way to earn enough to pay the rent and put food on the table. 1he lifetime welfare ban has been shown to particularly harm women and their children. 13 • Fear-Mongering The government and corporate media used racist, xenophobic, and mi- sogynist fear-mongering to distract us from increasing economic disparity and a growing underclass in the United States and abroad. The War on Drugs in the 1980s and the Bush Administrations War on Terror, both of which are ongoing, created internal and external enemies (criminals and terrorists) to blame for and distract from the ravages of racism, capital- ism, patriarchy, and imperialism. In exchange, these enemies (and any- one who looked like them) could be targeted with violence and murder. During this time, the use of prisons, policing, detention, and surveillance skyrocketed as the government declared formal war against all those who it marks as criminals or terrorists. 22 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement EXAMPLE: In the 1980s, the US government declared a War on Drugs and drastically increased mandatory sentences for violating drug prohibition laws. It also created new prohibitions for accessing public housing, public benefits, and higher education for people con~ victed of drug crimes. The result was the imprisonment of over one million people a year, the permanent marginalization and disenfran- chisement for people convicted, and a new set of military and foreign policy intervention justifications for the United States to take brutal action in Latin America. EXAMPLE: Following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, politicians manipulated the American publics fear and uncertainty to push through a range of new laws and policies justified by a declared War on Terror. New legislation like the PATRIOT Act, the Immigrant Registration Act, and the Real ID Act, as well as new administrative policies and practices, increased the surveillance state, reduced even the most basic rights and living stan- dards of immigrants, and turned local police, schoolteachers, hospital workers, and others into immigration enforcement officers. • The Myth That Violence and Discrimination Are Just About Bad Individuals Discrimination laws and hate crimes laws encourage us to understand oppression as something that happens when individuals use bias to deny someone a job because of race or sex or some other characteristic, or beat up or kill someone because of such a characteristic. This way of thinking, sometimes called the perpetrator perspective, 14 makes people · think about racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism in terms of individual behaviors and bad intentions rather than wide-scale structural oppression that often operates without some obvious indi- vidual actor aimed at denying an individual person an opportunity. The violence of imprisoning millions of poor people and people of color, for example, cant be adequately explained by finding one nasty rac- ist individual, but instead requires looking at a whole web of institu- tions, policies, and practices that make it normal and necessary to warehouse, displace, discard, and annihilate poor people and people of color. Thinking about violence and oppression as the work of a few bad apples undermines our· ability to analyze our conditions systemically and intergenerationally, and to therefore organize for systemic change. 23 Captive Genders This narrow way of thinking about oppression is repeated in law, policy, the media, and nonprofits. EXAMPLE: Megans Laws are statutes that require people convicted of sexual offenses to register and that require this information be avail- able to the public. These laws have been passed in jurisdictions around the country in the last two decades, prompted by and generating pub- lic outrage about child sexual abuse (CSA). Studies estimate that l in 3 people raised as girls and 1 in 6 people raised as boys were sexually abused as children, as a result of intergenerational trauma, commu- nity- and state-sanctioned abusive norms, and alienation. Rather than resourcing comprehensive programs to support the healing of survi- vors and transformation of people who have been sexually abusive, or interrupt the family and community norms that contribute to the widespread abuse of children, Megans Laws have ensured that people convicted of a range of sexual offenses face violence, the inability to find work or a place to live, and severely reduced chances of recov- ery and healing. Despite the limited or nonexistent deterrent effect of such laws, they remain the dominant official approach to the systemic problems ofCSA. 15 EXAMPLE: As we write this, the Matthew Shepard Local Law En~ forcement Enhancement Act has recently passed in the US Senate, and if signed into law would give $10 million to state and local law enforcement agencies, expand federal law enforcement power focused on hate crimes, and add the death penalty as a possible punishment for those convicted. This bill is heralded as a victory for transgender people because it will make gender identity an included category in Federal Hate Crimes law. Like Megans Law, this law and the advocacy surrounding it (including advocacy by large LGBT nonprofit orga- nizations) focus attention on individuals who kill people because of their identities. These laws frame the problem of violence in our com- munities as one of individual hateful people, when in reality, trans people face short life-spans because of the enormous systemic violence in welfare systems, shelters, prisons, jails, foster care, juvenile punish- ment systems, and immigration, and the inability to access basic sur- vival resources. ·These laws do nothing to prevent our deaths, they just use our deaths to expand a system that endangers our lives and places a chokehold on our communities. 16 24 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement • Undermining Transformative Organizing The second half of the twentieth century saw a major upsurge in radical and revolutionary organizing in oppressed communities in the United States and around the world. This powerful organizing posed a signifi- cant threat to the legitimacy of US power and capitalist empire more broadly, and therefore needed to be contained. These movements were undermined by two main strategies: First, the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s were criminalized, with the US government using tactics of imprisonment, torture, sabotage, and assassination to target and de- stroy groups like the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, and Young Lords, among others. Second, the growth of the nonprofit sector has seen social movements professionalizing, chasing philanthropic dol- lars, separating into issue areas, and moving toward social services and legal reform projects rather than radical projects aimed at the underlying causes of poverty and injustice. 17 These developments left significant sec- tions of the radical left traumatized and decimated, wiping out a genera- tion of revolutionaries and shifting the terms of resistance from revolution and transformation to inclusion and reform, prioritizing state- and foun- dation-sanctioned legal reforms and social services over mass organizing and direct action. EXAMPLE: The FBIs Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTEL- PRO) is a notorious example of the US governments use of infiltra- tion, surveillance, and violence to overtly target dissent and resistance. COINTELPRO was exposed when internal government documents were revealed that detailed the outrageous work undertaken by the federal government to dismantle resistance groups in the 1960s and 70s. Although the program was dissolved under that name, the tactics continued and can be seen today in current controversies about wire- tapping and torture as well as in the USA PATRIOT Act. Overt ac- tion to eliminate resistance and dissent here is as old as the European colonization of North America. 18 EXAMPLE: In the wake of decades of radical organizing by people in womens prisons and activists on the outside decrying systemic medical neglect, sexual violence, and the destruction of family bonds, Califor- nia legislators in 2006 proposed a so-called gender responsive cor- rections bill that would allow people in womens prisons to live with their children and receive increased social services. To make this plan 25 Captive Genders work, the bill called for millions of dollars in new prison construction. The message ofimproving the lives of women prisoners and creating more humane prisons-rhetoric that is consistently used by those in power to distract us from the fundamentally violent conditions of a capitalist police state-appealed to liberal, well-.intentioned feminist researchers, advocates, and legislators. Anti-prison organizations such as Oakland-based Now and others working in solidarity with the resounding sentiment of people in womens prisons, pointed out that this strategy was actually just a back door to creating 4,500 new prison beds for women in California, yet again expanding opportuni- ties to criminalize poor women and transgender people in one of the nations most imprisoning states.19 • The Hero Mindset The United States loves its heroes and its narratives-Horatio Alger, rags- to-riches, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, streets paved with gold, the rugged frontiersman, the benevolent philanthropist, and Obama as savior, among others. These narratives hide the uneven concentration of wealth, resources, and opportunity among different groups of people-the ways in which not everybody can just do anything if they put their minds to it and work hard enough. In the second half of the twentieth century, this individualistic and celebrity-obsessed culture had a deep impact on social movements and how we write narratives. Stories mass struggle became stories of individuals overcoming great odds. The rise of the nonprofit as a key vehicle for social change bolstered this trend, giving incentives to charismatic leaders (often executive directors, often people with privilege) to frame struggles in ways that prioritize symbolic victories (big court cases, sensationalistic media coverage) and ignore the daily work of building a base and a movement for the long haul. This trend also compromises the accountability of leaders and organizations to their …