Lives That Resist Telling challenges the resounding scholarly silence about the lives of migrant women who identify as lesbian, queer, or nonheteronormative. Reworking social science methodologies and theories, the essays explore the experiences of migrant Latina lesbians in Los Angeles; Latina lesbians whose transnational lives span the borders between the United States and Mexico; non-heteronormative migrant Muslim women in Norway and Denmark; economically privileged Chinese lesbian or lala women in Australia; and Iranian lesbian asylum-seekers in Turkey. The authors show how state migration controls and multiple institutions of power try to subjectify and govern migrant lesbians in often contradictory ways, and how migrant lesbians cope, strategize, and respond. The essays complicate and rework binaries of visibility/invisibility, in/out, victim/agent, home/homeless, and belonging/unbelonging. Tellability emerges as a technology of power and violence, and conversely, as a mode of healing, (re)building a sense of self and connection to others, and creating conditions for livability and queer world-making. This book was first published as a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

More than a quarter of a million LGBTQ-identified migrants in the United States lack documentation and constantly risk detention and deportation. LGBTQ migrants around the world endure similarly precarious situations. Eithne Luibheid's and Karma R. Chavez's edited collection provides a first-of-its-kind look at LGBTQ migrants and communities. The academics, activists, and artists in the volume center illegalization, detention, and deportation in national and transnational contexts, and examine how migrants and allies negotiate, resist, refuse, and critique these processes. The works contribute to the fields of gender and sexuality studies, critical race and ethnic studies, borders and migration studies, and decolonial studies. Bridging voices and works from inside and outside of the academy, and international in scope, Queer and Trans Migrations illuminates new perspectives in the field of queer and trans migration studies. Contributors: Andrew J. Brown, Julio Capo, Jr., Anna Carastathis, Jack Caraves, Karma R. Chavez, Ryan Conrad, Elif, Katherine Fobear, Monisha Das Gupta, Jamila Hammami, Edward Ou Jin Lee, Leece Lee-Oliver, Eithne Luibheid, Hana Masri, Yasmin Nair, Bamby Salcedo, Fadi Saleh, Rafael Ramirez Solorzano, Jose Guadalupe Herrera Soto, Myrto Tsilimpounidi, Suyapa Portillo Villeda, Sasha Wijeyeratne, Ruben Zecena

"State alert as pregnant asylum seekers aim for Ireland." "Country Being Held Hostage by Con Men, Spongers, and Those Taking Advantage of the Maternity Residency Policy." From 1997 to 2004, headlines such as these dominated Ireland's mainstream media as pregnant immigrants were recast as "illegals" entering the country to gain legal residency through childbirth. As immigration soared, Irish media and politicians began to equate this phenomenon with illegal immigration that threatened to destroy the country's social, cultural, and economic fabric.

"Pregnant on Arrival" explores how pregnant immigrants were made into paradigmatic figures of illegal immigration, as well as the measures this characterization set into motion and the consequences for immigrants and citizens. While focusing on Ireland, Eithne Luibheid's analysis illuminates global struggles over the citizenship status of children born to immigrant parents in countries as diverse as the United States, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Scholarship on the social construction of the illegal immigrant calls on histories of colonialism, global capitalism, racism, and exclusionary nation building but has been largely silent on the role of nationalist sexual regimes in determining legal status. Eithne Luibheid turns to queer theory to understand how pregnancy, sexuality, and immigrants' relationships to prevailing sexual norms affect their chances of being designated as legal or illegal.

"Pregnant on Arrival "offers unvarnished insight into how categories of immigrant legal status emerge and change, how sexual regimes figure prominently in these processes, and how efforts to prevent illegal immigration ultimately redefine nationalist sexual norms and associated racial, gender, economic, and geopolitical hierarchies.

Lesbians, prostitutes, women likely to have sex across racial lines, "brought to the United States for immoral purposes, " or "arriving in a state of pregnancy" -- national threats, one and all. Since the late nineteenth century, immigrant women's sexuality has been viewed as a threat to national security, to be contained through strict border-monitoring practices. By scrutinizing this policy, its origins, and its application, Eithne Luibheid shows how the U.S. border became a site not just for controlling female sexuality but also for contesting, constructing, and renegotiating sexual identity.

Initially targeting Chinese women, immigration control based on sexuality rapidly expanded to encompass every woman who sought entry to the United States. The particular cases Luibheid examines -- efforts to differentiate Chinese prostitutes from wives, the 1920s exclusion of Japanese wives to reduce the Japanese-American birthrate, the deportation of a Mexican woman on charges of lesbianism, the role of rape in mediating women's border crossings today -- challenge conventional accounts that attribute exclusion solely to prejudice or lack of information. This innovative work clearly links sexuality-based immigration exclusion to a dominant nationalism premised on sexual, gender, racial, and class hierarchies.