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