Queer in a Legal Sense

Brown Citizenship and Other Lawful Fictions

Contrasting works by queer Chicano writers against the legal landscape of sexuality and migration to interrogate the “lawful fiction” that denies queer migrants citizenship and community.

Activists for immigrants and queer people under assault by US authorities focus overwhelmingly on protections presumed to be afforded by citizenship through narratives that have rarely had a place for queer immigrants, who have consistently faced special obstacles to legal entry and citizenship that only recently are being applied more widely. Queer in a Legal Sense studies literary works by gay Chicanx writers alongside instruments of law, showing through this juxtaposition how racialized queer people have been imagined as nonviable from the standpoint of citizenship. In stories by John Rechy, Arturo Islas, Rigoberto GonzÁlez, Michael Nava, and Jaime Cortez, JosÉ de la Garza Valenzuela finds what has gone missing in the migrant movement’s pursuit of gendered avenues to civic participation. Further, these works illuminate the production of fictions in canons of law, like those announced by the Florida legislature’s “Purple Pamphlet” and by the US Supreme Court in Boutilier v. INS and Bowers v. Hardwick. Queer in a Legal Sense argues that, through selective ommissions and inclusions, legal fictions place queerness outside the boundaries of citizenship and powerfully undermine queer representation in pro-migrant advocacy.