Hi friends!
At the end of this month’s resource list, I asked if we are being honest when we say we are fighting for everyone? When I ask that, I don’t just mean generally, do we believe that all people deserve liberation; I mean, are we actually thinking of everyone, and are we being intersectional in that thinking? This month’s deep dive forces us to take a look at the ways in which intersecting marginalized identities and experiences require us to be both intentional and expansive in our liberatory efforts!
The history of queer exclusion from U.S. immigration is not a side story to the broader criminalization of queer and trans life; it is one of its most revealing chapters. For most of the twentieth century, queerness was literally written into American immigration law as grounds for exclusion and deportation. “Sexual deviants,” “psychopathic personalities,” people deemed threats to the “moral fabric of the nation” (did you laugh at the absurdity of the idea of this nation even having moral fabric? I did, because, what lol!!!?!?) was the very real legal language of the state, and was used to bar, detain, and remove people whose only crime was existing outside the hetero-normative binary that colonial power decided was the only acceptable form of being human.
