This project locates and names forms of alien intimacies in order to make visible the ways conceptions of complicity and resistance within discussions of queer kinships and queer reproductivity are conditioned by questions of race, nationality, and citizenship. By attending to such alien intimacies, this project investigates the limits of queer kinship imaginaries in two distinct forms. The first is characterized by social movements that claim queer alterity and non-complicity to state power, and posit reproductive queer kinship as a vehicle for liberation or radical social change. The second is an anti-normative queer theory approach that works to critique queer kinship’s homonormative complicities with the state and consigns queer reproduction to the realm of homorepronormative assimilation to hegemonic family forms. I enter into these discussions of queer kinships and interrogate their limits by reading immigration laws and how they have been used to reproduce the nation and its national imaginaries of racial and sexual purity through family morality. In particular, I read immigration laws as functioning not just through their exclusion of undesirable subjects, but also their production of a contingent class of alien citizenship of those are administratively incorporated into the nation, but nevertheless live under the threat of exclusion due to their detainable and deportable identity/status. Immigration law thus differentially limits and resources the extent to which certain racialized subjects can socially and biologically reproduce family across both exclusionary and inclusionary barriers. The entrance of immigration law into sites of social and sexual reproduction breaks down the public-private divide and provides a different entry point into discussions of queer family making practices as alternative social politics.
This project’s approach differs from the important ways feminist social reproduction theory and queer theory have broken down the public/private in their respective investigations into both the necessity of under-/unpaid work of social reproduction as the precondition for reproducing the conditions of production, as well as the ways sex, as a purportedly private category of acts and identities, is nevertheless mediated by sexualized publics. Alien intimacies attends to the constitutive racialized conditions that organize feminist inquiries into social reproduction and queer theories of alternative social reproduction. Through its functions as a racializing technology, immigration constitutes the racialized conditions that undergird and organize views of social and sexual reproduction as sites available for radical transformation. By reading these sites of queer kinships through their constitutive racializations as resident alien sexual bottomhood, this project attends to the ways feminist, queer, and critical race studies continue to fail to theorize the ways in which these sites and forms of social change and transformation, which we so heavily invest in the name of liberatory politics, can only operate through investments in certain kinds of complicities with domination. Re-entering these conversations from the perspective of the resident alien bottom, makes it impossible to turn away from such investments in complicity. The resident alien bottom becomes thinkable only through its precarious racialized and sexualized alien citizenship, which can only be understood by acknowledging some level of its complex complicity with the same state that consigned it to its inhabited precarity.
This dissertation takes up three major inquiries. The first is a question about how alternative intimacies, such as those imagined through queer kinship, come to reproduce dominant structures of intimacy. The second is a question about how critiques of alternative intimacies’ reproduction of dominance often themselves operate through terms of binary complicity and resistance organized by constitutive racial conditions. Lastly is a question of the politics of queer and feminist knowledge production, highlighted by the ways this project’s mixed methods approach organizes through Octavia Butler’s science fictional short story “Bloodchild,” as well as the detours, delays, and impossibilities that emerged from my own identifications with determining forms of racialization that simultaneously catalyzed, barred, and reproduced this project. Revealed in “Bloodchild’s” methodological innovation and the autoethnographic form that weaves throughout my subsequent arguments, this project works through a formal intervention into the dissertation genre by exploring my own (dis)identifications with dominant racialized social orders that interrupt my scholarly inquiry into the questions above, as well as become reproduced through my own racialized feminist research anxieties and resident alien intimacies.