Theorizing Queer and Trans* Migrant Experiences Through Materialist Feminism


Zachary Gilpin, West Virginia University

This paper seeks to advance a theoretical paradigm capable of elucidating the situated experiences of multiply-marginalized queer migrants residing in a transitory state without succumbing to homonormative, homonationalist, or bourgeois assimilationist political ideals. In so doing, I seek to, in the words of Rosemary Hennessy, return “to reproduction queerly” (2006). This paper reflects upon previous empirical work utilizing qualitative research methods to elucidate experiences of queer Central American migrants residing in Tapachula, Mexico. Queer migrants residing in Tapachula, the most prominent town in the western portion of the Guatemala-Mexico border region, endure complex, multi-modal and multi-scalar (im)mobilities in a place-specific matrix of cis-heteronormative state apparatuses, legal precarity, economic marginality, and xenophobia. In this previous work, I drew on feminist geopolitics, materialist feminism, and queer studies to demonstrate that the state of relative (im)mobility is intimately interrelated and co-constitutive of migrants’ sense of place and their (re)articulations of sexual and gender identities. I reflect on this work and argue that materialist feminism offers a fruitful lens through which the experiences of multiply-marginalized people may be explicated without reifying or essentializing historico-geographically specific expressions of socially constructed identities. I use the term materialist in two related senses: first, to refer to a specifically materialist ontology of sociality and, second, in recognition of the academic and political lineage of anti-capitalist feminism which emerged out of historical materialism. I particularly draw on the feminist materialisms of Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, as well as the queer historical materialism of Christopher Chitty, to offer an expansive view of capitalism. Fraser’s work on the topology of capitalist society notes that the specifically capitalist mode of production depends upon supports from supposedly extra-economic domains, namely the personal/domestic, the political, and “nature”. Undergirding the abode of production—defined by the legal but coercive exploitation of labor by the owners of the means of production—exists racialized expropriation, gendered/raced/sexed social reproduction, the utilization of nature as both a pool for resources and a sink for economic externalities, and a political realm premised on the atomized bourgeois subject. These social domains remain deeply imbricated and the historical development of various stages of capitalism has involved marked contestations over the exact content of these categories—what Fraser terms “boundary struggles”. I utilize Ara Wilson’s (2004) concept of “intimate economies”—which I define as the production of use values for one’s immediate consumption or for the consumption by others within one’s social network, as well as the interface of such labor with the exchange-value logic of the legal and gray/black market economies—to elucidate the contemporary topology of latest-stage capitalism as experienced by queer Central American migrants and their transnational networks. I then describe queer migrant experiences by drawing on Rahel Jaeggi’s (2016) anti-essentialist explication of the Hegelian/Marxist concept of alienation and argue that such experiences derive, in part, from the particular class compositions of “sexual hegemony” under capitalism (Chitty 2020). In reflecting upon my previous research, I conclude by suggesting that materialist feminism offers a politically adept framework to account for queer migrant experiences by attending to capitalism, social reproduction, and identity formation whilst historicizing these concepts so as to avoid tautological, essentialist, or overly economistic explanations whilst retaining the political economic insights of the Marxist tradition.

This paper will be presented at the following session: