Abstract
Over the past two and a half decades, a growing body of scholarship animated by the works of scholars such as Luibhéid (2002), Manalansan (2003), and Cantu (2009) has intervened in international migration research to argue that racialized gender and sexualities are integral to every aspect of the migration process. In the late 90s and early 2000s, this work emerged under the mantel of “queer migration studies.” More recently, such work has been complemented by trans studies scholars like Aren Aizura (2018) and Toby Beauchamp (2019). This latter group explicitly center their analyses on normative gender and transgender subjectivity to understand, for example, how the mobility of certain trans people is enabled through imperial and racial logics and how the state surveillance of gender conformity both opens and forecloses access to international migration.
Tristan Josephson's pithy monograph, On Transits and Transitions is one of the latest and most significant contributions to “queer and trans migration studies” as he studies sites that have been preoccupied by queer migration scholars like asylum and marriage but places trans migrants at the center. Josephson convincingly argues that trans migrants offer a valuable lens for highlighting the ways U.S. migration regimes constitute, repress, and enable all migrants who interface with the system while, in turn, such disparate interactions sustain U.S. citizenship.
In an exploration of asylum, marriage, and detention, Josephson shows that the experiences of diverse trans migrants traversing and being incorporated into these systems reflect how migration writ large works for everyone given the norms it demands. Perhaps more surprisingly, Josephson's study of immigration law reveals how the U.S. state defines and manages citizenship through its expectations related to race, gender, sexuality, labor, and propriety.
In the opening two body chapters, Josephson takes up the question of asylum, and how it can promise protection for a select number of trans migrants who can adequately perform and communicate their trauma and fit into a limited number of established gender and sexual categories. Although this limited path to inclusion has often been lauded by scholars and advocates alike, Josephson advises caution as this exceptional form of inclusion legitimates the expulsion of other migrants in the vast U.S. detention and deportation regime.
In the third chapter, Josephson considers how marriage is a pathway to citizenship for privileged trans migrants who meet certain norms for inclusion, such as having the appropriate gender designation on their official state documents and being legally married in a state that recognizes such unions (his study is largely situated before Obergefell v. Hodges). Although this mode of inclusion works for some, Josephson also shows that the terms of that inclusion come with its own state discipline—ensuring the right socioeconomic status, heterosexuality, and more.
In the final body chapter, Josephson interrogates the detention system to show how transgender migrants’ inclusion in federal detention standards, far from being a form of protection, is actually a tactic of governmentality. Josephson's analysis reveals that the criminalization of trans migrants inside the detention centers mirrors their social criminalization and exclusion from national belonging.
For those who are deeply seeped in queer and trans migration scholarship, several of Josephson's conclusions might feel like familiar or even well-trodden territory. For example, a number of scholars have attended to the ways that the new 2005 requirements put significant power in the hands of immigration judges to determine the credibility of asylum cases. Others have also shown how nonprofit organizations have been complicit with the detention system as it has expanded to incorporate more “humane” practices that participate in the maintenance and expansion of the system as a whole. But the larger takeaways of Josephson's work warrant serious scholarly attention. First, and as suggested above, Josephson makes abundantly clear that trans migrants are the ideal prism that reflects the ins and outs of how the U.S. immigration and asylum law operate for everyone. Second, Josephson shows how the immigration system does not accommodate the subjectivities of trans migrants who are forced to interface with it. He reveals how trans migrants find important spaces for agency within these processes and regimes that are crucial for their well-being as well as for scholarly understanding of their complex lives.
For these and more reasons, On Transits and Transitions is a must read for any scholar of U.S. and international migration. Moreover, it will find an appropriate home in interdisciplinary graduate and undergraduate classes that seek to help students understand the contours of migration regimes and to avoid simplistic analyses of those regimes that take for granted the state's understandings of what it is doing—including, protecting, and impartially adjudicating. In the end, Josephson's work is a treatise that insists that all serious immigration scholarship must reckon with the way immigration regimes constitute and impact all migrants, even if the identities they hold appear only to be marginal or minor. Our full understanding of immigration and citizenship, necessitates such a reckoning.