Siobhan Somerville, an associate professor in the Department of English and the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, presented her ongoing research project, ‘Queer Exclusions: Sexuality and U.S. Citizenship,’ Thurs., March 27, at the Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark, as part of the Out at CHM series.
____________________
Siobhan Somerville and Jennifer Brier at Out at CHM. Photo by Yasmin Nair
U.S. Citizenship,’ Thurs., March 27, at the Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark, as part of the Out at CHM series.
____________________
Somerville’s talk addressed the history of sexuality and immigration, and its relevance to ongoing battles around queer immigration issues, such as the HIV ban (in place since 1987) and the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA). She touched upon different points of this complex history, starting with the 1967 case of Clive Boutilier, a Canadian immigrant who was denied citizenship and deported back to Canada because of evidence of his homosexuality. According to Somerville, Boutilier’s is a tragic example of the overt exclusion of gays, but focusing only on how sexuality has been part of exclusionary mechanisms in relation to citizenship allows us to rely on a ‘liberal model of inclusion’ as a corrective. In her talk, Somerville sought to complicate the issues surrounding the link between sexuality and immigration. In particular, she focused on the rhetoric of family and family reunification, a driving principle in immigration reform, used both by straights and gays seeking to ensure that their non-citizen partners and families be allowed to stay with them.
Somerville touched upon points in the history of U.S. immigration law where ‘family’ has been defined in racialized and sexualized terms. For instance, the Dawes Act of 1887 resulted in Native American lands being divided into allotments for individual Native American families as a condition of their naturalization into U.S. citizenship. (Somerville pointed out the strangeness of Native Americans having to petition for citizenship in a land that had been theirs to begin with.) Such allotments replaced a traditional collective mode of ownership with privatized ownership, and also enforced changes in the family structure: Native American women were admonished to emulate white women of the time by reducing themselves to their roles as keepers of their home. Similarly, 19th-century immigration laws that specifically targeted Chinese immigrants forbade the entry of prostitutes and single women. All these case show ‘ … the historical context for how family rhetoric was deployed to produce [an] economic sexualized, and racialised capitalist model of household labor.’
She returned in the end to immigration issues facing queers today, including asylum, the HIV ban and UAFA. According to Somerville, the UAFA has captured attention in part because it’s framed within an either/or binary: those against it are deemed homophobic and those for it gay affirmative. But it still ties us to a concept of family that has a history of excluding specifically raced and gendered subjects. She suggested that it was necessary to ask why we should remain in the bind of family, given its history in immigration law: ‘What’s the model driving our preferences?’ and what might be alternatives to family-based reform? The question and answer session raised issues about alternative models of defining family, issues around health care, and immigration reform.