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Queer Migration and Critical Trafficking Studies: Notes on and Beyond Containment

In the fall of 2017, a group of invited scholars working on critical trafficking and queer migration studies came together for a roundtable discussion on “Trafficking Theory, Migrating Method, and Cross-Disciplinary Pedagogy” at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association under the conference theme “Pedagogies of Dissent.” Our conversation considered “what queer migration and trafficking scholars can learn from one another when they constellate their shared interests in sexuality, gender, race, nation, and migration, among other intersections” (Hill & Ch avez, 2017). At the heart of the matter was the unspoken question: Why are queer migration and critical trafficking scholars rarely in explicit conversation? Inasmuch as queer migration and critical trafficking scholars attempt not only to theorize the world but change it, these questions go beyond provocation and gesture toward a potential epistemic scandal (cf. Chow, 2006, p. 13). Despite shared commitments to analyzing the intimate entanglements of racialized gender and sexualities with trans/national migration regimes, activism, law, and policy, how have we become cordoned off from each other? Through what processes and with what effects? To me, these questions suggest a growing sense of fragmentation among a critical mass of university-“housed” feminist and queer scholars on the left who are engaged in similar questions and problematics oriented toward social justice and the world beyond the academy—in short, among scholars committed to enacting pedagogies of dissent. I argue that an ongoing sense of emergence (rather than fleeting relief) from this state of fragmentation cannot be leveraged through containment strategies effected by enunciating that the clusters of concerns we share in common are fields of inquiry. I am wary of the nominalization politics involved in naming queer migration and critical trafficking studies as such (i.e., QMS, CTS, and the telling shorthand and capitalization that entails). Why? Because I am suspicious that part of this strategy, as a subjectifying response to the left’s fragmentation, is normalizing to the extent that it stems from an intensifying demand within a neoliberal institutional politics of recognition to identify ourselves in intelligible alignment with increasingly fetishized niche forms of knowledge production which can be branded, distributed, and consumed as commodities. In the affective and political economy of ideas that higher education has become, queer