On Transits and Transitions
198 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback
Release Date:14 Oct 2022
ISBN:9781978813564
Hardcover
Release Date:14 Oct 2022
ISBN:9781978813571
On Transits and Transitions
Trans Migrants and U.S. Immigration Law
Rutgers University Press
Celebrations of the “transgender tipping point” in the second decade of the twenty-first century occurred at the same time of heightened debates and anxieties about immigration in the United States. On Transits and Transitions explores what the increased visibility of trans people in the public sphere means for trans migrants and provides a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse that the inclusion of transgender issues in law and policy represents the progression of legal equality for trans communities. Focusing on the intersection of immigration and trans rights, Josephson presents a careful and innovative examination of the processes by which the category of transgender is produced through and incorporated into the key areas of asylum law, marriage and immigration law, and immigration detention policies. Using mobility as a critical lens, On Transits and Transitions captures the insecurity and precarity created by U.S. immigration control and related processes of racialization to show how im/mobility conditions citizenship and national belonging for trans migrants in the United States.
The first in depth study of U.S. transgender immigration policy, On Transits and Transitions deftly illuminates the U.S immigration policy in which transgender became a recognized asylum seeker category. By brilliantly exploding the myth that more visibility and recognition for marginalized transgender people means expanded justice and equity, Josephson teaches us that citizenship and national belonging are not 'equal opportunity,' but are instead subject to inequitable racial, national, and gender hierarchies that persist even as we might assume they are improving.
Tristan Josephson critically examines how three very different policy regimes—asylum, immigration through marriage, and immigration detention—distill transgender migrants into the 'deserving' and everyone else. An indispensable contribution to the scholarship on trans migrants that exposes the limits of a politics of recognition.
TRISTAN JOSEPHSON is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at California State University, Sacramento.
Introduction
1 Visibility and Immutability in Asylum Law and Procedure
2 Desiring the Nation: Transgender Trauma in Asylum Declarations
3 Trans Citizenship: Marriage, Immigration, and Neoliberal Recognition
4 Transfer Points: Trans Migrants and Immigration Detention
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
1 Visibility and Immutability in Asylum Law and Procedure
2 Desiring the Nation: Transgender Trauma in Asylum Declarations
3 Trans Citizenship: Marriage, Immigration, and Neoliberal Recognition
4 Transfer Points: Trans Migrants and Immigration Detention
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
