Promiscuous Approaches to Mexican Migrant Sexuality: Queerness and the Reproduction of the "Anti-Citizen"

This paper brings together the fields of Latin@ studies, migration studies, and queer theory to consider the case of Blanca Borrego, the undocumented Mexican migrant who was arrested at her gynecologist’s office in a Houston... [ view full abstract ]

This paper brings together the fields of Latin@ studies, migration studies, and queer theory to consider the case of Blanca Borrego, the undocumented Mexican migrant who was arrested at her gynecologist’s office in a Houston suburb on September 3, 2015. Leveraging Juana María Rodríguez’ claim that queerness “is a challenge to constructions of heteronormativity,” (2003, 24) I argue that Borrego’s racialized sexuality sits outside of and in opposition to constructions of (white) heteronormativity. Specifically, I claim that heteronormativity is reserved for US citizens wherein “healthy” sexuality is practiced within the bounds of a reproductive family – one that (re)produces citizens. On the other hand, Borrego’s sexuality is imagined to excessively reproduce her deviance. As Jonathan Inda and Julie Dowling have argued, in a neoliberal state, one marked by an expectation that citizens ought to care for their own personal security, the proper citizen is governed and secured through the market, while the “deviant anti-citizen – the criminal, the poor person, the homeless person, the welfare recipient – who is deemed incapable of managing his or her own risks” must be managed and disciplined by the state through the mechanisms of criminal justice (2013, 4). In this context, Borrego is imagined as the criminal anti-citizen who perpetrated identity theft. What is not explicitly articulated in the coverage of the case, what need not be uttered is the fear not just that Borrego is an anti-citizen who is unable to manage herself in the neoliberal state but that her body is the mechanism through which anti-citizens are reproduced. And so Blanca Borrego’s queerness reorders the landscape of the doctor’s office. Where she one minute was standing in a space of health and support, the way her body was read conjures the logics of violent exclusion.