Women's Studies in Communication

ISSN: 0749-1409 (Print) 2152-999X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uwsc20

Introduction: Inciting Communication Across

Queer Migration Studies and Critical Trafficking
Studies

Annie Hill & Karma R. Chávez

To cite this article: Annie Hill & Karma R. Chávez (2018) Introduction: Inciting Communication
Across Queer Migration Studies and Critical Trafficking Studies, Women's Studies in
Communication, 41:4, 300-304, DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2018.1544000

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2018.1544000

Published online: 11 Mar 2019.

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WOMEN’S STUDIES IN COMMUNICATION
2018, VOL. 41, NO. 4, 300–304
https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2018.1544000

CONVERSATION AND COMMENTARY: QUEER MIGRATION STUDIES AND

CRITICAL TRAFFICKING STUDIES

Introduction: Inciting Communication Across Queer

Migration Studies and Critical Trafficking Studies
Annie Hilla and Karma R. Chavezb
a
Department of Rhetoric and Writing, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA; bDepartment of Mexican
American and Latina/o Studies, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA

While taking a walk in Long Beach, California, an Asian American couple and their
child crossed paths with a white woman named Tarin Olson, a professor and counselor
in career planning at Golden West College. The husband, Tony Kao, posted videos of
the encounter in which Olson walks away from the couple but can be heard saying,
“You need to go back to your home country”; “It’s not safe because there’s too many
people like you here”; and “You’re making my culture extinct” (Kuruvilla). Through
these statements, Olson asserts her rightful (or, really, whiteful) place in the United
States while avowing her position is precarious because of “people like you.” Put another
way, Olson verbally accosts a family but claims “it’s not safe” for people like her.
Articulating white supremacist logic, Olson imagines herself and what she views as her
country and culture as endangered due to the presence of other Americans. Under this
logic, her lashing out becomes a form of defense against people whose country can never
be the United States. This conceit of white dominance is well-worn. White American
women have long been central to anxieties about immigration, national identity, and the
nuclear family. In the domestic sphere, white women have served as guardians of citizen-
ship charged with reproductive labor: bearing children and instilling the norms and val-
ues of citizenship. In the public sphere today, guarding citizenship involves white
women like Olson policing non-white families through declarations of racist xenophobia
and, in significant numbers, by voting for a racist xenophobe like Donald Trump.
Being interpellated into this white nationalist drama, Kao responded to Olson by stat-
ing, “We were born and raised in the United States.” Media outlets reiterated Kao’s
commonsense defense (Flaherty; Vega; Kuruvilla). His response, however, also partici-
pates in the normative logic of citizenship. Belonging to a nuclear, heterosexual, citizen
family and walking in an affluent neighborhood are expected to be sufficient shields
from racist xenophobia. Although Asian Americans are no longer a primary target of
anti-immigrant sentiment and legal restriction, they remain framed as “forever foreign.”
The legacies of exclusionary immigration policies against Asians, such as refusing entry
to women suspected of being prostitutes or due to fear of their alleged fecundity, are
lodged in dominant U.S. culture and far from latent.
Like Kao, Olson’s nationality—her right to American citizenship—derives from the
immigration of her ancestors. Yet Olson differentiates this right through a racist

CONTACT Annie Hill anniehill@utexas.edu University of Texas at Austin, Department of Rhetoric and Writing,
Parlin Hall 18, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
ß 2018 The Organization for Research on Women and Communication
 WOMEN’S STUDIES IN COMMUNICATION 301

genealogy that extols the immigration of Europeans to the United States, while raging
against Asians doing the same thing. Once Kao’s videos went viral, reporters asked to
interview Olson, who stated, “If you would like to have a full normal interview about
the displacement of European-Americans, then I gladly am available to enlighten the
public” (Vega). Olson thus situates herself in a hyphenated history of European immigra-
tion that never questions, but depends on, the dispossession of native peoples and the
oppression of non-white immigrants, slaves, and their descendants. This encounter in
California, supposedly the most progressive place in the United States, tracks with a
national rise in hate crime and hate speech since Trump’s election (Grewal; Jacobs).
Although such encounters are not new, they do signal newly emboldened bigots express-
ing themselves in broad daylight. To study racist rhetoric and its gendered and sexual
(ir)rationalities, communication scholars must analyze this speech and action across mul-
tiple sites, including on the street, online, and in the White House. We must address
how some peoples’ presence in the United States is framed as a perpetual problem or,
more pointedly, a provocation to individuals subscribing to white supremacist logic and
trying to stand their ground, while walking away from dialogue.
This forum engages entangled topics including white supremacy, immigration, citizenship,
native sovereignty, gender and sexual politics, and racialized representations by bringing
together scholars working in queer migration studies (QMS) and critical trafficking studies
(CTS). In the example mentioned above, a QMS analysis attends to how white femininity
has functioned as a national rationale for framing immigrant and citizen men of color as
threats to white women and framing non-white families as threats to white culture. A CTS
analysis elucidates how a particular political context emboldens some U.S. citizens to surveil
and scrutinize others that they assume are foreign or “out of place.” Emboldening
Americans to identify threats to the nation enables acts of aggression to be cast as well-
intentioned, protective, and patriotic. In accordance with anti-terror, anti-immigration, and
anti-trafficking agendas, U.S. citizens are responsible for seeing and saying something.
The exchange leading to this Conversation and Commentary forum began when we
organized a roundtable at the 2017 American Studies Association meeting. Considering
resonances in research on migration and trafficking, we asked why scholars in QMS
and CTS rarely find themselves in the same intellectual and political conversations.
Because we are rhetorical critics, we also wondered if an exchange across QMS and
CTS could inform and incite communication studies research. To intersect fields and
cross streams of inquiry, we invited queer migration and critical trafficking scholars to
join us in a discussion that explored our theoretical, methodological, and activist com-
mitments, as well as the tools we utilize to pursue interdisciplinary projects. The essays
emerging from that exchange constitute this forum, which also invites communication
scholars to use our resources and research to apprehend what are urgent issues of our
time: white supremacy, gender and sexual oppression, and global migration.

Intersections through queer migration studies and critical

trafficking studies
Queer and critical. These adjectives qualify the two fields brought together for this forum.
Scholars in queer migration studies and critical trafficking studies investigate migration
302 
A. HILL AND K. R. CHAVEZ

and state and nongovernmental organization (NGO) agendas that define and confine
human movement. Studying migration within nations and across national borders, QMS
and CTS are committed to centering the experiences of people who migrate and analyzing,
rather than simply adopting, state discourses and definitions, such as illegal migration, traf-
ficking, and smuggling. Animating these terms of movement are labels that legally and
symbolically differentiate people, such as migrant, trafficking victim, asylum seeker, and
refugee. QMS shows how racialized gender and sexuality shape immigration policy,
debates, and virtually all aspects of a person’s migration experience. CTS exposes how
anti-trafficking and anti-immigration agendas mobilize sexuality, race, gender, class, and
nationality to combat and control labor and mobility. Overlapping research on the sex
trade, sexual citizenship, and migratory projects put QMS and CTS in close proximity, yet
few works explicitly address our thematic, theoretical, and methodological intersections.
In some ways, the separation of queer migration studies and critical trafficking studies
makes sense. QMS foregrounds subjects of queer migration, such as undocuqueer activists’
push for the DREAM Act; binational same-sex couples’ efforts to earn sponsorship privi-
leges; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) asylum seekers’ fight for
refuge. CTS focuses on anti-trafficking agendas and their main object of concern: women
trafficked for sexual exploitation. Thus, the fields differ through alternate emphases on sub-
jects and objects in connection with the state. On one hand, QMS emphasizes self-identified
subjects who contest immigration policies, detention, and deportation. On the other hand,
CTS emphasizes how states construct trafficking victims and traffickers while urging NGOs
and citizens to act for (and against) these externally identified objects of concern. QMS
works to queer immigration histories, center queer migrants, and understand activism,
while CTS examines the ways in which state and nonstate actors define trafficking, devise
protections and penalties, and deploy anti-trafficking strategies. Different emphases help to
explain the lack of exchange across QMS and CTS. Yet our fields resonate due to a shared
commitment to question, queer, and critique regulations and restrictions on human mobil-
ity. Taken together, QMS and CTS pursue interdisciplinary, intersectional analyses of
migration; activism and advocacy; and policy development and implementation.
To showcase connections across QMS and CTS and to stimulate queer migration and
critical trafficking research in communication studies, this forum offers essays that ana-
lyze sexuality, race, gender, class, and nation in relation to migration and trafficking.
We asked the contributors to explore the following questions:

 How might theories, methods, and topics animating QMS and CTS intersect and
incite new lines of inquiry?
 How do QMS and CTS intervene in discourses, policies, activism, and advocacy
that interpellate and impact migration and trafficking?
 What are the dominant modes and media through which states, NGOs, and indi-
viduals represent and respond to queer migrants and trafficking victims?
 When and where do anti-immigration and anti-trafficking agendas converge or
contradict each other?

Crafted after our roundtable at the American Studies Association conference, each
essay offers a contributor’s analysis of a topic in QMS or CTS and reflections on how
 WOMEN’S STUDIES IN COMMUNICATION 303

our fields might better communicate to create critical studies of migration and traffick-
ing. Given the venue of the roundtable, the essays explore migration and trafficking in
a U.S. context or how U.S.-based media represent these issues.
The first essay, written by Eithne Luibheid, turns to a QMS key term, heteronormativ-
ity, and explores how U.S. policy to restrict Central American immigration separates
parents and guardians from migrant children. Parsing how the state uses family ties to
break migration chains, Luibheid reveals that family reunification—a cornerstone of
immigration policy—differentially applies to people depending on country of origin.
The tactic of targeting migrant children to trap their parents or guardians also covers
up U.S. involvement in the conflicts and structural adjustment programs creating exi-
gencies for migration in the first place.
In the second essay, Wendy S. Hesford uses a CTS concept, sexual humanitarianism,
and shows how U.S. Christian conservative media draws on anti-Muslim stereotypes to
represent violence against Yazidi women and girls. Hesford reveals a convergence in the
wars on terror and trafficking that situates sexualized violence against women and girls
as taking place outside of the United States and taking Christians as the primary vic-
tims. Through this study, Hesford invites scholarly and activist interrogations of rhet-
orical appeals that reify American and Christian exceptionalism.
Analyzing the rhetoric of crisis used at an anti-trafficking panel, Annie Hill explicitly
extends the CTS concept of sexual humanitarianism toward an intersectional framework to
elucidate local gendered and racialized representations of trafficking victims and render vis-
ible the heroic positioning of the panelists and audience. Hill reflects on the rhetorical situ-
ation of the panel and questions those who speak for victims, arouse public alarm, and
resist facing how they can harm the victims they want to discover and protect.
In the fourth essay, Julietta Hua focuses on U.S. media coverage of Foxconn workers’
suicides and the near-death of a Chinese teen who sold a kidney to buy Apple products.
Hua criticizes supply-chain activism that advocates conscientious consumerism but fails
to address extractions of human vitality as a condition of capitalist production and con-
sumption. She asks, “How can anti-trafficking campaigns that leverage corporate capital-
ism to end ‘modern slavery’ succeed if capitalism itself is never implicated as operating
on an uneven distribution of risk?”
Turning to a risky and embodied challenge, Debanuj DasGupta centers undocu-
mented trans activist Jennicet Gutierrez’s interruption of President Barack Obama’s
speech at the White House LGBT Pride celebration in 2015. In an effort to understand
activism that reassembles trauma to “resist state violence and savior projects,” DasGupta
argues that Gutierrez’s use of her body to narrate the trauma that trans migrants experi-
ence in detention, and by fashioning herself in ways that make her feel beautiful, her
activism demands an end to the detention and deportation of trans migrants without
positioning them as helpless victims or abject objects of state intervention.
In the sixth essay, April Petillo foregrounds indigenous sovereignty and settler coloni-
alism by detailing how sex trafficking interventions perpetuate violence through reliance
on settler sexual norms and borders. Tracing the historical contexts surrounding the
anti-immigration and anti-trafficking entanglements of the Page Act, Chinese Exclusion
Act, and Mann Act, Petillo argues that U.S. laws produced policed subjects through an
ideology of “Indianness”: a colonial construct that shaped the position of people
304 
A. HILL AND K. R. CHAVEZ

juxtaposed with settlers. Petillo’s analysis illustrates how laws to manage borders and
movement via sexuality in settler states turn on a logic of difference as danger.
In the final essay, Melissa Autumn White probes the risks of and reasons for naming
QMS and CTS as fields through which we identify ourselves as “minoritized feminist,
queer, and critical race scholars working in interdisciplinary modes” and attempt to
“register the representational and diversity ‘value’ of our work.” White’s analysis thus
concludes and (re)opens this forum while speaking to broader issues of knowledge pro-
duction in academia and, certainly, in the field of communication.
We end and begin again, then, by examining what it means to “own”—give an
account of and be accountable for—our scholarship, pedagogy, and performance as
members of disciplines. We pose this question to scholars in emergent and established
fields to ask that we all interrogate and rethink the borders of scholarship, pedagogy,
and disciplinary membership. White suggests that questioning the enclosures around
fields of knowledge entails confronting “methodological nationalism,” which returns us
to the tenacity of nationalist logic.
Although multiple U.S. media outlets covered the encounter between Tarin Olson
and Tony Kao, and reiterated the statements we quote in the introduction, few stories
mentioned another thing Olson said. If you listen closely, you can hear Olson repeatedly
say, “Invading!” That a U.S. citizen would accuse other citizens of “invading” the
United States in 2018 should come as no surprise, but it must give us pause. To disinter
the roots grounding “rightful” claims to citizenship and belonging, this forum contends
that the local, national, and transnational circulation of logics underlying such state-
ments requires intersectional analyses across multiple fields, including queer migration
studies, critical trafficking studies, and communication studies.

Works cited
Flaherty, Colleen. “Off-Campus Bigotry.” Inside Higher Ed, 7 Mar. 2018, https://www.insidehighered.
com/news/2018/03/07/college-says-professor-leave-after-telling-asian-american-family-go-back-your-
home.
Grewal, Daisy. “Do Trump Tweets Spur Hate Crimes?” Scientific American, 26 June 2018, https://
www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-trump-tweets-spur-hate-crimes1/.
Jacobs, Tom. “Trump’s Election Made Bigotry More Acceptable.” Pacific Standard, 21 Feb. 2018,
https://psmag.com/social-justice/trumps-election-made-bigotry-more-acceptable.
Kuruvilla, Carol. “College Faculty Member Caught on Video Telling Asian-American Man to ‘Go
Back to Your Home Country.’” Huffington Post, 9 Mar. 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/
entry/college-counselor-asian-american-home-country_us_5aa02a5de4b002df2c60335c.
Vega, Priscella. “Golden West College Professor on Leave After Video Shows Her Telling Couple
to ‘Go Back to Your Home Country.’” Los Angeles Times, 6 Mar. 2018, http://www.latimes.
com/socal/daily-pilot/news/tn-dpt-me-golden-west-20180305-story.html.