Queer Narratives of Migration and Sobrevivencia in the “Ordinariness” of State Violence

Abstract

This article documents the precariousness of a queer undocumented family attempting to make their lives within racist heteronormative regimes in the United States.  Using film as a methodology by which to engage their experiences and trace their memories of violent encounters with the state, it highlights the nuanced afterlife of ‘unspectacular’forms of state violence mediated by race, gender and sexuality.  Conceptualizing the state as a system of discourses and bodily practices diffused in the everyday, I make legible the depths to which violence materializes in their bodies.  The acts of sobrevivencia, or of survival, they enact as inassimilable subjects traversing the violent myriad of geographically and corporeally inscribed borders, suggests these moments of state encounters are not exceptional.  Rather, they point to the ease with which heteropatriarchal lines of race, sexuality, and gender are drawn and given coherence within a presumed multicultural society.