Working with the Complexity and Refusing to Simplify: Undocuqueer Meaning Making at the Intersection of LGBTQ and Immigrant Rights Discourses

This study brings gender, sexuality, and immigration status, and their conceptual margins, to the center of analysis via the narratives of 31 self-identified undocuqueer immigrants. Undocuqueer immigrants ascribe meaning to their experiences by producing alternate subjectivities and subject positions that resist multiple axes of oppression. These subjectivities problematize the exclusionary repercussions of single-axis identity categorization that mostly benefit those who already have some structural privileges. Undocuqueer as a form of resistance to essentialized identity discourses was evidenced in participants’ opposition to heteronormative, homonormative, and DREAMer discourses. This study has implications for further understanding the way that queer politics and identity interact with various axes of inequality.