ABSTRACT
The ways that sexuality shapes and is reshaped by international migration has long been implicitly acknowledged, including by scholarship on “marriage migration” and on the linkages among late nineteenth-century industrialization, immigration, and the sex industry. Nonetheless, the major social science disciplines have generally addressed sexuality and international migration as separate areas. In recent decades, however, scholars have increasingly situated sexuality and international migration in critical conversation. In the process, they have drawn on and transformed key theories, methodologies, and research practices within and across the disciplines. Historically, migration scholarship-including immigration, emigration, diaspora, and trans-
nationalism research-has ignored, marginalized, or trivialized sexuality, or else subsumed it under rubrics like gender, deviance, or morality (Manalansan 2006). In recent decades, however, scholars have begun to insist that sexuality must be analyzed as a distinct axis that structures all migration processes. Although groundbreaking scholarship often focused on gay migrant experiences, scholars’ purpose was never to simply “add” lesbians, gay men, or other figures to existing migration histories, theories, and methods. Instead, they have shown that sexuality structures all migration experiences, and migration theories, methodologies and epistemologies must be reformulated accordingly. Illustrating this insight, several recent works explore how normative heterosexuality and marriage, and the affective bonds that characterize them, become reformulated across transnational circuits that span international borders. Other scholarship explores how diasporas and borderlands may be conceived without reinscribing sexually normative logics that often inform theories of race, ethnicity, culture, and space.
