Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border.

ENTRY DENIED: CONTROLLING SEXUAUTY AT THE BORDER

By Eithne Luibheid. University of Minnesota, 2002.

Eithne Luibheid's Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border is an ambitious and innovative attempt to explore the connections between sexuality and immigration in the United States. Her book, originally conceived to theorize the relationships between gay/lesbian and immigration issues, was transformed to address the public debates and legislature interventions on immigration in the mid-1990s. It is a book that serves many purposes. First, as she explains, it connects the struggles of immigrant lesbians and gays and undocumented heterosexual Latinas who are working and raising children in the U.S. but who became systemically targeted by anti-immigrant legislature like Proposition 187 in California. Second, and most important, her intention is to explicate how the "border"--as represented by the immigration service--has become a site for not just controlling women's sexuality but also for constructing sexual identities, norms, and behaviors. Hegemonic heterosexuality, in other words, is "manufactured and oppressively enforced by state institutions that include the immigration apparatus" (139).

Racial, gender, sexual, class, and nationality hierarchies of every kind produce such hegemonic heterosexuality. "Entry Denied," she writes in her introduction, "therefore explores how U.S. federal immigration control has been organized around sexuality, in ways that intersect with gender, race, and class criteria without being reducible to them" (xii). Finally, as Luibheid argues, both immigration and sexuality scholarship need new theoretical frameworks and methodologies.

In general, she stays committed to her vision. In this regard, her work has much resonance, on the one hand, with the discourse of sexuality as articulated by French philosopher Michel Foucault in the first volume of History of Sexuality and in Discipline and Punish, and with scholarship on transnationalism by Nina Glick Schiller, Patricia Pessar, and Aihwah Ong, who elaborate why people seek legal status even when they do not expect permanent settlement in the host country. The result is a quite powerful interdisciplinary study connecting immigration/border control, sexual regulation, and racial formation in the U.S.

The structure of the book is meant to address both the conceptual framework and the thematic content of her study. It is organized in five chapters and includes an introduction and a conclusion. It begins with an interpretation of Foucault's framework on sexuality, followed by an explication of three lines of inquiry that will infiltrate the entire study. According to Luibheid, these areas of inquiry are: first, "an insistence on the centrality of sexuality as an axis of power"; second, "a healthy skepticism toward all claims about immigrants' "real" identities, sexual or otherwise"; and lastly, "the ways that writing, including the creation of official immigration records and the books that scholars write based on these records, is centrally implicated in disciplining and subjecting immigrants" (xvii-xviii). Chapter one is an overview of how laws and policies under the federal immigration control system have influenced sexuality-based exclusion since the late nineteenth century. The book continues with four sections that form the basis of the study. In each section, she elaborates the book's central theme--how some women are barred from entering the U.S. because their sexualities present a threat to national security: She discusses Chinese prostitutes and the Page Law of 1875; Japanese picture brides from 1908-1920, exclusionist writings on childbearing, and the Immigration Act of 1924; the deportation case of Mexican-born Sara Harb Quiroz in 1961 on charges of lesbianism, the system of exclusion of lesbians and gays, and "procedures" like sexual confessions; and, finally, rape, the Refugee/Asylum system and Border Patrol. This breakdown enables her to conduct close analysis of the multiple discourses and processes of exclusion that are varied in time, location, and the individuals involved. Yet, taken together, these specific cases acknowledge, too, the unrelenting biases in the border-monitoring system that are based on sexuality, race, gender, class, and nationality. In the last section of the book, Luibheid situates herself in the present debates about immigration and sexuality and presents her views about the implications of her work for future research.

Based on court documents and decisions, congressional hearings, immigration-service manuals, exclusionist writings, and newspaper accounts, Luibheid makes many claims in her book, some substantiated, some illustrated by detailed analysis of particular writings or documents: the most detailed discussions are on V.S. McClatchy's anti-Japanese pamphlet "Japanese Immigration and Colonization", the Quiroz case, and the rape of undocumented Mexican woman Blanca Bernal by Border Patrol Agent Larry Selders in 1993. Others interpretations are put out there more summarily for the reader to think about. At times, she makes broad sweeping statements, especially in building up cumulative arguments or establishing connections between sexuality, immigration and other categories of analysis. She expresses many ideas, but they do not always fall into place, at least not obviously. For example, in the chapter on rapes of undocumented women, Luibheid raises a very important question: "If not to keep them out, then what ends does the rape of undocumented women serve, from the government's point of view?" (129) In moving through her arguments, she discusses but only very briefly the following: feminist critique of rape as a "technology" for the violent production of social hierarchies, forms of violence against women in workplaces and homes, and Lisa Lowe (yes, a brief mention of her name). She ends this session by stating that the responses to rape by both the refugee/asylum system and the Border Patrol "contribute to the reproduction of exclusionary nationalism" (134). Although I understand perfectly well the importance of such a conclusion, especially in relation to the current discourse on nation building and imperialism in the field, I must say that a big claim like this cannot be made so hastily. A more cumulative directional sense of overlapping/ intersecting dimensions towards the conclusion would perhaps be helpful.

Luibheid has taken as her responsibility to be one of the first in the field to examine the linkages between sexuality and immigration. Her interpretation of the "circuit of discourses"--by extending Foucault's framework--is, in my opinion, the most successful endeavor in the project. Her detailed analysis of written documents enables the reader to grasp, case after case, how exclusion is created and maintained at the border. In so doing, she succeeds in what she originally intends to demonstrate in the study, which, as she explains in the introduction, "focuses primarily on how the immigration service tries to determine if an applicant is eligible for admission or not" (xxv). The reader is reminded both in the introduction and in the conclusion that this is not a book about the agency of women. I think this is smart because it is exactly the question that I found myself asking throughout the reading of the book. Towards the end, however, I am convinced that a critique on the oppressive exclusionary practices at the border is right on target. The beast to be slain, that is to say; is, indeed, how hegemonic heterosexuality is "manufactured and oppressively enforced by state institutions that include the immigration service". As a pioneer, Luibheid succeeds in making a significant contribution to the field by raising questions about a wide range of critical issues--e, specially issues that are timely and at the heart of scholarly inquiry. As such, Entry Denied will have a wide appeal and make a good choice for use as a classroom text.