6. Queer and Trans Migrants, Colonial Logics, and the Politics of Refusal

Abstract

I was interested in the larger picture, in the discursive, material and moral territory that was simultaneously historical and contemporary ... and the ways in which Kahnawakero:non, the "people of Kahnawake," had refused the authority of the state at almost every turn.The ways in which their formation of the initial membership code ... was refused; the ways in which their interactions with border guards at the international boundary line were predicated upon a refusal; how refusal worked in everyday encounters to enunciate repeatedly to ourselves and to outsiders that "this is who we are, this who you are, these are my rights."-Audra Simpson, "On Ethnographic Refusal"[T]he path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal.In The Undercommons if we begin anywhere, we begin with the right to refuse what has been refused to you.Citing Gayatri Spivak, [Fred] Moten and [Stefano] Harney call this refusal the "first right" and it is a game-changing kind of refusal in that it signals that refusal of the choices as offered.-Jack Halberstam, "The Wild Beyond"