Lives That Resist Telling

<p><em>Lives That Resist Telling</em> challenges the resounding scholarly silence about the lives of migrant women who identify as lesbian queer or nonheteronormative. Reworking social science methodologies and theories the essays explore the experiences of migrant Latina lesbians in Los Angeles; Latina lesbians whose transnational lives span the borders between the United States and Mexico; non-heteronormative migrant Muslim women in Norway and Denmark; economically privileged Chinese lesbian or <i>lala</i> women in Australia; and Iranian lesbian asylum-seekers in Turkey. The authors show how state migration controls and multiple institutions of power try to subjectify and govern migrant lesbians in often contradictory ways and how migrant lesbians cope strategize and respond.</p><p>The essays complicate and rework binaries of visibility/invisibility in/out victim/agent home/homeless and belonging/unbelonging. Tellability emerges as a technology of power and violence and conversely as a mode of healing (re)building a sense of self and connection to others and creating conditions for livability and queer world-making.</p><p>This book was first published as a special issue of the <i>Journal of Lesbian Studies</i>.</p>