Description
This thesis explores the ways queer people of color conceptualize, create, and sustain communities across the various real and metaphorical borders they inhabit. I utilize Emma Pérez’s theory of decolonial imaginaries to position the spoken personal narratives of five queer migrant womxn as testimonios—decolonial texts that can further develop theoretical understandings of sexuality, race, and gender in relation to discourses of migration. Following Pérez, I center the experiences of womxn of color as a conscious attempt to (re)articulate their relationship to a society that erases them from historical, socio-political, and academic narratives. The narratives I examine suggest a need to move away from dominant-Western analyses and discourses of migration that simplify and essentialize the experiences of queer migrants of color by reducing them solely to their sexual identities. I propose what I call a decolonial spiritual turn; a move away from identity categories as central to understandings of community. Using Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating’s work on spiritual activism as part of my theoretical framework—as well as queer, postcolonial, and border theory—I describe community as felt comunidad, a collective desire for social justice that seeks the liberation and healing of queer people of color as its goal.
