In her essay “Thinking Sex,” Gayle Rubin argues that in times of conflict, debates about sexuality and sexual values “acquire immense symbolic weight. Disputes over sexual behavior often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity” (143). Explain how this relates to immigration law, both historically and in the contemporary period, using at least two different specific examples.
We have spent much of this unit thinking through how sexuality is policed at the border, and how immigration is policed more broadly. Why is sexuality so heavily policed, either historically or in the contemporary period, and what do you think should be the policy for either new immigrants, or undocumented immigrants already in the United States?
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