This paper explores the potentially generative ambivalences of rhetorically embedding „the family“ as a site of political possibility in relation to mobility justice struggles. As feminist, queer, and decolonial scholars have well-established, „the family“ is a site of gender and sexual regulation, normalization/pathology, and a racialized technology of biopolitics and nation-state (re)formation. It is a central concept mobilizing moral(izing) discourses around sex work as a coercive form of labor and queerness as a modality of social destruction and nihilism. In Trump’s Amerika, however, #FamiliesBelongTogether has emerged as an ameliorative site of organizing against detention and deportation regimes that are weaponizing familial bonds and reliances in an effort to apprehend mobility in the name of national and ideological security. As those racialized as „migrants“, „refugees“, and „trafficked persons“ are subject to ever-intensifying tactics of dehumanization, how might we turn the political „ambivalence [of #FamiliesBelongTogether] into something else“ (Anzaldua 1999:10), a „something else“ that can begin to inch toward our otherwise utopian imaginaries of the abolition of borders, prisons, and capitalism?

Melissa Autumn White is an assistant professor of LGBT Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and co-founder of Feminist Researchers Against Borders, which held its first Summer School „Taster“ in Athens, Greece in July 2018. A queer migration and mobility justice studies scholar, her research has been published in Women’s Studies in Communication, Feminist Studies, Radical History Review, Sexualities, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies as well as numerous anthologies. Her first book, the co-edited volume Mobile Desires: The Politics and Erotics of Mobility Justice, was published by Palgrave in 2015.

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