Lawyers instruct their clients to make performative and fleeting modifications in comportment to appease judges or officers. But how do they guide their clients to routinize everyday behaviors and lifestyles seen as desirable and respectable by the state? Expanding on theories of social control, nonstate governance, and lawyering, this paper considers the role of lawyers who guide mixed-status couples applying for marriage-based green card and naturalization petitions in the United States. Interviews with immigration attorneys, paralegals, and nonprofit advocates reveal their three-step strategy to shape intimate dimensions of mixedstatus couples’ lives that connote marital legitimacy. First, lawyers translate immigration law into personalized checklists that function as the blueprint of marriage that couples must follow. Then, lawyers instruct and correct their clients’ family behaviors so that they are enacted and documented in compliance with vague immigration law as interpreted by the archetypal immigration officer. Crucially, lawyers help couples routinize and painstakingly archive these curated lifestyles for ongoing adjudication. Findings suggest that nonstate actors like immigration lawyers are more than intermediaries who broker and coach; they become domestic counselors who, as indirect agents of the state, coerce subjects toward acculturation.

This 4,000-word state-of-the-field review article provides an accessible survey of the nascent field of queer migration studies. I bring together existing research in sociology, anthropology, political science, ethnic studies, and queer studies, and identify future directions for research. The article is designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate audiences, as well as anyone looking to understand where queer migration studies stands in 2025.

part of the inaugural issue of Sex & Sexualities (the newest ASA journal)

The paper draws on interviews with a hard-to-reach population, Korean unwed mothers, to examine how tie severance unfolds through interpersonal interactions involving culture in networks. I argue that tie severance requires relational work of identifying network management strategies appropriate to the context, whereby one draws on broader cultural values and then matches them to network-specific norms, expectations, and meanings. I propose a typology of tie severance processes, which are distinguished by two dimensions (actor and motive), and identify unique types of relational work associated with each process. These findings provide an alternative explanation for how networks dissolve, which do not occur simply as the result of network structure or decay functions but fundamentally involve shared culture in networks.

Tackling how racial justice and climate crisis are entangled, this essay introduces a speculative cartography experiment entitled The World We Became: Map Quest 2350. A collaboration between a collective of artists, poets, academics, curators, architects, and activists, this digital humanities project maps global ecological crises and shared Black, Asian, Pacific, Middle Eastern, Latin American, Caribbean, and Indigenous futures. Intentionally produced in a multimedia format, the born-digital speculative design experiment features visual and audio components presenting a planetary vision of the year 2350 as an underwater future in ruins. The atlas connects five transnational imaginaries that rescript the geographic boundaries of what we currently understand to be South Asia, the South Pacific, the Middle East, North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Situating nation-state borders as recent constructs, in this creative exercise the natural environment becomes a model for imagining interspecies relationality and co-presence. Mangroves and atolls form portals to speculative futures of non-human existence beyond the climate crisis and the impact of racial extractive capitalism. Anchored in five locales, the collective text brings together a global vision of survivance addressing migration, dispossession, Asian diaspora, Native sovereignty, Black fugitivity, and broader questions of global indigeneity. With life emerging from the ruins, this atlas forms a digital blueprint of suboceanic futures and the practice of interrogating what justice could mean in the far future.

Portals to Oceanic Kinship: Pacifica Atlantis

Andrea Chung, Heidi Amin-Hong, Juhwan Seo, Melanie Puka, Priyanka Sen, and Tauren Nelson

We begin from the atoll as a portal to envision a future oriented toward more-than-human modes of kinship and care.

read more at Dark Laboratory

The purpose of this study is to explore the ways in which LGBTQ campers and counsellors are shaped by and shape summer camp. Summer camps are often the place where many US youth begin to learn about sex and sexuality. It is a unique and important spatial locale that is understudied in both sexualities and wider sociological enquiry. To better understand the impact of summer camp experiences on sexualities, the study analyses retrospective interviews with former campers about their experiences at a summer camp, as well as podcasts and blogs. We address two key areas of camp life: sexual firsts and being openly queer at camp. Many campers are less likely to be out at camp than they are at home. The exception to this is when there are visible staff or counsellors that are out at camp. Despite not being out, many LGBTQ campers have their first sexual experience at camp, though many do not see it as sexual at the time of the act. Our findings reaffirm the importance of contact with queer people, both for LGBTQ acceptance from straight/cis people and for the self-acceptance of young queer persons. We conclude by discussing how this space is unique and how it can be improved for LGBTQ people's experiences and development at summer camps.

I am developing my first monograph, which examines the intimate lives of queer immigrants undergoing immigration adjudication. Set in the post-DOMA context of marriage equality, this project considers how family and sexual practices, queer and immigrant identity, and political consciousness are shaped by the law. Drawing on interviews with queer immigrants and their U.S. citizen partners, as well as immigration lawyers, I show how queer immigrant families are transformed by the law as they seek recognition from the state.

U.S. immigration law’s preference for family reunification is motivated by a normative vision of who belongs in the nation and what the nation stands for, which shapes the family practices of immigrants seeking legal recognition from the state. Modifications to quotidian practices that immigrant families undertake to make themselves legible to the bureaucratic state, I reveal, reflect logics of liberal inclusion in U.S. exceptionalism. Using 80 in-depth interviews with members of queer binational couples petitioning for a marriage-based green card and legal professionals providing guidance, I argue that the couples’ everyday behaviors are enactments of U.S. nationalist projects legitimized by queer immigrant inclusion. Respondents recount three practices that characterize what I call quotidian homonationalism: 1) establishing a private household with cohabitation and joint finances; 2) integrating into the American family via kin relations; and 3) 1) embodying “good moral character” through monogamy. The nuclear family is not simply the central unit of the private sphere and the building block of the nation. It is also a site to produce normative subjects whose quotidian practices align with nationalist interests of the state. These findings suggest that seemingly inconsequential processes like bureaucratic adjudication can serve as a critical linkage between quotidian practices and political projects.

The legalization of same-sex marriage in a growing number of countries has opened the door for queer couples from two different countries to pursue family reunification through spousal petitions. The global landscape for marriage equality, however, remains fractured, and queer binational couples must make strategic decisions to gain legal recognition of their relationship and immigrate together to one country. How does the piecemeal legalization of same-sex marriage shape queer binational couples’ citizenship rights? This article conceptualizes transnational sexual citizenship and presents a typology of its varieties using the case of queer binational couples whose respective homelands do (or do not) allow same-sex marriage migration. Interviews with queer binational couples seeking to immigrate to the United States substantiate their stratified citizenship rights and show that couples must make claims for citizenship rights in jurisdictions where they anticipate being recognized by family and immigration laws. For queer immigrant families, family formation and migration decisions remain constrained by the citizenship rights to which they can make claims.

I draw on interviews with immigration lawyers to argue that their case selection process resembles the immigration state's fraud detection work. They judge by first impressions and detect fraud through mock interviews. Lawyers report relying on their "gut check" and analyzing couples' body language and interactions. They also take on the state's lens by incorporating probing questions into their consultation meetings and conducting fraud investigations. Lawyers justify this practice as necessary for managing their professional reputation, among fellow practitioners, immigration officers, and future clients. I argue that lawyers' case selection process reflects the state's priorities around rooting out fraud.

In collaboration with Janelle Wong, I examine how race blindness and censorship in college admissions following Harvard v. SFFA affect the evaluation of applicants by their racial background. Through survey experiments and interviews, we seek to identify the effects of post-SFFA admissions policies on different racial groups.

This project, in collaboration with Filiz Garip and Tessa Desmond, explores how binational trade deals and climate change affect agricultural outputs in Mexico and drives migration, both domestic and international. We use Mexican Migration Project data to examine these patterns.

In collaboration with Ben Rissing, we have placed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for administrative data on family-based green card petitions. We will explore disparities in petition approval and denial rates by race, nation of origin, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status.