In immigration and sexuality research there is new and emerging literature that understands the convergence of these two topics. However, scholarship primarily examining Latina lesbian immigrants is not as visible. This thesis examines the lives of Latina lesbian immigrants residing in Texas and California to understand greater meanings of immigration, sexuality and citizenship. Ten Latina lesbian immigrants participated in in-depth interviews, answering questions about growing up, sexuality, migration, citizenship and meanings of home. The research questions asked the following: What affect does immigration have on the sexualities and sex lives of Latina lesbian immigrants? How does their age of migration impact their sexualities? How do these women define and conceptualize citizenship? How do immigration and sexuality converge in the lives and on the bodies of Latina lesbian immigrants? The interviews revealed that the age in which the women migrated and their resettlement in urban areas contribute to their conceptualizations of a “sexually open” United States and a not-as-queer-friendly home country. Second, the women interviewed categorize citizenship in local and global ways. While some saw citizenship as part of every day practice, others found it to be connected with a sense of global community. Migration also developed a consciousness surrounding citizenship, as many of them were confronted with the concept upon migrating to the United States. Finally, immigration and sexuality unfolds in my participant’s lives in contradictory and non-linear ways. While many of the women felt a connection to their local gay and lesbian communities in positive ways, their lives are met with adversities in other ways that are affected by their immigrant status – including inability to obtain a driver’s license and obligations to become United State’s citizens. The women also conceptualize home in fluid and unfixed ways. Home and the body collapse when discussing migration, citizenship and nation. The research presented attempts to offer a conversation about the historical and current relationship between immigrants and LGBT people. It is also my objective to further conversations about multiple levels of oppression and how Latina lesbian immigrant women use their circumstances to gain a better awareness of themselves, and hopefully improve their rights and living conditions as human beings. / text

abstract: At the heart of this dissertation is a push for critical genealogy that intervenes into two major theoretical bodies of work in rhetoric and composition -- affect studies and queer latina rhetorics. Chapter one intervenes into emerging discourses on publics and affect studies from seamlessly recovering "the body" as an always-already Western body of rhetoric in the advent of this renewed interest in emotion, embodiment, and structures of affect as rhetorical concepts showing the long history of theorizing by queer mestizas. Chapter two focuses on one register of affect: anger, which articulated from the works of writers such as Maria Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa offers a complex theory of agency for the subaltern subject. Chapter three links emotions like anger and melancholia to the corporeal rhetorics of skin and face, metaphors that are abundant in the queer mestiza and chicana writers under discussion, revealing the dramatic inner-workings of a the queer mestiza subject and the inter-subjective dynamics between the racialized and gendered performance of that body. By re-rooting affect in the queer colonized, yet resistant body, the link between the writing subject and colonial violence is made clear. Chapter four looks at the autoethnographic process of creating an affective archive in the form of queer racial melancholia, while Chapter five concludes by taking writing programs to task for their view of the writing archive, offering a radical new historiography by means of a queer chicana methodology. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2014

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