ABSTRACT
This essay explores the estrangement and experiences of belonging for gender variant and sexually diverse Indigenous, African, Latino and Asian peoples in the United States. It explores the operation of estrangement in three racialized technologies that aggravate the conditions of violence, disparity and alienation. Estrangement operates through the technologies of: 1) colonial and imperial knowledge formation; 2) state policing, incarceration and extralegal violence; 3) subordination, exclusion and normalization. While these technologies have produced terrible conditions under which people have been made to struggle, they have also produced grounds for, and strategies of, survival and belonging. The operations of estrangement and its changing context also illuminate strategies of Indigenous, African, Latino and Asian American gender and sexually variant people to generate and support survival and belonging. This approach allows us new ways of understanding queer and trans world-making, refuge and resilience in a hostile world.
