Edging aesthetics: queer and trans undocumented migrant images and imaginations

This article attends to erotic imaginations dreamed within the everyday material realities of queer and trans undocumented migrants in the US. Focusing on fictional representations in narrative cinema, the author analyzes depictions of nonnormative noncitizen life in two independent narrative feature films: Aurora Guerrero’s Mosquita y Mari (2012) and Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (2019). The author argues that, amid feeling out of sync with the normative nation-state’s organizations of space and time, quotidian erotic imaginative acts (like daydreaming, reminiscing and fantasizing) allow these films’ gender- and sexual-nonconforming illegalized main characters momentary access to otherwise arrangements of time–space and bodies. These different arrangements of spatiotemporality and interbodily relation rebut the placelessness that conditions queer and trans migrant life while opening further possibilities for survival and togetherness across time and space. The article proposes ‘edging’ as a framework for studying these imaginative rearrangements of time–space and proximity and the cross-ethnic decolonial coalitions they can activate. The author then reads edging’s filmic representations through what they call ‘edging aesthetics’. In so doing, they suggest these films surface the oft-overlooked significance of ordinary rituals of imagining for staging forms of being-with that exceed the US nation-state’s attempts to manage and control intimacies between people.