ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) arts-based online environments to understand the force and function of multimodal compositions—writing and illustrating—in digital landscapes for vulnerable populations threatened in and by related regimes of deportation and distortion. It proposes that understanding the digital sites and their multimodal productions as spaces of reciprocal and relational literacies can enable a politics of un/belonging. The QTPOC artivists and other contributors to Visions from the Inside (VFI) create meanings that encourage intersectional action against deportations and distortions. The chapter examines the images and texts that compose VFI, and focuses on the distinct rhetorical qualities of QTPOC digital spaces. In coalitional gesturing, VFI is a digital environment that forgoes making rights-based claims and arguments for inclusion and assimilation and instead creates the conditions of possibility for informed mobilizations. A coalitional gesture thusly conceived is an imagined connection, whether long lasting or brief, whether physical or ideological, and without guarantee.
