ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the limits of intersectionality as a conceptual framework for making sense of the particular vulnerability of migrants. The author claims that insofar as intersectionality remains tethered to the conceptual ironwork of the nation-state and international border regime—themselves products of colonialism—intersectionality tends to obscure the spatial and temporal dimensions of the social processes that produce national identity, Indigenous difference, and migrant status. Intersectionality needs a political geography of migration. Plenty of critics have argued that Asian American, as a category of recognition, tends to flatten differences of nationality, culture, class, and immigration status, while reifying the effects of US immigration policies. Indigenous women are particularly vulnerable to both violence and erasure when they become migrants, Shannon Speed argues, because crossing the border often means leaving one regime of settler control to enter another. The extraordinary violence forcing women to flee Central America is increasingly described as femicide.
