Queer, Migrant Non-Parenthood in Désorientale by Négar Djavadi and Gabrielle by Agnès Vannouvong

Abstract Désorientale (2016) by Franco-Iranian author Négar Djavadi and Gabrielle (2015) by Franco-Lao-Thai author Agnès Vannouvong both emerge at a moment when queer people have some rights (marriage and adoption) but no access to assisted reproductive technology (ART). They take up the issue of what I term “political infertility,” rebuking the notion of queerness as an unproductive sexuality. These novels’ queer (migrant) characters experience compounded forms of exclusion, along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and cultural difference. I explore how the queer (migrant) nonparent speaks to a particular precarity within a system of power, revealing the complex way in which the nonparent is entrapped by competing modes of legitimatization, visibility, and access to full and fulfilled subjecthood.