Intimate archives, migrant negotiations: Affective governance and the recognition of 'same-sex' family class migration in Canada

In 2002, the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Protection Act formally extended relationship recognition to "same-sex" couples for the purposes of family class sponsorship privileges. Since then, thousands of transnational queer couples have secured common nationalized residency rights through these provisions. This dissertation explores how immigration recognition functions as a profound form of "affective governance" and a key means through which common residency rights are secured. Drawing on policy, activist and legal documents, as well as on narratives generated through interviews with queer transnational couples who have negotiated the family class sponsorship process, Intimate Archives, Migrant Negotiations offers a nuanced empirical exploration of how state power operates through affective modes, effecting homonational subjects and social institutions.;The second part of the dissertation advances a qualitative exploration of narratives produced by self-identified gay, lesbian, queer, transgender butch, and bisexual migrants and sponsors to reflect on lived experiences of negotiating recognition and common residency rights in the immigration context. Chapter four focuses on my participants' strategies of documenting their relationships in the "intimate archives" or proof-of-relationship dossiers that are a crucial aspect of the sponsorship application. Chapter five continues to explore narrative reflections with a focus on research participants' ambivalent feelings around (homo)nationalized belongings.;In conclusion, the final chapter considers how the affective governance of queer migration forecloses the possibilities of anything like a "queer no borders" world, even while it opens up spaces for forging new affinities of resistance to assemblages of power organized through immigration controls, border surveillance and the terms of state recognition.;In the first part of the dissertation, I trace a genealogy and an architecture of the contemporary recognition of "same-sex" couples in Canadian immigration law, policy and practice. Chapter two illuminates the ways that shifting legal and policy contexts have emerged in coherence with neoliberal and biopolitical modes of governance and discourses of human capital. Chapter three documents the ways that gay and lesbian activists (in particular, the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Taskforce) have been implicated in developing the current grids of intelligibility that govern the immigration process for non-heteronormative couples.