Debility, Negative Affect, Mobility

Abstract

This article proposes that the undocumented as a valence of difference expands on queer studies’ turn to a subjectless critique and how debility and negativity become part of the discussion of an objectless critique. In examining Alan Pelaez Lopez's “sick in ‘america,’” Julio Salgado's oeuvre, and Yosimar Reyes's #UndocuJoy, it is argued that undocumented queer subjects living under a landscape of debility and a climate of negative affect diagnose contemporary tactics of debility deployed as frames of illegality, securitization, and biopoliticization, and simultaneously reflect how the production of negative affect leads to feelings of nonbelonging, of being off. This article goes on to suggest that debility is conjoined to negative affect, arguing that in spite a continual state of debility and a dispersion of negativity, the undocumented thrive in the practices of the everyday, presented here as another lens of thinking mobility, a recalibrator to the debility/capacity/(dis)ability imaginary.