1 Desires of Belonging and Betrayals: Narratives of “coming out” and the Terms of Recognition in (Un)documented migrants.” Laura Fantone and Annie Isabel Fukushima PREVIEW COPY- DO NOT CIRCULATE WITHOUT AUTHORS’ WRITTEN CONSENT Abstract: “Coming out” was popularized in the 1970s, emerging as central to the Gay liberation/queer movement. To be out, to disclose one’s sexuality, to one’s community, was central to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender movements (LGBT). To be out is a means of a particular kind of emancipation of the individual and the collective – to be recognized. To come out is to self-disclose, it is about one’s identity, but also to create the terms of recognition. The image of “coming out” have been central to the strategies of twenty-first century immigrant rights organizing. For the undocumented migrant in the United States, coming out has been bound to dualities of forced coming out of the shadows as a means to take a risk with the hope that one may enter a path towards citizenship (i.e., Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) or being forced because one’s family is outed by their neighbors or law enforcement agencies. Coming out has also been a strategy of resistance where a migrant’s coming out has been bound t o a rhetoric and practice of “national coming out of the shadows day,” and “coming out as undocu-queer.” Through transnational feminist methodologies, we will examine a range of texts and sites of display produced through the content, interviews, and mater ials of undocumented queer “coming out.” Therefore, in this article, we examine policies such the Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals, the Trump administration's immigration executive order, the Dream Act, and California state dream act/AB540. We contend that through the discursive and social usage of “coming out” for undocumented (queer) migrants, that normative forms of recognition are negotiated: acceptance, acceptability, citizenship, victimhood, vulnerability, and the human. We examine the normative frames that are central to undocumented migrants who “come out” - queer, as queer subjects and as migratory, and subject to state power. keywords: precarity, vulnerability, undocumented, queer, migration. Introduction Immigration is a highly contested issue in the twenty-first century. In particular, in North America debates surrounding immigration have framed the issues in dualities: migrants as dangerous, hordes, and “illegal” in contrast to migrants who are to be “rescued” and on a path to citizenship (Fukushima 2015). As illuminated by Cecilia Menjivar, migrants are defined by liminality (2006) and what Douglas Massey calls a “selective hardening of the border” (2008: 31). As Syrian refugees, the Rohingya, and labor migration made headline news another group of immigrants emerged in the U.S., the DREAMers. DREAMers are undocumented migrants who were raised in the United States, many working and even college going. Story-after-story, the DREAMers are portrayed as “ideal migrants”: educated, working, and victims of migration, often to the detriment of their family and/or parents, who crossed with them. Contrasting the DREAMers