While literatures on globalization and transnationalism have tended to highlight the ways in which the State is disappearing or being eclipsed by global capital and new information technologies, even neo-liberal (leaning) States retain their powers and prerogatives of surveillance, severe discipline and in some cases expulsion or extermination of vulnerable persons, even as they continue to disinvest in public health, education and welfare. My own research in Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago and Brazil, and experiences at home in the United States of America, impels us to take seriously the distinctions between socialist and liberal States, post-colonial and imperial nations, North and South. There are crucial historical and political-economic distinctions that condition and structure both the ways in which a State - any State - attempts to regulate particular bodies, and how national belonging is reckoned. Still, it seems the State - seemingly every State, though of course with widely varying scales and intensities - depends upon racialized heteropatriarchy (which is always also classed) to constitute and maintain itself in the global hierarchy of States (Allen, 2009a, pp. 53-62; Allen, 2011b). Since she wrote The Boundaries of Blackness, Cathy J. Cohen has exposed the ways in which the United States of America and black institutions, academics and families construct the dangerous vulnerabilities of the deeply and multiply subaltern - an analytic category she has formulated as 'punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens' (Cohen, 1997, pp. 437465). In her essay 'Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics', Cohen critiques African-American studies' politics of respectability and argues that the reputed deviance of lesbians, gays, transgender and bisexual persons, single mothers and State aid recipients, in the eyes of American policymakers as well as scholars and civil society leaders, marks this group not only as unruly would-be subject-citizens, but also outside of cultural boundaries of belonging and care (Cohen, 2004, vol. 1