In pursuit of love: ‘Safe passages’, migration and queer South Asians in the US

Abstract

In the last decade or two the notion of human security has emerged as a benchmark for assessing the quality of everyday lives. Despite the paradigmatic shift, scholarly inquiries on human security rarely center sexual migrants. This article attends to this gap. Based on 30 in-depth interviews and supplemented with web material, the article describes the unique and multidimensional vulnerabilities endured by queer immigrants of color – queer South Asians – in the US. The article simultaneously contextualizes and moves beyond the areas of law and public policy, to examine queer migration and security from the subjective lens of the migrants (documented, undocumented, refugee and asylees) in order to demonstrate that safety, security and acceptance are negotiated with multiple agents (such as intimate partners, family, co-ethnic community, etc.) amid social cleavages (such as class, nationality, religion, gender and age) that facilitate or interrupt migration in ‘glocal’ contexts where the global and local intersect in complex ways to suffuse all such experiences.