Queer Performance on the Border: Making Critical Fun of European Immigration Regimes

Abstract

Queer migrants seeking asylum in Europe face both heteronormative and homonormative assumptions about their subjectivity. Yet these assumptions are not simply adhered to for the sake of intelligibility. This article will explore how cultural production challenges the heteronormativity and homonormativity of European immigration regimes in both On the Bride’s Side (a 2014 documentary directed by Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry, Antonio Augugliaro, and Gabriele del Grande) and Moebius Stripping (a 2019 filmed performance by the Istanbul Queer Art Collective). Drawing upon the Bakhtinian notion of the carnivalesque, I suggest these performances are making critical fun of European borders. Instead of only exposing the violence of hetero/homonormativity, making critical fun allows one to grapple with how such violence is being creatively manoeuvred. By displaying the border as porous and incapable of understanding migrant subjectivity, there is an imaginative reconfiguration of the border itself. Without denying the potential for European borders to force queer migrants into situations of vulnerability, the act of crossing the border, and performing the act too, can sometimes become an agentic sign of making critical fun that disrupts the sexual and gendered norms being expected by immigration regimes.