Queer Migrants Research Articles

Glitchy transnationalism: When queer migrants meet the state online

Abstract Drawing on ethnographic research I conducted between May 2022 and January 2024 with queer migrants in Athens, Greece, I offer the conceptualization of “glitchy transnationalism” as a corrective to the transnational promise of queer digital media—the notion that these platforms can seamlessly facilitate connections across national boundaries among queer individuals (e.g., Grindr). I explore how this promise falters for two queer migrant individuals, Ziri and Tilila—both of whom I interpret as encountering two glitches. I argue that understanding these perceived transnational “failures” as glitches showcases the interplay of factors such as legal status, migrancy, race, sexuality, and gender identity in shaping the lived realities of queer migrants within transnational digital spaces. Ultimately, this research underscores the relationship between state dynamics and digital media in the lives of queer migrants, urging scholars to adopt a lens that recognizes glitches as diagnostic of power dynamics within queer digital realms.

Queer mountains: Migrant drag performers reimagining sexual citizenship in Germany

This article seeks to understand how staging, performing and re-narrating experiences of queer migration can be utilized to radically reimagine queer migrants’ subjectivities and politics in today’s Germany. Informed by ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2023, including 22 qualitative interviews with drag performers, I focus on the emerging scene of ‘migrant drag’ in Germany, informed by transnational histories of queer performance and border-crossing. Through acts of migrant drag, ‘building queer mountains’ appears as a queer migrant practice of finding alternative pathways to overcome obstacles that limit queer migrant subjectivities and to claim locality and stages for queer migrant politics beyond the normative scripts of sexual citizenship. Ultimately, ‘building queer mountains’ shows that sexual citizenship, sustained by (homo)normative sexualizations and hierarchical racialization, could be ‘crossed’ and reimagined through the collective and creative work of a community in search of alternative worlds.

Multiple Encounters: Queer Migrants and Bureaucratic Violence

In this paper, we analyze the multiple encounters queer asylum seekers face due to violence embedded in border control and asylum recognition processes. This analysis is based on the reconstitution of two narratives that form part of an ethnographic study, the result of five years of fieldwork with queer migrants in Brazil and Spain. We employ the notion of bureaucratic violence to understand the ambiguities between control and protection in the emergence of the LGBTI refugee as a subject of rights in the humanitarian realm.

Recognizing the agency of forced migrants with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and sex characteristics

Abstract In recent years, scholarship and policy reports have slowly attended to the lived realities of forced migrants with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC). However, these emerging discourses are typically characterized by a violation-centric view that focuses on queer migrants’ vulnerabilities and experiences of victimization. Yet, what remains strikingly absent from existing research and advocacy engagement is how refugees with diverse SOGIESC across different settings also actively seek out services and build support networks; how they engage with their experiences on their own terms; how they resist violence; or in other words, how they exercise various forms of agency. In this field reflection, we emphasize the importance to recognize how and under what conditions forced migrants with diverse SOGIESC exercise agency. We put forward illustrative examples based on field reflections of working with refugees with diverse SOGIESC, opening up new perspectives for research, policy, and activism.

Homing desires: Transnational queer migrants negotiating homes and homelands in Scotland

A vast literature on the home across sociology, human geography and cognate disciplines has mapped out home as a messy conceptual terrain. Critical perspectives have theorised home as simultaneously imaginative and material, and argued for the importance to pay attention to both dimensions. Following in this tradition, empirical research has explored how ‘home’ is understood, imagined and experienced in everyday life, and how imagery and experiences of home are inflected by class, race/ethnicity, migrancy, gender, sexuality, age and able-bodiness. In the literature on home, however, migrancy and sexuality are rarely brought together. This article advances existing debates on the home though an intersectional exploration of the home/migration/sexuality nexus, drawing on research with queer migrants from Central Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Former Soviet Union (FSU) living in Scotland. Methodologically, the article draws on photo diaries and photo elicitation interviews to explore queer migrants’ sense of home: an approach that allows us to untangle the spatial, material, imaginary, affective and temporal dimensions of home. Empirically, we show how both migrancy and sexuality inform our participants’ complex experiences and understandings of home. Conceptually, the article brings into conversation literatures on the migrant and the queer home, which have hitherto been largely separate, and proposes ways to advance the exploration of the home/migration/sexuality nexus.

Translating difference: whiteness, racialisation and queer migration in Berlin

This article explores how the experiences of queer migration shape and inform racialisation, and how racial categories, such as ‘whiteness’ and ‘non-whiteness’, are employed by queer migrants from Turkey in relation to their narratives of belonging and non-belonging in Germany. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Berlin between 2018 and 2022, I aim to show how racism is ambiguously attached to migration and sexual difference, and how ideas of racial difference enable queer migrants to form political collectives and make their experience intelligible to themselves and others. Instead of approaching racialisation as an all-or-nothing finality, the participants often use narratives of non-belonging to distance themselves from the public majority (defined as ‘heterosexual’ and ‘white’) and employ hybrid minoritarian identities, such as ‘queer people of colour’, to translate their difference to other queer migrant and racialised groups in Berlin.

Examining the political economy of heteronormativity in Southeast Asian queer migration biographies

This article examines the workings of heteronormativity in Southeast Asian queer migration biographies. By Southeast Asian queer migrants, the project refers to people self-identifying as gender and sexuality diverse from dominant gender and sexuality binary systems and people with variations in sex characteristics who have emigrated out of their home country in the Southeast Asian region. The exploratory study makes use of qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews with 15 queer migrants from Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and The Philippines and Thailand on their local and transnational familial care practices and needs. The respondents on one hand, through emigration, have attempted to veer off from discriminatory heteronormative structures in their home country and enjoyed relatively more space and opportunities in the receiving society to construct queer familial care practices. On the other hand, their queer migration biographies show how they continue to be implicated in the political economy of heteronormativity locally through their own queer familial practices and transnationally through their financial and emotional remittances to support heteronormative families of origin. The article argues that queer citizens and migrants deserve equal if not greater recognition for their unrelenting local and transnational care efforts to sustain heteronormative families in a global neoliberal economy and should not have to experience exclusion for being deemed as having deviated from heteronormative structures.

Cogiendo en luto

Chavela Vargas is widely known for her unique approach to some of México’s most celebrated musical genres. Though undoubtedly a queer icon within and outside of México, critical scholarship has only recently begun to focus on the way her queer migrant subjectivity and marimacho voice, persona, and performances reinvent Mexican sonic history and interpellate listeners queerly. Importantly, her aching vocals and tragic life story coexist with pulsating sexual energy. In this essay I argue that Chavela inaugurates a postmortem politics in which grief and the erotic are held together, instead of separated or silenced by taboo. Inspired by Chavela, I introduce the practice of cogiendo en luto (fucking in grief), which asks the difficult questions: What happens when Eros and Thanatos go to bed together? How can the erotic help to shape grief, and vice versa? By linking Eros to Thanatos, Chavela makes the grief she experienced throughout her life transformative, intimate, expansive, introspective, chaotic, and at certain privileged moments erotic, orgasmic, and sensual. The essay samples lyrics and performances of some of Chavela’s songs, film cameos, and an obituary written about her by Pedro Almodóvar. Together, these queer performative interventions re-signify the grief of migration, addiction, heartbreak, and death, while forging an affective and fleshy relationship with listeners and spectators. As a queer and grieving listener/spectator/fan of Chavela’s, I also weave my own grief into the essay, reflecting on what Chavela meant to my healing process and further underscoring her unique affective contributions to contemporary queer subjectivities and soundscapes.

National Imaginary and the Catholic Church: Queer Migrant Women’s Experiences of Exclusionary Moments

In this article, I discuss the imagined boundaries of belonging in Iceland, the political projects of national identity and religion, and the ways in which those projects affect the everyday social formations for LBTQ+ migrant women. I highlight the interlocutors’ experiences of exclusion, foregrounding resistance and resilience in facing unequal power relations, including racism, sexism, heterosexism and cisgenderism. In the article, I apply theories of critical race, postcolonialism, queer-of-colour critique, queer theology, the relationality of space and place, as well as the politics of belonging and a sense of belonging. I draw on feminist writings concerning queer migrations, intersectionality and assemblage, to analyse interlocutors’ multilayered experiences within the Icelandic context, other cultural frames of reference, and transnationally. I analyse semi-structured interviews with 28 interlocutors, who identify as LBTQ+ migrant women, demigirl, gender queer and non-binary. Six interlocutors are racialised as black or brown, 22 as white, hailing from the Global South and Global North. Two themes were carved out of the analysis, relating to the genealogy and aesthetics of racialisation and othering in Iceland, and experiences of exclusion and resistance within the Catholic Church. In line with the analysis, I advocate for dismantling social hierarchies and exclusionary power structures by foregrounding structural violence and microagressions against disenfranchised groups of individuals in addition to highlighting queer worldmaking practices.

Practices of radical digital care: towards autonomous queer migration

ABSTRACT Digital connectivity of queer migrants on the move to Europe plays a crucial role in confronting border regimes, heteronormativity and racist oppression. ICTs at the disposal of queer migrants interrupt the material politics of silence and violence. However, digital technology also implies serious hazards. Queer migrants use digital space to empower themselves, to build networks, and to trace, reach and create safer spaces of care. This paper conceptualises how care is materialised in self-organised actions and horizontal relationships that question power regimes and commodification practices while introducing the notion of radical digital care. Digital spaces of (radical) care constitute safe spaces of compassion where people can be heard and believed. They act as points of reference for queer people seeking recognition and care. Moreover, queer migration constitutes constant shifting between subject and care positions that redefine the notion of home and safety and the material ordering of migration itself. Based on a qualitative study of ten semi-structured interviews with solidarians and migrants, this paper reveals how the appropriation of digital media by queer migrants re-arranges the material politics of the borderland by contesting border technologies, and through radical care, allows communities to live through hardship, fear, and abuse.

Queer Migration and the Performance of Crime and Illegality

Abstract In this article, I focus on how activism and art disrupt the necessity of queer migrants having to perform the role of the “good,” law-abiding migrant who desires inclusion into the nation. More specifically, I analyze how performing crime and illegality challenges the necessity of queer migrants who claim asylum adhering to stereotypes of vulnerability so as to be seen as deserving of legal status. First, I examine the #Rockumenta activism by LGBTQIA+ Refugees Welcome to understand how queer migrants engage with criminality to avoid being silenced. Next, I explore the photography series I Am Illegal by an anonymous artist to understand how queer migrants challenge the designation of illegality by immigration regimes. Instead of trying to prove anything to the viewer about queer migrants, I suggest both activist and artistic interventions shift the focus toward the inherent violence of immigration regimes.

Between visibility and elsewhere: South Asian queer creative cultures and resistance

ABSTRACT This article draws on existing interviews and creative material from LGBTQ + South Asians who have lived and spent significant time in the UK as part of the Cross Border Queers project. It begins by considering creative forms of diasporic activism and creativity in the UK that have emerged from South Asian LGBTQ + communities and individuals. We discuss the ways in which South Asian LGBTQ + diasporic organising was formed through a sense of shared racial and class solidarity and especially under the umbrella of political Blackness. We then move on to the role played by cultural activism to see how artists have used culture as a way to advance social change and increase the visibility of South Asian LGBTQ + communities in the UK. We place different genres of visual culture, curation, performance and oral history to evoke how South Asian queer migrants articulate a distinct form of subjectivity and aesthetic practice.

Going out and making it home: on the roots, routes and homing of young queer men in Nairobi, Kenya

Public imagination and academic scholarship present queer migrants as being uprooted due to their embodiment of non-normative sexual identities. Drawing from ethnographic research with a male sex worker-led organisation (SLO) in Nairobi, including 41 in-depth interviews with members, this paper explores this perceived uprootedness by highlighting Kenyan queer migrants’ multi-layered and multi-dimensional social experiences of home. Using the concept of ‘homing’, the paper explores the men’s lifelong efforts to feel at home, and the embeddedness of queer identities in this process. The SLO generates feelings of safety, acceptance and recognition and provides a ‘second home’ in the city. In the process of creating ties with chosen families in the city, the men still maintain close ties with family back in their villages, while economic opportunities induce back-and-forth mobilities. The men’s individual trajectories might fluctuate yet still fit within a more linear route in which they aspire to acquire land and properties in their ancestral homeland. The analysis of queer homing supports a reimagining of queer people’s mobilities that stresses their embeddedness in society and illustrates how it relates to the ‘queering’ of queer in the African context.

Mobility as survival and freedom: Pandemic, Immobility and its implications for women and queer migrants

This paper intends to move beyond the common knowledge of how pandemic restricts mobility at large and provokes us to think about those for whom mobility restriction was a way of life much before the coronavirus arrived. Looking at shadow pandemic of gender-based mobility restrictions of women and non-male actors in conservative societies in South Asia, in this paper I argue that social deconstruction of “immobility” is embedded in the process of gendering the pandemic. Drawing from interviews conducted on the Indian immigrants in Germany over a year during and after the global lock down, this paper explores how covid-induced immobility mimics an already established framework of coerced immobility based on gender that acts as a motivation of migration for women and non-male actors at some level. Referring to Ayelet Shachar’s idea of shifting borders, I locate the moral borders at home as a crucial competitor of physical borders of the barbed wire, that often provokes women and non-male actors to take the leap of faith for survival and better livelihood.

The Integration of LGBTI Refugees in Brazil: Sexual Democracies in the South, Processes of Racialization and Shared Precarities

In this article, I focus on the integration practices and discourses regarding “LGBTI refugees” in Brazil, in contrast with the precarity faced by queer immigrants and refugees in the country. I argue that those integration practices and discourses tend to limit “LGBTI refugees” to their sexual and gender identities, in dynamics that overshadow the processes of racialization that they experience as queer migrants from/in the Global South. In a critical analysis based on ethnographic research, I argue that the precarity lived by those refugees can only be understood in their articulations among gender, sexuality, and race.

Digital Migration Practices and the Everyday

AbstractThis special issue explores the role that digital technology plays in the lives of migrants. It does so by paying close attention to governmental and supranational organizations as well as to subjective and affective dimensions of the everyday. Digital migration practices emerge as complex negotiations in the digital media sphere between infrastructural bias and agential opportunities, contesting racial practices as well as enabling digitally mediated bonds of solidarity and intimacy. The issue offers nuanced critical perspectives ranging from surveillance capitalism, extractive humanitarianism, datafication, and border regimes to choreographies of care and intimacy in transnational settings, among other aspects. Renowned international scholars reflect on these issues from different vantage points. The closing forum section provides state-of-the-art commentaries on digital diaspora, affect and belonging, voice and visibility in the digital media sphere, queer migrant interventions in non-academic settings, and datafication and media infrastructures in “deep time.”

Migrant Insubordination

Hunger strikes in detention centers across the nation have captivated media and scholarly attention. This article examines hunger strikes as signs of the development of both alliances and collective consciousness. Based on migrant testimonies, this article centers migrants in detention as critical social analysts who are crafting life affirming relationalities and launching staunch critiques of detention. This essay posits queer migrant kinship as a lens to interpret migrant sociality in detention. Queer migrant kinship reveals the centrality of care practices and witnessing as key elements politicizing migrants. Through this interdependent sensibility, migrants perform acts of radical care such as sharing resources, promoting well-being, and providing advocacy. Through these acts, this essay argues, migrants are challenging detention as a space of death and neglect into one of insubordination.

A Lot of Straddling and Squirming: Taking Queer Migrant Stories beyond the Academic and Digital Walls

Straddling walls between cultures, squirming within cisheteronormative societies, we may hesitate about taking our stories to those who often hurt us. Academia has provided one outlet for such stories, but what is the point of being critical scholars if we cannot take our critique beyond the academic walls? In 2018, I began my research with Polish LGBTQs in the UK about their identities, migration experiences, and social media use. I received 767 survey responses and conducted 30 face-to-face interviews with a diverse group of LGBTQs (Szulc, 2019b). The research felt personal, as I too had left my hometown, a small city in central Poland, to migrate for studies, work, and love: from Bełchatów to Kraków to İstanbul to Leuven to Antwerpen to London to Sheffield and, most recently, to Manchester. Telling the stories of my participants felt a bit like telling my own story. But our stories also...

Truths, fakes and the deserving queer migrant

This article explores the role of truth within queer migration. By analysing a host of cultural production – including the verbatim theatre performance Rights of Passage by Claire Summerskill, the short film Crypsis by Christopher McGill, the ethnofictional film Samira by Nicola Mai, and the film The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela by Olaf de Fleur Johannesson – I will challenge the necessity of attempting to discover the truth of queer migrants as sexual and gendered subjects, particularly as related to asylum claims. Yet if questions are raised about the importance of truth, this also demands analysing the role of faking sexuality and gender, and ‘fake’ queer migrants more broadly, referring to those who allegedly fabricate their sexuality and gender to claim asylum. Instead of suggesting faking implies the possibility of undeservingness, I use faking as a theoretical tool to understand the demands of truth, and how faking may become means to subvert the grounds of who is considered a deserving queer migrant seeking asylum. By disrupting the binary between truths and fakes, the very notion of there being truths of queer migrants (and the subject more broadly) will be questioned.

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

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.