Queer Migration Studies

This article addresses the sexual gap in Chinese migration studies with a multi-dimensional analysis of Chinese migrant young gay men's urban integration. Based on life history interviews, conducted in Shenzhen, a migrant metropolis in South China, this research examines how this migrant-friendly city offers these migrant young gay men possibilities and at the same time, limits their urban integration by taking economic, social relation and identity issues into account. The author concludes this article with a discussion on sexuality's constitutive role in shaping the complicated dynamics of Chinese migrant young gay men's urban integration.

Drawing from queer migration studies and queer theories of affect, this chapter explores shameless interruptions as survival strategies that trans and queer migrants enact when shame alienates them from LGBT public and private spheres. As I suggest, shameless interruptions are affective, performative, and temporal strategies that challenge the constraints of normative belonging within LGBT politics and that ask us to linger with the possibilities of temporal disruption. Chapter published in the book Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation edited by Eithne Luibhéid and Karma Chávez.

Em dezembro de 2019, o ACNUR e a OIM (Organização Internacional para Migrações) assinalaram a expressividade numérica - 4,769,498 milhões - de venezuelanos migrantes ou refugiados no mundo. Com previsões de que esse número aumente para 6,5 milhões de venezuelanos em 2020, desse número, o Brasil abriga, atualmente, cerca de 224 mil. O estado que mais recebe venezuelanos no Brasil é Roraima, diante da fronteira localizada no município de Pacaraima. A reflexão sobre o refúgio de pessoas não-cisheterossexuais encontra-se na fronteira de dois campos de direito: o da migração e refúgio, responsável pela constituição da noção de “refugiados”, "solicitantes de refúgio" e "migrantes"; e o de gênero e sexualidade, que, entre outros, abriga os estudos sobre pessoas não-cisheterossexuais. Essa intersecção temática pautada pelo refúgio de pessoas não-cisheterossexuais parece, por vezes, subestimada em ambos espaços de construção de temáticas e questões acadêmicas e políticas. Essa dissertação é resultado de uma pesquisa sobre experiências de vida de três mulheres não-cisheterossexuais venezuelanas, solicitantes de refúgio que migraram para o Estado de Roraima no ano de 2018, e foram, posteriormente, interiorizadas para a cidade do Rio de Janeiro, por programa do governo federal. Neste texto de dissertação, após refletir sobre a problematização de temáticas e objetos de estudos formulados em intersecção de campos analíticos elaborados em defesa de própria especificidade e até mesmo para me constituir como pesquisadora, necessariamente investindo em distintivas formulações de objeto de estudo, privilegio então as narrativas das interlocutoras sobre seus processos migratórios enquanto pessoas não-cisheterossexuais, buscando refletir sobre o impacto que suas identidades e performatividades de gênero e orientação sexual, não cisheteronormativas, têm sobre esses processos.

As chamadas migrações internacionais têm se intensificado em muitas regiões nas últimas décadas e para investigar as complexidades e singularidades desses processos de mobilidade a perspectiva interseccional tem se mostrado indispensável. Principalmente nas análises dos processos de discriminação e violência pelos quais os/as migrantes enfrentam nas “sociedades receptoras”, categorias como raça, classe, gênero etc., parecem estruturantes para compreender quais migrantes são considerados/as “desejáveis” ou não. A proposta desta dissertação foi a de considerar a sexualidade como uma categoria também relevante, especificamente no caso das pessoas que se identificam e são identificadas como homossexuais masculinos ou gays. Busquei, portanto, compreender narrativas de migração de sujeitos que se identificam como homens gays (ou homossexuais) e venezuelanos, tendo como contexto a cidade de Boa Vista, em Roraima, uma região que tem passado por múltiplas transformações ligadas à chegada de migrantes venezuelanos/as nos últimos anos. A partir de entrevistas com Reinaldo, Ángel e Manuel, constatei como a experiência da homossexualidade e a experiência de imigração tendem a lançar o sujeito a um lugar de alteridade e exposição a violações de diferentes tipos. Por conta disso, os interlocutores apresentam táticas para camuflarem-se em diferentes contextos, ora como brasileiros, ora como heterossexuais. Foi possível constatar que a violência neste caso parece operar como um jogo de identificação em que para não ser atacado é necessário agenciar quando e onde é seguro performar a identidade nacional e sexual. Além disto, pude perceber que, ainda que o processo migratório tenha levado a mudanças identitárias significativas, as narrativas mostram que a violência contra o sujeito demarcado como homossexual, apesar de nem sempre uníssona e coerente, não parece cessar por conta do cruzamento da fronteira entre o Brasil e Venezuela.

This chapter provides an ethnography of German and Danish refugee solidarity activism focusing on the politics of intersectional gendered inclusion and exclusion in a variety of organizations including grassroots feminist and LGBTQ groups. I first address the challenges of structural inequalities and status differences in initiatives and solidarity encounters for refugees taking place in two different national contexts and in an increasingly hostile external environment. I then discuss how a lack of intersectional awareness in heterogeneous coalitions may foster positional misunderstandings; that is, situations in which issues of gender and sexuality are represented along dividing lines of "cultural differences" while structural inequalities are overlooked. As a potential response to conflict and demobilization caused by intersectional positional misunderstandings, the chapter presents the collective practices of political translation which help to foster more inclusive cooperation in refugee solidarity coalitions involving different linguistic and civic status groups. Political translation, distinct from linguistic translation, is a set of disruptive and communicative practices developed by queer and feminist activists, migrants, minority organizers and global justice activists in Europe and the US in order to work together more inclusively with disempowered groups and coalition members (Doerr 2018a).

Using oral histories, this article reappropriates the concept of home to conceptualize it as a space of survival in the lives of LGBTQ Latinx migrants in Los Angeles, California, and migrant returnees in Mexico City, Mexico. It presents the process of homebuilding as a personal and inward protest against intersecting forms of systemic violence.

A feminist study and oral history based in the “coming out” experiences of a Third World, Zapotec-Oaxacan, working-class immigrant woman. Discussion of community issues around queer sexualities, dominant narratives, and home building; brings attention to seldom cited scholarship and theory on practices within minority communities.

This working paper scrutinizes the role of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) in constructing a transnational matrix of deservingness through which migration authorities differentially and selectively allocate refugee status, refugee rights and resettlement spots. This working paper will also reveal two interconnected effects of the transnational matrix of deservingness; while the matrix gives those deemed deserving incentive to remain immobile in Turkey and construct ‘legal’ subjectivities recognized by transnational refugee governance, the matrix gives those deemed undeserving incentive to be mobile, searching ways out of Turkey since they could not construct their legal subjectivities.

South Africa is the only country on the African continent that constitutionally protects transgender asylum seekers. In light of this, it has seen a marked rise in the emergence of this category of person within the asylum system. Drawing on research carried out between 2012 and 2015, I argue that transgender-identified refugees or “gender refugees” from Africa, living in South Africa, rather than accessing refuge continue to experience significant hindrances to their survival comparable with the persecution experienced in their countries of origin. I argue this is in part due to the nature of their asylum claim in relation to gender as a wider system of “common-sense” dichotomous administration, something which remains relatively constant across countries of origin and refugee-receiving countries. Rather than being protected gender refugees, because they are read as violating the rules of normative gender, they find themselves paradoxically with rights, but unable to access them

Since the 2013 passage of Uganda’s now infamous Anti-Homosexuality Bill (AHB), the number of African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people on the move and seeking sanctuary has increased. Neighbouring Kenya hosts one of the five largest United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) mandated operations in the world concentrated most visibly between the Kakuma and Dadaab Refugee camps. Despite the fact that homosexuality remains criminalised within Kenya’s borders, those seeking refuge have increasingly included LGBTI people from the region. Although initially allowed to live in urban Nairobi in response to increasing fears regarding terrorism, the Kenyan state re-issued a strict directive in 2015 requiring all refugees in Kenya to move back to the camps – making it illegal for refugees to live outside of designated camp areas. To accommodate and protect LGBTI refugees, the majority of whom had been sent to Kakuma, the UNHCR facilitated the sectioning off of a protection area - essentially encamping them within the camp. It was here that they were requested to wait for resettlement. At the time of entering the camp LGBTI refugees and allies created a series of online fundraising campaigns by via the crowdfunding website GoFundMe. It is these campaigns, in their global circulation via the Internet and what they tell us about the spatial and temporal experience of resettlement as a ‘waiting event’ that this chapter explores. I suggest that LGBTI refugees’ prolific self-publication and use of GoFundMe specifically resists the spatial and temporal logics of the camp, a space designated for their waiting, by crafting a temporality that refuses the experience of waiting as suspension within the camp. This access to the virtual means that they are not solely confined to the physical space of the refugee camp but are, simultaneously, projecting themselves both into their future goal of resettlement and thereby transforming the experience of waiting in their present.

Established in 1992 and located in North Western Kenya, Kakuma Refugee Camp, comprised of Kakuma 1, 2, 3 and 4, has an estimated population of 180,000 people. Since its establishment, the camp has functioned as a refuge for many of those fleeing various forms of violence and persecution in the East African region, not least people experiencing persecution on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity/expression. A recent report suggests that the camp currently hosts more than 170 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) asylum seekers registered with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), many of whom are from Uganda. In 2016, it was reported that LGBT people were sectioned off in a different area of Kakuma in an effort to ensure their safety. The UNHCR has asked LGBT asylum seekers within the camp to practice a certain amount of “discretion”, so as not to draw unnecessary attention to themselves or “blow their cover as LGBTI refugees”. It is notable that those least able to engage in some form of discretion and most likely to be thought of as the epitome of homosexuality are often transgender asylum seekers. Indeed transgender people within the camp are considered to be among those most visible and by extension “most hated” (Naluzze 2018).

Refugee camps are often posed as non-spaces, places of displacement, places of exile and enforced invisibility. In light of this, how might we conceive of those encamped within the camp? How might we think of a designated space within non-space? How might we understand the extreme visibility of transgender people in relation to their encampment and the perception that they are the preeminent example of homosexuality in relation to the tensions around discretion and invisibility? Drawing on Agamben’s (2005) notion of migrants as homo sacer — those excluded through inclusion — this paper seeks to rethink states of exception in relation to transgender asylum seekers within Kakuma, noting their dual existence in what Alumine Monroe (2002) has theorised as states of hyper-visibility and seeming bureaucratic invisibility in a space, the refugee camp, constructed upon the logic of invisibility. Moreover, this paper seeks to consider what it might mean to exist in a lifelong state of precariousness and suffering to be orientated as such, which rather than being afforded minor reprieve in Kakuma, as a UNHCR-run refugee camp, is prolonged.

Face aux persécutions subies dans leur pays d’origine en raison de leur orientation sexuelle, de plus en plus de personnes réussissent à quitter ce dernier et à arriver en France, où elles déposent une demande d’asile reposant sur ce motif particulier. Mais dans un contexte de fermeture accrue des frontières européennes et de durcissement des politiques migratoires, ils et elles s’y retrouvent souvent dans des situations de très grande précarité. Alors que de nombreuses représentations font des grandes villes des refuges pour les minorités sexuelles, la situation rencontrée par les demandeur·se·s d’asile homosexuel·le·s en région parisienne vient mettre à l’épreuve cette idée.

Chossière F., 2020, « Minorités sexuelles en exil : l’expérience minoritaire en ville à l’aune de marginalisations multiples », Urbanités, #13 / Minorités/Majorités, février 2020, en ligne.

https://www.revue-urbanites.fr/13-chossiere/