Queer/Migration

This special double issue of GLQ explores the interface between queerness and migration, challenging heterosexist and heteronormative assumptions that often underpin traditional migration scholarship. Refusing to treat queer migrants as a homogeneous group, the issue insists that sexuality scholarship must rethink the role of migration in constructing heterogeneous sexual identities, communities, politics, and practices. Considering queer migration to the United States, from the Philippines, and between Australia and Asia, Russia and Israel, and France and the Dominican Republic, contributors critically examine how sexuality shapes all migration processes and experiences.

The issue, featuring essays by both established and emerging scholars, situates queer migration within global processes of colonization, globalization, capitalism, nationalism, and slavery. One contributor argues that a queer Atlantic history emerged during the Middle Passage experience of slavery, connecting this history to the contemporary movement of Haitian refugees and Dominican migrant laborers. Another contributor considers how the policing of queer migrant bodies and of “unnatural offenses” by colonial administrations in the Nicobar and Andaman islands ultimately reconfigured the ecology of the entire Indian Ocean archipelago. Still another contributor theorizes how gay couples composed of young Asian émigrés and considerably older white citizens negotiate Australian immigration policy to subvert dominant forms of nationalism and citizenship embedded in long histories of inequality between Australia and Asia. Other essays explore how transgender histories and theories transform queer migration scholarship; how “queer complicities” with contemporary neoliberal migration politics uphold regimes of violence and inequality; and how migration regimes and settlement policies in various parts of the world identify individuals as “queer,” “deviant,” or “abnormal” within racial, gender, class, cultural, and geopolitical hierarchies.

Contributors. Bobby Benedicto, Carlos Ulises Decena, Kale Bantigue Fajardo, Maja Horn, Adi Kuntsman, Eithne Luibhéid, Clare Sears, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Kath Weston, Audrey Yue