This paper puts queer theory’s “subjectless critique” of identity to work in challenging the state’s biopolitical use of essential, authentic identities in asylum law and practice. It not only builds upon, but also departs from existing scholarship that calls on state actors to recognize a wider range of forms of gender and sexual diversity that make people vulnerable to persecution. By contrast, I investigate how the practices of “destination” countries produce asylums-seekers as dispossessed, deportable, precarious queers, regardless of sexual identity or practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with asylum-seekers and their supporters in Toronto, Canada, I highlight the waiting room as one type of material and metaphorical space that produces asylum-seekers as liminal queer subjects. I argue that approaching queerness as precarity, rather than lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identity or even sexual and gender diversity, provides alternative and expansive ethical horizons for queer and migration politics.

This article argues that media coverage of the 2010–17 Toronto gay village homicides avoids one of the central patterns in the case: the murderous aggression of a white gay man, Bruce McArthur, against racialized men, most of them from the Middle East or South Asia. It argues that even coverage that is sensitive to intersectionality tends to treat race, class, and immigration status as secondary to sexual orientation, making racialized queer migrants a “sub-group” of a normatively white lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer community. The article calls for sustained engagement with the specific, racialized character of much of the violence in the McArthur case. With inspiration from queer diasporic, transnational feminist, and feminist geographical methods, it points to continuities between McArthur’s racialized violence and the effects of Canadian white supremacy, imperialism, and capitalist inequality on Afghan and Sri Lankan refugees across diasporas. These effects notably include Canada’s 2002–14 role in the occupation of Afghanistan and the 2010 detainment of Sri Lankan Tamil passengers on the MV Sun Sea. The article concludes that critical reckoning with racialized violence as racialized violence is crucial to any hope of reparation in the wake of the McArthur case.

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In Part 1 of 'Encountering Berlant', we encounter the promise and provocation of Lauren Berlant's work. In 1000-word contributions, geographers and others stay with what Berlant's thought offers contemporary human geography. They amplify an encounter with their work, demonstrating how a concept, idea, or style disrupts something, opens up a new possibility, or simply invites thinking otherwise. The encounters range across the incredible body of work Berlant left

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Critical urban theory (CUT) provides intellectual support for a politics of the right to the city. However, CUT has rarely engaged with the rich scholarship on sexuality and the urban, much of which directly addresses questions of social justice. CUT has most often treated sexuality as an attribute, rather than a diffuse discourse of subject-producing power intimately connected with race, class and gender. This article highlights two strands in contemporary queer studies--queer subjectless critique and queer temporality--that can enrich understandings of the key concepts of alienation, deprivation and resistance in the city. I illustrate the salience of queer thinking for CUT through a close reading of Flag Wars (2003), a documentary film recognized for its engagement with gentrification and the politics of difference in the United States. While the film ostensibly explores the problem of gay gentrification in a working-class black neighborhood, a queer subjectless approach asks how discourses on sexuality produce residents at risk of displacement as deviant, immoral and queer--regardless of sexual orientation. I argue that recognizing the wide range of ways in which narratives about sexuality can deprive and alienate urban subjects could generate additional alternative bases for solidarity in the struggle for a just city.

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