The question of refugee rights and immigrant entry to the UK presently has come under attack with the rise of nationalist sentiment and the exit of the UK from the European Union. The figure of the Muslim migrant has been normatively constructed to represent a limit to UK's multiculturalism (and, arguably globally). Such anti-Mus-lim sentiment operates via displacing racialized bodies from UK public culture. This article situates the ways in which racialized queer Muslim subjects attempt to maneuver structural racism and heteronormativity in the UK. The article argues that queer Muslim immigrants perceive queer spaces in Central London as white spaces. Secondly , we will analyze how the racialized queer Muslim subject creates ethnoracial specific spaces that are located outside central London. We argue that queer migration needs to be understood as an embodied experience by paying attention to how racialized queer Muslim migrants moves through multiple spaces in the city. The article develops a mixed method approach through an analysis of Ian Iqbal Rashid's film A Touch of Pink (2004) alongside Raisa Kabir's recent exhibition In/Visible Space: Reflections on the Realm of Dimensional Affect, Space and the Queer Racialised Self (Rich Mix, April, 2013) and the narrative of a gay identified working class Muslim immigrant male from East London. We argue that queer Muslim migrants reside on the margins of British symbolic culture through a non-belonging to one's religious identity. Such non-belonging is a spatialized experience. An analysis of the film, exhibition and our ethnography reveals the ways in which sexuality is constructed and conferred through racialization and creates precariously situated queer Muslim migrant subjects within present day UK.
Immigration procedures related to asylum and detention are based on sex/gender binaries. Such binaries frame the bodies of undocumented transgender asylum seekers as unintelligible to immigration law and subject them to intense trauma. The experiences of trauma and death of transgender detainees within detention centers is a spatialized experience. The assignment of detention cells based on birth gender, denial of hormones and live saving treatments constitute a racialized and gendered torture upon the body of the transgender detainee. The article attends to the narratives of transgender detainees within detention cell by analyzing the script of “ Tara's Crossing,” a play based on the narratives of transgender detainees and asylum seekers. The play was produced by LGBTQ immigrant right activists soon after the attacks on 9/11 and the intensification of detention and deportation as a part of national security procedures. Drawing upon the script of Tara's Crossing, along with activist archives such as flyers, newsletter articles, and radio interviews of Balmitra Vimal Prasad, the protagonist of the play, the article analyzes the ways in which the sex/gender binary is reiterated within the detention cell, as well as asylum procedures. I turn to the activism around Tara's Crossing and the present-day activism of transgender immigrants in order to show how trauma experienced by transgender detainees holds potential for creating coalitional oppositional politics.
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