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

Abstract

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.