Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema

Abstract

This exciting and original volume offers the first comprehensive critical study of the recent profusion of European films and television addressing sexual migration and seeking to capture the lives and experiences of LGBTIQ+ migrants and refugees.Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema argues that embodied cinematic representations of the queer migrant, even if at times highly ambivalent and contentious, constitute an urgent new repertoire of queer subjectivities and socialities that serve to undermine the patrolled borders of gender and sexuality, nationhood and citizenship, and refigure or queer fixed notions and universals of identity like 'Europe' and national belonging based on the model of the family. At stake ethically and politically is the elaboration of a 'transborder' consciousness and aesthetics that counters the homonationalist, xenophobic and homo/trans-phobic representation of the 'migrant to Europe' figure rooted in the toxic binaries of othering (the good vs bad migrant, host vs guest, indigenous vs foreigner).Bringing together 15 contributors working in different national film traditions and embracing multiple theoretical perspectives, this powerful and timely collection will be of major interest to both specialists and students in film and media studies, gender and queer studies, migration/mobility studies, cultural studies, and aesthetics.

Truths, fakes and the deserving queer migrant

“…Early scholarship on queer migration explored how queer migrants subverted the bounds of citizenship and the way borders were attempting to authenticate their sexuality and gender (Cantú, 2009;Luibhéid, 2008). Whether immigration regimes or across society, the latter which can produce a modality of bordering in its own right, there has been an attempt to authenticate not only the experiences of persecution had by queer migrants in Europe and elsewhere but their claimed sexuality and gender (Spijkerboer and Jansen, 2011;Williams, 2020). Such expectations often require queer migrants to adhere to stereotypes of white (homo)normative LGBT persons in Europe (and the global North more broadly)ranging from producing linear trajectories of sexuality, relying on binary gender norms, or adhering to sociocultural ideas of what their traits and interests might be (Giametta, 2017;Sari, 2020).…”

‘Refugees welcome’, including in (gay) porn: violence under the mask of liberation

“…I also situate the film within theoretical frameworks on queer migration, recognising how sexuality intersects with race, class, gender, and other factors to shape migratory experiences and the control of mobility (Cantú 2009;Luibhéid 2008). As such, this article contributes to the growing analysis of the visual economy on queer migration (Williams 2020), especially the intersecting forms of oppression that subjugate queer refugees to violence on both the material and discursive level. Not only is the queer refugee depicted across television, cinema, documentary, and photography; porn has become another domain of interest.…”