Identities Journal Blog
  • Home
  • About
    • About Identities
    • Global South Authors
    • Identities Collection
    • Latest Articles
    • Special Issues
    • Open Access Articles
    • Most Read Articles
    • Most Cited Articles
  • Identities Blog
    • Blog Collection
    • Blog Categories >
      • Anti-racism
      • Culture
      • Decoloniality
      • Ethnicity
      • Migration
      • Race
      • Commentaries
      • COVID-19 Blog Series
      • COVID-19 Symposium
      • More Blogs
    • About Our Blog
  • COVID-19 Blog Series
    • COVID-19 Blog Collection
    • Call for COVID-19 Commentaries
  • Events
    • Decolonizing Politics Symposium
    • The Subject of Decolonization: Literary Critical Insights
  • Contact
    • Subscribe to our Newsletter
  • Home
  • About
    • About Identities
    • Global South Authors
    • Identities Collection
    • Latest Articles
    • Special Issues
    • Open Access Articles
    • Most Read Articles
    • Most Cited Articles
  • Identities Blog
    • Blog Collection
    • Blog Categories >
      • Anti-racism
      • Culture
      • Decoloniality
      • Ethnicity
      • Migration
      • Race
      • Commentaries
      • COVID-19 Blog Series
      • COVID-19 Symposium
      • More Blogs
    • About Our Blog
  • COVID-19 Blog Series
    • COVID-19 Blog Collection
    • Call for COVID-19 Commentaries
  • Events
    • Decolonizing Politics Symposium
    • The Subject of Decolonization: Literary Critical Insights
  • Contact
    • Subscribe to our Newsletter

The social hauntings within narratives of plight

23/2/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Avery Gordon identified a problem with sociology over two decades ago when they wrote Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Despite the sociological aim of unlocking knowledge about social life, the emphasis on empiricism left what remains absent outside its purview. According to Gordon, haunting is the means of understanding how what remains absent within social life attempts to make itself known.
 
Such a methodology is important when understanding contemporary queer migration. Whether queer migrants need to keep in the shadows because they fear they might be deported by the state, or whether they remain in the closet because they fear they will not be accepted due to their sexuality and gender, there is much to be learnt about what remains absent within narratives on queer migration.
 
Although sociolegal analysis has done well attempting to uncover more about queer migration and the lives of queer migrants, particularly as related to those claiming asylum, it must be recognised there are limits on what can be learnt. There will always be experiences that fail to make the headlines of media outlets or the reports by nongovernmental organisations, which prompt two possible responses. On the one hand, one may seek to know more using the established methodologies of sociology. On the other hand, one may seek to grapple with what remains absent but becomes haunting.
Paying attention to the hauntings of queer migration is exactly the point of my Identities article, ‘Beyond intelligibility: the hauntings of queer migration’. Importantly, this was not an attempt to simply theorise about what may be missing from narratives on queer migration, but rather an attempt to explore how cultural production has the possibility of invoking the hauntings that take place within social life. More specifically, I analysed Season of Migration to the North by Lars Laumann, a film about a queer Sudanese migrant who fled to Norway after hosting a fashion show, and Shelter: Farewell to Eden by Enrico Masi, a film about a Filipino transgender migrant navigating European borders.
 
What both forms of cultural productions show is that intelligibility is not the only political goal. Although the demands of immigration regimes and sociolegal analysis may seek to enhance the intelligibility of queer migrants, I pointed to the way absences are conjured through hauntings to challenge the need to make queer migrants intelligible to understand their subjectivity, especially when their experiences of plight are often traumatic.
 
Having recognised that both the violence of European borders and liberal hospitality often demanded queer migrants appear within particular schemas of understanding, I wanted to disrupt the way visibility as intelligible subjects is heralded as the sole achievement for queer migrants. This was especially important because queer migrants seeking asylum are often expected to reproduce particular norms surrounding their sexuality and gender in order to claim intelligibility within Europe, not only when interacting with immigration regimes but within the public domain more broadly.
 
Such norms were linked to the stereotypes expected of white queer subjects in Europe, ranging from going to nightclubs or attending pride events. The haunting aspects of queer migration occur when this ‘figure’ of the queer migrant is destabilised. Paying attention to how absences are made present in cultural production allowed me to grapple with the possibility of going beyond intelligibility when seeking to understand queer migration.
 
The very politics of intelligibility has become the cornerstone of much queer activism surrounding rights and recognitions in liberal democracies, but there is always the risk of this becoming essentialising and reproducing its own exclusions. This is why coalitional praxis that does not depend upon intelligibility may be one step forward when challenging the violence of European borders.

​Image credit: Photo by Sébastien Goldberg on Unsplash

Blog post by Matthew Abbey, University of Warwick, UK

Read the Identities article: 
Abbey, Matthew. Beyond intelligibility: the hauntings of queer migration. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2021.2003110 ​
Picture
Explore other relevant Identities articles:

Transnational ways of belonging and queer ways of being. Exploring transnationalism through the trajectories of the rainbow flag
 
Identifications, communities and connections: intersections of ethnicity and sexuality among diasporic gay men
 
Queer habitus: bodily performance and queer ethnography in Lebanon

0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Blog Collection

    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019

    Blog Categories

    All
    Activism
    Anti-racism
    Asylum Seekers
    Belonging
    Blackness
    Boundary Work
    Cities
    Citizenship
    Colonialism
    Commentaries
    Conflict
    Cosmopolitanism
    Covid-19
    Cultural Memory
    Culture
    Decoloniality
    Diaspora
    Discrimination
    Displacement
    Diversity
    Ethnic Boundaries
    Ethnic Identity
    Ethnicity
    Exile
    Far Right
    Gender
    Identity
    Immigration
    Indigenous
    Integration
    Intersectionality
    Islamophobia
    Justice
    Kinship
    Marginalisation
    Migration
    Multiculturalism
    National Identity
    Nationalism
    Nationhood
    Othering
    Policing
    Populism
    Postcolonial
    Race
    Racial Identity
    Racialisation
    Racism
    Radicalism
    Refugees
    Religion
    Resistance
    State Racism
    Stereotyping
    Stigmatisation
    Subjectivity
    Transnationalism
    Victimhood
    Whiteness

Explore Identities at tandfonline.com/GIDE