Queering the Diaspora

In a recent overview of queer migration scholarship, Eithne Luibhéid makes the crucial point that queer migration is at once a set of grounded processes involving heterogeneous social groups and a series of theoretical and social justice questions that implicate – but also extend beyond – migration and sexuality strictly defined, refusing in the process to attach to bodies in any strictly identarian manner (2008: 169).1 Yet queer migration scholarship is also directly informed by an understanding of sexuality as constructed within multiple and conflicting relations of power, including race, ethnicity, gender, class, citizenship and geopolitical location. For this reason it engages with histories and subjects that reflect both alienation from white gay communities and histories of multiple diasporas forged through colonialism and transnational capitalism. Much of the expanding and pioneering body of scholarship reveals that queer migrants comprise essentially ‘impossible’ subjects with unrepresentable histories that exceed existing categories, thereby requiring scholars to foreground and challenge regimes of power and knowledge that generate structures of impossibility where particular groups are concerned, and to re-examine how individuals negotiate them. Overlapping, palimpsestic histories of imperialism, invasion, investment, trade and political influence create ‘bridges for migration’ between and among nation states (Luibhéid 2008: 173).2