(Trans)forming queer in migration narratives: The case of Russian gender/sexually nonconforming migrants in Berlin

Abstract

In recent years, social sciences and psychological scholarship in particular have increasingly started to address how processes of globalisation and transnational migration affect gendered sexual identities, local practices and communities, while, at the same time, exploring the role sexuality and gender play in relocation decisions, migration routes and experiences of acculturation. The present study adds to a young, but dynamically evolving interdisciplinary field of queer migration by interrogating how Russian queer migrants (de)construct, sense, perform and narrate their gendered sexual identities. Grounded in queer theor(ies) and applying queer epistemological possibilities to migration research on gendered sexualities, this paper seeks to problematise existing (scholarly) discourses on LGBT migrant subjectivities. Interviews with 10 sexually/gender nonconforming Russian migrants in Berlin were conducted and narrative analysis was employed to approach migration stories. Results showed that gendered sexual subjectivities and the very performances that constitute them go through (trans)formations as migration narratives unfold. Often being highly politicised, the self-declared identities were also strategically-used and flexible and were found to be influenced by different discursive scripts individuals drew upon. Ultimately, this paper serves as a call for an on-going interrogation and problematisation of the existing sexual/gender identity categories as uncritically attributed to non-Western, migrant, diasporic, racialised and creole queer subjects and attention to political discourses these categories are produced within.