Infrastructures of Migrant Intimacies

This paper explores how housing, people and places function as infrastructures in discussions of migrant intimacies. Intimacy is here understood both as relations between humans and as co-becomings with the more-than-human. The concept of co-becoming refers to the ontological thinking that all beings, materialities, places and affects are constituted through relations that are constantly regenerated. Infrastructures are understood not as prefigured objects or structures but as relational, dynamic patterns. Drawing on post-humanist queer theory, the paper develops the notion of the infrastructure of migrant intimacies to portray migrant relations in ways that move beyond normative categories of intimacy. The article draws on a theory-driven analysis of interviews with European Union (EU) and non-EU migrants working in low-paid jobs in Finland. The article addresses the following question: how do human and more-than-human infrastructures converge as intimacies in migrants’ accounts? By focusing on infrastructures, the article offers a nuanced interpretation of how migrant intimacies emerge in the context of precarity as creative, temporary and ambivalent co-becomings that do not easily align with white (hetero)normative notions of intimacy or with some popular queer understandings of intimacy.