Toward Queer Anti-nationalist Belonging: LGBTQ+ Immigrants, Assimilation, and Transnational Attachments

Increasing scholarship has examined the interplay between migration and sexuality. However, less attention has been given to the impacts of sexuality upon later generations of immigrants and to migrants whose migration journeys were not in pursuit of sexual freedom. Drawing from 33 in-depth interviews with LGBTQ+ individuals whose migration histories were unrelated to their sexuality, I find sexuality nonetheless acts as a mediator of attachment or detachment from national identity, which is further complicated by international sexual politics, racialization, and pressures of assimilation. By problematizing the naturalization of national inclusion and assimilation into nation states, I show queer migrants are in fact critical of national belonging, negotiate their attachment to countries through their sexuality, and in some cases, formulate an explicitly anti-nationalist and anti-assimilationist framework.