Queer Muslims creating queer livable spaces through strategic (In)visibility and educational migration in transnational contexts

This article explores the connections between the pursuit of higher education, queer migration, livability, and (in)visibility based on 14 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with queer Muslims from Muslim-majority countries in the Global South who pursued higher education in the Global North. Centering the concept of livability, the article highlights that queer Muslims move in and out of the closet strategically, depending on social, political, and cultural contexts. This dance between visibility and invisibility helps them create queer livable spaces where they can express their non-normative genders and sexualities and find queer belonging while also maintaining their familial and communal ties and avoiding violence. Educational migration becomes a tool to create such livable spaces as it allows queer Muslims financial stability and respectability, helping them navigate the expectations of marriage and heteronormativity in their countries of origin and Islamophobia, xenophobia, and homonormativity in the countries of migration. These queer livable spaces are an alternative and a form of resistance to Western notions of queerness and the visibility paradigm.