Queer Borderscapes: The Geographies of Border Internalisation for Queer Latin American Migrants in Barcelona

States increasingly rely on forms of border dislocation and dispersal to sustain their mobility regimes. In response, scholars in critical border studies have turned to border deconstruction to examine contemporary migration governance. However, the application of queer theory to the study of decentralised bordering remains underexplored in the literature. I address this gap by analysing the impacts of border internalisation on queer Latin American migrants living in Barcelona. Building on Brambilla’s ‘borderscapes’ notion and Van Houtum and Van Naerssen’s understanding of ‘b/ordering’, I develop the ‘queer borderscapes’ framework: an intersectional intervention in the literature that examines how queerness intensifies and transforms b/ordering practices. Drawing from semi-structured interviews and walking ethnography with 13 participants, I argue that queerness disrupts the border’s classificatory logics in two ways: by forcing legibility across multiple, unstable axes of gender and sexuality that clash with the border’s demand for linear and coherent identity narratives, and by psychologically internalising the border through ‘code switching’ as a form of self-surveillance. In doing so, this study underscores the interlocking nature of the parameters that sustain mobility regimes, where the fraught relationship between the border and the migrant ‘other’ is laid bare.