Work

Queer mountains: Migrant drag performers reimagining sexual citizenship in Germany

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: This article seeks to understand how staging, performing and re-narrating experiences of queer migration can be utilized to radically reimagine queer migrants’ subjectivities and politics in today’s Germany. Informed by ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2023, including 22 qualitative interviews with drag performers, I focus on the emerging scene of ‘migrant drag’ in Germany, informed by transnational histories of queer performance and border-crossing. Through acts of migrant drag, ‘building queer mountains’ appears as a queer migrant practice of finding alternative pathways to overcome obstacles that limit queer migrant subjectivities and to claim locality and stages for queer migrant politics beyond the normative scripts of sexual citizenship. Ultimately, ‘building queer mountains’ shows that sexual citizenship, sustained by (homo)normative sexualizations and hierarchical racialization, could be ‘crossed’ and reimagined through the collective and creative work of a community in search of alternative worlds.

Source: Sexualities

DOI: 10.1177/13634607241259539

Author: Tunay Altay

Institution: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Language: English

Topic: Gender and Feminist Studies

Subfield: Gender Studies

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Reduced inequalities

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,450