Queer Lives and Mobility Across Generations

I’m exploring how women who self-describe as living queer lives organise and find solidarity in the context of mobility, especially migration and exile. The project is situated in Social Anthropology and borders on Gender Studies and Critical Urbanisms. I’m looking at specific experiences in local, self-organised cultural/artistic spaces, like community radios, in “postmigrant” settings (DACH countries), through a multi-sited ethnographic research design.

I will build on the concept of translocational positionality developed by Floya Anthias. This is an intersectional lens to understand identity and belonging across multiform and shifting borders and social boundaries. A further theoretical framework is queer-feminist anthropology, as developed by Margot Weiss, because of its potential to destabilise all identity claims, not just those based on sexuality. The role of the spatial and urban in facilitating patterns of queer solidarity, especially for newcomers and people with mobile biographies, also needs to be considered. Community radios as sites of research are relevant for their potential as liminal spaces (Busch & Hassemer 2018) where new encounters and non-linear life trajectories are (sometimes) facilitated. Sound mapping & sound collage as a communicative genre will complement more traditional ethnographic research outputs.