ABSTRACT
Recent approaches to the study of queer migration politics and diaspora, while appearing to serve only a select set of research interests within geography, have tremendous potential in advancing the study of geographies of migration at large. Most notably, they can: illuminate the impossible positions migrants often occupy; challenge diasporic norms over authenticity; destabilize conventional understandings of gender, nation and home; bring a coalitional understanding of politics to the fore of migration analysis; and situate diasporic experiences within present and future possibilities for new ways of expressing intimacy and kinship beyond the limited scope of nationality and citizenship. Unfortunately, while feminist gender-sensitive approaches to migration now occupy a central place in the geographic study of migration, the often interrelated and overlapping queer approaches to migration continue to be underrepresented. An example is in Michael Samers’s Migration (2010), from the Routledge Key Ideas in Geography series, a recent key textbook on migration geographies that includes extensive discussions of gender and feminist approaches but hardly a mention of sexuality and queer approaches. Similar omissions exist in a broad set of texts and conference sessions on migration that reveal a critical integration of feminism but not of queer theory.
