Queer in Exile and Exile in Queer: Journeys for Asylum and Belonging across Borders and Norms

This is a doctoral study on exile as a tenuous journey between territories, norms of belonging and politics. Europe, freedom and liberal democracy are terms that often sound interchangeable for people who set on a quest for settling and belonging in European territories and communities. For queer exiles, the journey also means abandoning communities and kinships, and the norms that structured these, in search and hope for queer ones. Queer is deviant, both in the narrow sexual/gender sense and in the wider sense of deviation from norms of belonging and home making. However, queer keeps deviating from norms of kinship and belonging, even in countries and communities of chosen refuge. Belonging, community- and home- making are unending journeys. Long before crossing territorial boundaries, queers journey in belongings and narratives that sound alien or exilic within communities they inhabit. When they do finally cross state borders into countries of hoped refuge they often become differently exiled in new forms, and norms. I trace trajectories of the narratives of belonging along the journey from the abandoned community to the place of new exile and desired belonging. The new exile entails intensified experiences with norms of citizenship and racialization and the injuries of these, which presses for new meaning, sense and affinities of community and belonging. My research question is: How does the queer exile conceptualization and politicization of home and belonging change through the journey of exile?