Warming up Narratives of Community: Queer Kinship and Emotional Exile

This text tackles questions of what makes a community and belonging possible and sens- ible. Rather than focusing on a specific community, it centers the ongoing collective living and communality at work in constructing and deconstructing narratives of belonging. The text is based on a year-long ethnographic fieldwork in gender -political communities in Helsinki, among people whose state -authorized residence in Finland is (sought to be) recognized based on the need for protection from sexuality- and gender -based violence in communities of origin/departure.1 I begin with narratives that participants mobilize to make sense of belonging to a given community or collective (queer, multicultural, Finnish/European) and non -belonging to another (community of origin). Then, I discuss possibilities of affinity, alliance and politics that rethink normative/restrictive structures of identification and othering/exclusion. I foreground queerhood for 1) its praxis of prob- lematizing normative boundaries of communities, 2) its juxtaposition of the intimate and the communal to mobilize vulnerability as transformative to violent structures. I argue that the precarity of queer racialized exiles might entail strategic, but possibly compla- cent, investment in racializing norms. This precludes consideration of unjust structures in the desired society of settlement. However, the realm of precarity opens to (re)consid- eration and contestations of the norms and terms of belonging to the idealized desired (Finnish/European/multicultural) community. Scholars have highlighted that experienc- ing racializing queer -political milieus induces shifts in racialized queers' narratives of belonging and affinity. My ethnography on mundane narratives in the uncertainty and unmooring of exile traces how abstracted and dichotomous/factionalist narratives of com munity open and warm up to a queerer sense of kinship that is more attuned to con- siderations of the lived -experience violence to difference (and the different) within and without these boundaries of belonging.