Beyond Settlement: Temporal-Spatial Negotiations of Sexuality among Queer Student Migrants

• In Event: Transnational Sexualities (Co-sponsored by Global and Transnational Sociology Section)

Abstract

Queer migration scholarship has often approached queer subjects through a settlement-oriented horizon, depicting mobility as oriented toward long-term incorporation in a host country, as in much work on queer asylum and queer labour migration. Yet international students move through cyclical academic temporalities and shifting spatial attachments, where settlement is rarely assumed. This group has often been narrated by higher education scholarship from a campus-based perspective, yet international students have rarely been studied by migration scholars primarily as migrants, rather than as students. This study addresses this research gap and explores how queer student migrants experience and navigate sexuality across shifting spatial and temporal horizons.

Based on the spatial method of walking interviews, and the temporal method of sit-down interviews incorporating self-portraits and timelines, with 24 East Asian queer student migrants in London, this study offers an infrastructural mechanism for compartmentalizing sexuality. It captures how migrants make sexual life workable through rhythmic switching across segmented spaces and timeframes, alongside two everyday sub-mechanisms of condensing sexuality and restoring sexuality. These sub-mechanisms identify concentrated, high-density windows of intensified sexual expression, and decompressed, lower-stakes phases and spaces through which sexuality is resumed and sustained, respectively. Together, the three mechanisms challenge assimilatory and incorporation explanations by offering a portable framework for analyzing how queer migrants experience and navigate sexuality across rapid horizon shifts and constant mobility.

Author

• Ziqi Yin, University of Cambridge