Un-silencing the Lambs: Slaying the Racialized, Queer CEE Migrant in 'God’s Own Country'

• In Event: Liberation or Racialization?: Intersectional Perspectives on Central, Eastern, Southeastern European, and Eurasian Queer Migrations

Abstract

“God’s Own Country” (2017) is the first British feature film to include a queer character representative of the sizable migration from Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries to the United Kingdom that occurred in the years between 2004 (the EU enlargement) and 2020 (“Brexit”), and the intensification of racialization and xenophobia among indigenous Britons during this period. The film depicts an intimate relationship between a closeted young farmer in Yorkshire, a region in the north of England described colloquially as “God’s own country” and a male Romanian migrant laborer who arrives there to work. Upon first meeting, the Yorkshire man subjects the Romanian man to racist insults; however, from this discursively assaultive introduction, the relationship between the two men develops in stages into first a sexual, then romantic, then committed partnership. Animal slaughter and death recur in the film as metaphor. This paper draws on Kalmar’s anthropological concept of “East Europeanism” and the Harlem ball culture’s reinterpretation of the word “slay” to mean “accomplish something amazing” rather than “kill violently” to identify and examine the interwoven themes of racialized/xenophobic discourse, cinematic queer representation, and eroticization of the CEE migrant male body in “God’s Own Country.”

Author

• Nicholas Boston, CUNY Lehman College