Närbild på graffitivägg med illustration och texten "Colombia".

Welcome to a migration seminar titled Boundaries of Queerness - Homonationalism and Racial Politics in Sweden.

Guest speaker

Katharina Kehl, PhD in peace and development studies. Katharina is affiliated to the Department of Cultural Science, University of Gothenburg. She is also editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary open-access journal lambda nordica.

Seminar abstract:

In the wake of fights for LGBTQ rights across the globe, these rights have assumed new meanings. How LGBTQ people are and should be treated has become a deeply racialised boundary marker, internationally and domestically. It has both been used to ascribe “Otherness” in immigration debates across Europe and plays a prominent role in Russia’s ongoing fight against “Gayropa” in Ukraine. Boundary making around sexuality and gender in relation to race plays an important role for processes of identity formation; and materializes in institutional frameworks regulating e.g. reproductive and transgender health or asylum-seeking processes. This book explores Sweden as a political arena where boundary making around LGBTQ rights is both common and contested. Attitudes towards gender identity and sexuality are drawn upon to create powerful narratives of Sweden as particularly progressive, while the political right has employed a rhetoric of gender equality having gone “too far”. The tensions between these positions provide analytical insights concerning the mobilization of sexuality, gender and race in contestations around (non-)belonging and (un)intelligibility that go beyond the specific empirical context. By introducing the concept of normative intelligibility from the context of queer theory into literature on borders, boundary making and politics of belonging, the book looks to expand and destabilize binary notions of (non-)belonging. It also aims to (re-)focus our attention on processes of racialization, and the ascription of race and religion as ethno-cultural signifiers of ‘Otherness’ in relation to sexuality and gender.

Attendance

This is a hybrid seminar, you are welcome to connect via Zoom or join us at MIM seminar room, floor 9, Niagara, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1. To attend on campus, please gather by the reception area at 13.05.
If you have any questions, send an email to mim@mau.se.

Zoom

Link will be available closer to the seminar date.

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