Moral B/orders & the Politics of Belonging

While early migration studies largely centred on cisgender heterosexual men workers, feminist and queer scholarship has expanded the field by showing how diverse gender identities and sexualities intersect with class, race and other social factors to shape migrants’ experiences. This theme investigates the processes by which governments and other institutions manage and control the sexualities and gender identities of people who are moving — particularly through borders and beyond — and how norms, laws and policies shape, restrict or sometimes enable the sexual and gendered lives of mobile populations.

By focusing on queer and trans displacement within the Global South — including movements on, from and to the African continent — the theme counters the geographical and empirical orientation of existing scholarship, producing a more nuanced account of how, when, where and why LGBTQI+ people migrate. It also addresses how economic factors interact with mobility to control sexual economies, as in migrant and mobile sex work, and engages with violence on the move, including human trafficking.