Dragging the border. Refugee/migrant agency, belonging, and drag person(a)s.


Paulie McDermid, York University

Nationalist anxieties around borders in Canada and other ‘Western’ countries regularly generate dehumanizing political discourses that position refugee and other migrant people as threats to the imagined integrity of the nation. These hostile discourses translate into racialized border policies and reception practices that readily fold some bodies into the nation while many others are habitually excluded from belonging. Meanwhile, in the past few years, right-wing extremist attacks on trans/non-binary/queer people across Canada, the US, and other countries have proliferated. These attacks have often taken the form of anti-trans laws and political hostility which have brought drag artists directly into the firing line. Notably, events where drag artists read stories for children have been targeted. Such attacks have sought to dehumanize drag artists (and trans folks) as gender ‘monsters’ who endanger children and thus threaten via the figure of the Child the nation’s future. Consequently, both refugees/migrants and drag artists face dehumanizing social and political exclusion from (national) belonging. This presentation will share some findings from a recent qualitative doctoral study in which drag artists who migrated to or sought refuge in Canada describe what creating a drag persona means for their refugee/migrant subjectivities, how they assert agency in the face of dehumanizing hostility, and how they foster belonging for themselves and others. Uniquely, this study highlights the utility of looking at refuge and migration through the lens of drag in two critical areas. Firstly, refugee studies scholarship has problematized the denial of agency to the ‘forced’ migrant (e.g., Stepputat and Sørensen, 2014) resulting in the production of an essentialized refugee ‘victim’ (Malkki, 1995); a non-agentive ‘non-person’, timeless and placeless, who is the object of ‘Western’ rescue (Kyriakides et al., 2018, 2019). Meanwhile, other migrants are positioned as threatening and ‘bogus’ figures with an excess of agency, shopping around for the best country to which to move (Bakewell, 2010). In response to these constructions, scholars, including queer and trans migration specialists, have noted the agentive and strategic deployment of a performative ‘refugeeness’ (e.g., Fassin and Salcedo, 2015; Häkli et al., 2017; Murray, 2015). This study takes up intentionality and performativity in drag performance (Butler, 1999) to re-examine issues of refugee/migrant agency. Secondly, and following on from these observations about the ‘refugee’ as a diminished category of ‘person’, the study considers the question of who is a ‘person’ in light of what refugee/migrant drag artists have to say about their invented personas. This discussion will draw on ideas about the relationship of ‘person’ to persona from thinkers such as Hannah Arendt (1951, 1969) and Roderick Ferguson (2019) to situate the social and political life of refugee/migrant drag artists within a framework of relational subjectivity as sketched by psychologist Augustine Nwoye (2007) and feminist geographer Sage Brice (2020). Building on relational subjectivity, livable spaces of belonging for the drag artists in this study are both cultivated in the present, via non-queer and queer familial formations, and projected into the future, through intergenerational non-normative reproduction (Gogul, 2018). In such ways, refugee and other migrant drag artists firmly push back on exclusion and hostility in social and political domains.

This paper will be presented at the following session: