Gendering Queer Migration: Evidence from Chinese LGBTQ+ Migrants


Tori Yang, University of British Columbia

Since the 1970s, gender and migration scholarship has emerged as a vibrant subfield in migration studies. Evolving from critiquing androcentric perspectives that take men’s experiences as the default principle, this body of work has profoundly transformed our understanding of how migration, like all other social phenomena, is a gendered process. Despite promising developments in the area, assumptions about heterosexuality still largely structure foundational arguments about the context of migration and its process. Most discussions of gender in the family are what Ingraham (1994: 204) calls “heterogender,” a concept which draws our attention to heterosexuality as an unquestioned and invisible social arrangement. However, gender does not simply distribute men and women in relations of inequality across multiple social terrains, but it also involves the marginalization of non-normative gender identities and forms of intimacy. Left under-examined by scholars of gender and migration is the distinct influence of sexuality. To this end, queer migration scholarship provides a crucial intervention. By focusing on “how sexuality constitutes a ‘dense transfer point for relations of power’ that structure all aspects of international migration” (Luibheid 2008: 169), queer migration provides a critical entry point to interrogate the “heterosexual imaginary” (Ingraham 1994) in migration theories, including in gender and migration scholarship (Manalansan 2006). Developments in gender and migration scholarship create opportunities to examine gender not only in the broader context of migration but also within the realm of queer migration, especially given its ontological distinctiveness. However, in its focus on sexualities, queer migration scholarship insufficiently conceptualizes gender as a relational and differentiating mechanism. This oversight inadvertently homogenizes queer migrants as a singular group defined primarily by their non-normative sexualities, an assumption that does not adequately reflect the more complex understandings that are emerging from gender and migration scholarship. If heteronormativity is the “grid of intelligibility” that dictates an “oppositionally and hierarchically defined” gender and sexuality, then the endeavor of queer migration to challenge the heteronormative assumptions in migration scholarship (Luibheid 2004) must extend beyond interrogating non-normative sexualities into a deeper engagement with how gender and sexuality are mutually imbricated in shaping the lives of queer migrants. Combining insights from the queer migration literature and gender and migration scholarship, this article details the gendered effects of queer migration by disentangling gender from sexuality. To do so, I draw from in-depth interviews with 50 skilled Chinese LGBTQ+ migrants in the United States and Canada. Placing the experiences of gay men alongside that of women and non-binary migrants can augment our understanding of the gendered experiences of queer migrants by conceptualizing gender as relational without reifying the premise of heterosexuality. My findings demonstrate how gender provides privileges to a subset of gay men in navigating heteronormative expectations while constraining others. Instead of being uniformly restrictive, however, gendered subjectivities are also reshaped in the process of migration. The findings shed light on the varied impacts of gender and underscore the recursive interplay between gender and queer migration. This article contributes to both gender and migration scholarship and queer migration studies, framing heteronormativity as at once a structuring force and a cultural artifact that is actively negotiated and contested through migration processes.

This paper will be presented at the following session: