ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the intersections of mobility, sexuality and citizenship, and the role played by multilingualism and multi-semioticity in mediating such relationships. Debates about language and culture tests for the naturalisation of migrants are perhaps the most fraught discursive terrain in which frictions between mobility and the multilingual diversity that comes with it, as well as forms of surveillance geared to the reproduction of an unachievable monolingual national ideal, have manifested themselves in the first ten years of the twenty-first century. Admittedly, the choice of a cinematic text is not particularly common in either the work on language and citizenship, or in queer-migration scholarship, both of which have tended to investigate policy documents, interview data and ethnographic field notes. Citizenship is something that individuals repeatedly claim and contest as they negotiate between their own sense of attachment and affiliation, and the strictures imposed by dominant social, cultural and institutional forces.
