ABSTRACT
This chapter is an introduction to the evolution of queer migrant and refugee representation in recent European film and maps out the current areas of theoretical enquiry within the context of migration cinema and migratory aesthetics. It establishes first the profusion of innovative and daring films made during the last 15–20 years which explore themes of sexual migration while seeking to visualise queer migrant lives within Europe and at its borders. This exciting new cinematic corpus encompasses a remarkable range of genres and formal approaches, from taut emotional dramas and romances to comedies, experimental docufictions, grassroots documentaries, and television series. It then examines in turn the themes of queer asylum, homonationalism, the figuration of the queer migrant, the New Europe, border aesthetics and politics, and queer migrant relationality and affect. The chapter argues that the multiple meanings of ‘queer’ extend also to how films portray migrants of all genders, since the aesthetic process may undermine and destabilise fixed notions and universals of identity such as ‘Europe’, ‘Europeanness’, as well as European protocols like national belonging based on the model of the family. It is argued that the impressively diverse representations of the connected, embodied figure of the queer migrant in recent European cinema, even if sometimes highly ambivalent and contentious, constitute a major, new and urgent repertoire of queer subjectivities and potentialities. At stake ethically and politically is the elaboration of a fully sentient and desiring queer migrant/refugee subject and the formalising of a new, queer, migrant consciousness that directly counters the homonationalist, xenophobic and homo/trans-phobic representation of the ‘migrant to Europe’ figure rooted in the toxic binaries of othering (the good vs. bad migrant, host vs. guest, indigenous vs. foreigner). Finally, the chapter presents the argument for a new, more ethically informed ‘transborder’ aesthetics.
