Ahlstedt, ‘The Feeling of Migration’, 2016
- Category: Literature
- Source: Academic
- Subject: Sexual Orientation/Sexuality, Gender Identity, Refugee/Asylum, Migration, Ethnicity/Race, Social Class, LGBT+
- Place: Europe, Other
- Year: 2016
- File: The_Feeling_of_Migration_Narratives_of_Q
- URL: https://www.academia.edu/28022291/The_Feeling_of_Migration_Narratives_of_Queer_Intimacies_and_Partner_Migration
Sara Ahlstedt, ‘The Feeling of Migration: Narratives of Queer Intimacies and Partner Migration’, Linköping Studies in Arts and Science No. 686, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Linköping, 2016
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes narratives of queer partner migration. The purpose of the study is to examine how queer partner migrants and their Swedish partners experience the migration process by analyzing the emotions and feelings that emerge in the process.
The focus is the queer partner migration relationship, and what emotions and feelings ‘do’ to this relationship, but also how emotions and feelings structure the migration process. The study analyzes the work three different emotions – love, loss, and belonging – do in these migration processes, and how this work is described in the participant narratives.
By using affect theories and the concept of queer phenomenology, the dissertation shows how the work is connected to gender identity, sexual identity, race and whiteness, nationality, perceived proximity to Western-ness, class, language, and the migration narrative the migrating partner is (or is not) written into by way of the country they have migrated from. This is analyzed in relation to the theoretical frameworks of entanglement, homonationalism, and intimate citizenship.
The analysis shows that emotions and feelings structure the migration process for both more privileged and less privileged migrants, but in different ways. The understanding of who ‘is’ a migrant, and the preparedness for the feelings that arise in a migration process, are tied to the positions mentioned above, and the privileges these positions give, or do not give, the migrant access to. By focusing on emotions and feelings and what these do, the study also illustrates how the migration process affects the non-migrating partner who, amongst other things, engages in emotional labour to ‘make’ the migrating partner ‘Swedish.’
Both narratives and storytelling are important throughout the dissertation, not only as the method used in the analysis but as the form of the dissertation.