Cesaro, ‘Undoing intimacy, redrawing borders’, 2026

Sara Cesaro, ‘Undoing intimacy, redrawing borders: Dealing with sexual violence in queer asylum support organizations’, Emotion, Space and Society, Volume 60, 2026, 101213

Abstract

This article addresses how an organization providing legal and social support to queer asylum seekers’ based in a major city in France fights against sexual violence, committed by volunteers on migrants. More specifically, it focuses on the framing processes (Benford and Snow, 2000) of both the organization’s action and space. The article highlights how intimacy is produced and understood among the organization, be it sexual and affective relations or a social proximity framed as familial. It shows, however, how intimacy can allow the production of sexual violence. It then focuses on the strategies used to minimize and euphemize this violence, by framing asylum seekers as dangerous and threatening, by drawing on an anti-migrant and racist rhetorics, seemingly paradoxical for such an organization. The article subsequently shows how the strategies to counter these discourses are based on a problematization of the whiteness in the organization: expliciting race, in a context that is apparently colourblind (Bonilla-Silva, 2012), functions as a tool for framing relations between volunteers and asylum seekers. If focusing on the treatment of sexual violence shows how this support organization constitute a continuum of sexual violence (Kelly, 1987), I argue for the necessity of extending this classic notion to encompass their spatial and racial dimensions, which intersect with the patriarchal one. In order to exit the organization from this continuum of violence, volunteers create new intimacy boundaries.

Keywords: Intimacy; Sexual violence; Framing processes; SOGI asylum