McGuirk, ‘Psychogeography, Safe Spaces, and LGBTQ Immigrant Experience: Reflections from the “At Home in The Village?” project’, 2018
- Category: Literature
- Source: Academic
- Subject: Sexual Orientation/Sexuality, Gender Identity, Refugee/Asylum, Ethnicity/Race, LGBT+
- Place: Americas
- Year: 2018
- File: Psychogeography, Safe Spaces, and LGBTQ Immigrant Experience - Reflections from the At Home in The Village project
- URL: https://refugeehosts.org/2018/01/13/psychogeography-safe-spaces-and-lgbtq-immigrant-experience-reflections-from-the-at-home-in-the-village-project/
Siobhán McGuirk, ‘Psychogeography, Safe Spaces, and LGBTQ Immigrant Experience: Reflections from the “At Home in The Village?” project’, Refugee Hosts ‘Representations of Displacement Series.’ (London: University College London), 13 January 2018
Abstract
How can representations of local communities as particularly ‘hospitable’ and ‘welcoming’ spaces in fact obscure complex realities of exclusion? In this contribution to our Representations of Displacement series, Siobhán McGuirk explores the ways in which NGO and media reports have (mis)represented sexual minority refugees’ arrival in an “inclusive” community in the USA characterised by rainbow flag “gaybourhoods” and welcoming “safe spaces.” In contrast to these dominant NGO and media narratives however, McGuirk’s research suggests that the reality of fleeing home, and of being welcomed into US “gaybourhoods,” is not a linear process of travelling from “fear to safety”: instead, it is a complex process of (un)welcome and insecurity, where inclusion in certain communities is simultaneously framed by experiences of racism and xenophobia.