Queering the Politics of Refugee Camps. Sexualities, Spaces, and Governance

Abstract

This panel investigates how refugee camps operate as both political and spatial regimes in which gendered and sexualized norms are reproduced, contested, and transformed. While forced migration research has increasingly addressed intersectional inequalities, the lived experiences and political subjectivities of queer refugees remain underexplored. To spark research debate, camps are addressed not solely as sites of humanitarian governance and control but also as arenas of queer negotiation, where sexuality, safety, and belonging are continuously (re)constructed and (re)defined. The panel situates queer refugee experiences in camps within broader debates on protection, agency, and the politics of aid. It further locates these dynamics within the global refugee regime, emphasizing how the camp functions as a central and globally dispersed technology of governance across both the Global South and Global North. While often imagined as exceptional or peripheral, camps in different contexts reproduce connected logics of control and care that reflect broader hierarchies of mobility and belonging. We seek to understand how humanitarian governance produces spatial orders and temporalities that render queer lives precarious yet also open up alternative modes of relationality and political agency. By examining how queer refugees experience and contest these regimes, the panel foregrounds the geographies of humanitarianism and the ways in which sexuality and gender become entangled with global politics of displacement and border management. The panel includes contributions that employ qualitative, ethnographic, theoretical, and comparative approaches to examine the governance of sexuality and gender in the contexts of refugee camps. How do institutional structures regulate sexualities and bodies in the name of protection? What strategies of resistance and reconfiguration emerge among queer refugees navigating these regimes? By queering the study of forced migration governance, this panel contributes to political science debates on sovereignty, biopolitics, and the spatialities of care. It aims to bridge feminist, queer, and refugee studies to illuminate how global politics of displacement are constituted and potentially transformed through the lived realities of queer refugees.

Title	Details
Spaces of Surveillance, Sites of Subversion: Geopolitical Imprints on Gender Identity in Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon	View Paper Details
Homonational Time(s)? Temporalities of Exception in European Queer Refugee Camps	View Paper Details
Who finds safety? Queer displaced people and the search for protection in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya	View Paper Details
"It didn't feel like home anymore": Russian queer migrants in Serbia and Germany since Russia's aggression against Ukraine	View Paper Details