Migrating Images and Self-Translation: Visual Narratives by Queer Refugees in Germany and Sweden Contesting Right Wing Mobilization

Images of migrants have been used and diffused online by right wing extremist activists or far right populist parties during contentious election campaigns to construct and legitimate an ethno-nationalist representation of citizenship. At the same time, images can potentially become sites of resistance promoting new representations of migrants ‘acts of citizenship’ by (cf. Isin). Following media reporting on the issue of incidents of sexual harassment committed allegedly by refugees, right wing activists in Germany and Sweden have used provocative visual representations depicting immigrants as ‘criminal foreigners’. The Alternative for Germany (AfP) used infamous posters and narratives conflating the image of male, Muslim migrants with that of homophobics. Not long ago, the figure of migrants has been the symbolic core not of institutionally endorsed right-wing anti-immigrant campaigns but of non-institutional grassroots campaigns by left-wing activists trying to construct a trans-nationalist vision and stories of solidarity connecting migrants and precarious citizens (Doerr 2017; Doerr and Mattoni 2014). This paper highlights the challenges of progressive activists’ attempts to intervene as critical, ‘political translators’ (Doerr 2018) building resisting images and visual narratives contrasting the right wing’s rapid and effective diffusion of denigrating images of minorities in multicultural digital publics. Queer refugees from Muslim countries do not fit into the stereotypical propaganda images by far right wing populists and extremists. Operating in the context of polarized media debates, LGBTQI refugees in Sweden and Germany seek to build resistance to dominant media representations, by translating their diverse narratives and imaginaries of transnational citizenship and solidarity. This paper traces the cultural challenges that queer migrants face during their collective and individual processes of self-translation in the context of protest coalitions and grassroots education toward host societies, institutions interacting with majority as well as minority groups. The paper infuses research on social movements and translation with theories of narrative and visual and discursive analysis (Polletta 2006, Baker 2016; Doerr 2018).