Homonational Time(s)? Temporalities of Exception in European Queer Refugee Camps

This paper explores queer refugee camps in Europe as temporal as well as spatial formations, exceptional spaces where the promise of safety is continuously deferred. Building on feminist, queer, and decolonial theories of time, it interrogates how European asylum systems produce the queer refugee camp as a humanitarian innovation while reproducing colonial temporal hierarchies. Drawing on ethnographic research in Berlin and Copenhagen, the article traces how the everyday life of queer camps unfolds through waiting, repetition, and bureaucratic delay, forms of temporal governance that sustain rather than suspend exceptional rule. While ostensibly progressive, the establishment of queer-specific refugee accommodations reinscribes what Rahul Rao (2020) identifies as the “homoracial politics” of queer liberalism: a spatial and temporal alignment of queerness with modernity, safety, and futurity, and of racialised migrants with backwardness and crisis. The queer camp, in this light, embodies what Jasbir K. Puar (2007) calls homonationalism’s temporal logic: it stages Europe as the time-space of queer arrival, thereby legitimating the exclusion of others deemed temporally “behind.” The article argues that this exceptional space also functions as a site of chronopolitical regulation. Refugees’ bodies are synchronised to bureaucratic and humanitarian rhythms that measure worth through compliance, efficiency, and patience, thus echoing the capitalist and androcentric temporalities critiqued in feminist and queer time theory (Freeman, 2010; Mountz, 2011; Muñoz, 2009). Yet within this chrononormative regime, residents and volunteers cultivate alternative rhythms of care and endurance. These minor temporalities - of waiting together, of pausing institutional time, of inhabiting delay - constitute what the paper terms refuge as a temporal method: practices that resist the linear temporality of progress by sustaining life in suspension. By situating queer camps within feminist political theory and geography, the paper advances a critique of the temporal politics of asylum and proposes that emancipatory time politics must reckon with the colonial, racialised, and sexualised chronologies embedded in humanitarian care.