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Paper short abstract

Homonationalism is used extensively to explain the reproduction of border violence by queer forcibly displaced people. Yet, displacing the nation state in analysis elucidates how feminist and queer political economies of care recreate colonial border violence through logics of immunity and purity.

Paper long abstract

The reproduction of border violence by queer forcibly displaced people after their arrival in destination countries is explained almost exclusively through the concept of homonationalism in the literature. The notion that these queer subjects are but recreating a callous logic of the state, however, obscures the very colonial violence it indexes, while also reproducing it. Displacing the sovereign nation state as the analytic frame par excellence yields significantly greater insight into the everyday recursive cultural production of the border and its regulation. Drawing from novel ethnographic research with queer forcibly displaced people and their allies in Melbourne, Australia, I explore the emic recursion of border violence within feminist and queer circles of community and care. Examining the classificatory systems which subtend individual and group projects of self-actualisation, I argue that the feminist and queer politics of care depend on, and hence safeguard, the yoking of self-legitimisation to the dispossession and domination of Others. Utilising the concept of generalised domestication (Hage, 2017), I thus explicate how (often well-meaning) actors routinely reproduce the very colonial violence that they otherwise avowedly oppose through a logic of immunity and purity (Stoler, 2021). I hence contend that while queerness proffers very real possibilities for otherwise, these political economies ensure that colonial control of the border endures through a moral sanitisation of the violence.