Beyond intelligibility: the hauntings of queer migration

This article explores the haunting aspects of queer migration within two documentary films: Season of Migration to the North (Laumann 2015), a film about a queer Sudanese migrant who fled to Norway after hosting a fashion show, and Shelter: Farewell to Eden (Masi 2019), a film about a Filipino transgender migrant navigating European borders. Instead of focusing on how the films make the protagonists intelligible, I focus on how absences are conjured to question the necessity of making the subject intelligible. This is important because queer migrants are often framed as only victims of persecution who must become intelligible to the demands of sexual humanitarianism. Disrupting the way visibility is heralded as an achievement for queer migrants, I explore the importance of unintelligibility in migration, especially when the terms of appearance are controlled by not only norms surrounding sexuality, gender, race, and class but also the violence of European borders.