Queering Migration Discourse

Differentiating Racism and Migratism in Postcolonial Europe

Abstract

In this article, I make one main argument: I claim that a differentiation of racism and migratism is needed in critical (queer feminist) knowledge production concerned with racism and migration in postcolonial Europe. With my analysis, I show that without this differentiation, queer-feminist theory and activism reproduce Europe as a space free of race (and thereby deny racism and the efficiency of racialisation), reduce transnationalism to a coexistence of homogenised national entities and render Europeans of colour as the abjects of discourses on migration – and paradoxically racism. Overall, this is an epistemological project and I call for a change of paradigms in activism and scholarship on migration in postcolonial Europe. I argue for a postcolonial framing of migration and show the necessity of analysing migratism (the discriminatory ascription of migration) always in relation to racism. I am concerned with carving out dimensions of power relations that are, in such an immense way, constitutive for collective possibilities of conceptualising the world and knowledge production(s), that they become even inaccessible to critical and reflective analyses, as their premises are naturalised and normalised in such a way that they become invisible and unquestionable. My approach is not about separating struggles against racism from those against migratism, nor do I want to deny that racism and migratism have a specific interconnection. On the contrary, I argue that anti-racist and anti-migratist struggles have a long shared history and my research underlines the necessity to carefully analyse the construction of gendered racialisation in Europe and its relationship to migration.