Thomas Wimark, senior lecturer and associate professor at the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Uppsala University gives an open lecture during the conference "Migration and Discipline: Civic Fostering of Gender, Sexuality, and the Body".
Thomas Wimark
Senior lecturer and associate professor at the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Uppsala University
Thomas is a senior lecturer and associate professor at the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Uppsala University. His research interests include migration, urban planning and marginalised groups. In his academic work, he mainly interrogates how normative views of sexuality, gender and race affects (queer) individuals that migrate within and between countries. His publication list includes contributions in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Social and Cultural Geography, and Housing studies. He is on the editorial board of Gender, Place and Culture.
In the last decade, integration discourses and policy discussions regarding seeking asylum have gained momentum, with ever more individuals fleeing repressive regimes, poverty, and environmental catastrophes. This increasing incidence of asylum number has compelled attention towards asylum systems and governance of migrants. In these forums, sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) asylum seekers and refugees represent contradictory subjects. On the one hand, granting asylum to SOGI asylum seekers has proxied in the Global North for inclusion and tolerance of LGBT individuals. On the other hand, SOGI asylum seekers often do not meet heteronormative and homonormative societal expectations and their visible difference juxtaposes much societal Whiteness thus evoking anxiety in popular rhetoric. In this keynote, I draw from research with SOGI asylum seekers to show how they are continuously domesticized in the society based on heteronormative and homonormative standards. I diverge from the idea that the asylum system is the main space for making home in a country of settlement and argue that such home-making occurs through time and space. Taking searching for home and homemaking as a point of departure, I show that SOGI asylum seekers and refugees are forced to endure living in liminality for long periods of time. This position shifts analyses away from state-controlled spaces to a wider consideration of the types and range of spaces important tor homemaking.