Translating difference: whiteness, racialisation and queer migration in Berlin

Abstract

This article explores how the experiences of queer migration shape and inform racialisation, and how racial categories, such as ‘whiteness’ and ‘non-whiteness’, are employed by queer migrants from Turkey in relation to their narratives of belonging and non-belonging in Germany. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Berlin between 2018 and 2022, I aim to show how racism is ambiguously attached to migration and sexual difference, and how ideas of racial difference enable queer migrants to form political collectives and make their experience intelligible to themselves and others. Instead of approaching racialisation as an all-or-nothing finality, the participants often use narratives of non-belonging to distance themselves from the public majority (defined as ‘heterosexual’ and ‘white’) and employ hybrid minoritarian identities, such as ‘queer people of colour’, to translate their difference to other queer migrant and racialised groups in Berlin.