Cancelled! Racialised intimacies: Masculinities in the economy of LGBTIQ+ refugee support in Berlin and Copenhagen

About the seminar

Drawing on interviews with refugees, volunteers, and employees, alongside ethnographic fieldwork within LGBTIQ+ refugee support in Berlin and Copenhagen respectively, this presentation introduces to the concept of ‘racialised intimacies’ to explore how support is oftentimes mediated by sexual intimacy as a form of currency as well as the idea of familial intimacy. This uneven support also reproduces power imbalances that are established in particular masculine queer spaces where racial hierarchies are at play. In some cases, these interactions lead to exploitation. This presentation engages with the scholarship on queer asylum by examining the nuanced power relations and intimate economies within LGBTIQ+ refugee support emphasizing the importance of considering racialised masculinities in these contexts.

About Marlene Spanger

Over the past 15 years research of Marlene Spanger has been significant in the field(s) of labour migration including various industries such as logistics, agriculture, cleaning, construction, and sex work as well as gender and racialization studies. Examining intersecting hierarchies of racial, gender, sexuality and/or citizenship, Spanger shows how migrants experience exploitation and systemic racism in various ways and, as well as how they respond to such hierarchies. Theorizing ‘convoluted mobility’ she has demonstrated how migrant worker experience multiple forms of exploitation. Emphasising transnationalism, she also shows how migrants create transnational spaces through their pursuit of work abroad and how this impacts labour exploitation. Additionally, Spanger has developed a theoretical framework focusing on state apparatuses, which demonstrates how nation states respond to the sale of sex, human trafficking, and labour migration exploitation, showing how such responses regulate migration through entangled regimes of migration, anti-trafficking, labour, and care.