Notes on Queering Immigration History

Abstract

Immigration histories are distressingly straight. Diasporic stories are often built on carefully curated mythologies. Particularly so if these communities have a formidable contingent of upwardly mobile middle classes. The problem is compounded when it comes to working on immigrant communities of colour. Facing marginalisation and erasure on almost all sides, all that is left is the rather restrictive category of victimisation that reinforces a recurrent invisibility. While different queer demographics are indeed becoming popular subjects of study in recent times, histories of immigration and queerness remain generally unintegrated as disciplinary sub-fields. The predominance of cultural studies and formidable theoretical frameworks that underpin modern queer studies deter many historians, especially those trained in a more empiricist British historical tradition; while on the other, the dense lexicon of queer studies require a degree of familiarity that is not easily accessible to those not themselves queer or specialists in queer studies. This is not to deny the lack of sufficient engagements with queer historical topics in most British history centres; very recently the Royal Historical Society’s ‘LGBT+ Histories & Historians Report’ (2020) has only confirmed what a lot of us already knew. LGBT staff, students and studies are yet to be mainstreamed within standard pedagogic practice; they remain uneasily situated.