Sexual Citizenship Across the Borders: European Queer Mobilities in Times of War

• Applicant: Dr. Olga Plakhotnik
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Human Geography ; Modern and Contemporary History ; Political Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561289364

When hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian war refugees started arriving in Germany in February 2022, it can be assumed (though never statistically registered) that part of them were queer people. A similar assumption can be made about Belarusians who fled the political terror of Lukashenka’s regime after 2020. Being not “refugees” in legal terms but experiencing hardships of forced relocation, queer people from Ukraine and Belarus compose communities of queer diaspora in Germany, which are the object of this research. This theory-driven and empirically based project explores the complex conjunctions between sexuality and transnational mobility using the case of the 2020-2022 queer migrations to Germany from Ukraine and Belarus. It investigates the complexity of the queer migrants’ experiences, the discursive construction of queer diaspora, and the potential for solidarities beyond and across national borders. The project’s design relies on a conceptual framework of sexual citizenship understood in a performative sense as a discourse, practice and affects of belonging. This perspective allows approaching queer migration as a “sexual citizenship across the borders” – a dynamic process of identity-making, bonding and un-bounding, mobility and immobility. The analytics of citizenship helps to explain how different political regimes in the countries of origin, including the state’s sexual and gender politics, and the differential regime of mobility in Germany (temporary protection of the Ukrainian citizens vs. the lack thereof for the citizens of Belarus) shape a discursive construction of queer diasporas in a particular way. Another analytic framework of the research – coloniality – considers the global regime of sexuality and gender, and corresponding knowledge and subjectivities production (Quijano 2000). On the one hand, this analytics accounts for the peripheral position of Belarus and Ukraine vis-à-vis Germany, also in terms of sexual politics. On the other hand, it places Belarusian and Ukrainian queer diaspora in the context of other differently racialized migrant groups in Germany. Such a complex theoretical design has the potential to transgress the dominant frame of “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003) and de-essentialize diaspora: to approach it not as a clearly defined group but a power-loaded process across borders, contexts, and social actors. The project’s results include a book volume, academic articles, and an emerging scholarly network. The findings will enrich scholarship on the understudied population (queer people from Ukraine and Belarus) in the new circumstances (war/ state terror and migration). The expected new insights for political sciences, sociology, area studies, feminist and queer studies are especially significant given the current right turn in Germany and Europe, including the rise of anti-migrant and anti-queer tendencies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants