Finland and Europe are places that queer people around the world idealize as places of safety, where they envision communities of support and belonging. What happens to ideals in the reality of painful bureaucratic procedures and personal and mundane experiences of injury and isolation?
Researcher Ali Ali's research aims to expose how bureaucracies and racialization shape the relations and activism within queer communities. It highlights that queer politics goes beyond questions of intimate sexuality or gender. Queer acts and politics are any acts or projects that intentionally or unintentionally challenge norms, whether related to race, nationality, or sexuality.
"How do experiences of harsh national bureaucracies and mundane racism and xenophobia inform the political relations and mobilization in communities of queer asylum seekers in Finland? This has been the central question of my doctoral research. Queer is not limited to sexuality or gender. Queer (before being sexual) is that which, intentionally or not, unsettles conventions and traditions, racial, national and sexual. It is about making belonging to communities, sensible and worthy of investing our relations and hopes in."
Queer is not a static identity; instead, it is a continuous sociopolitical movement where we tackle our vulnerabilities, expose injustices, and nurture meaningful bonds within and across communities.
Ali's research has highlighted that when refugees and asylum seekers seek belonging and reparative relations, they mainly find these in the engaged communities and relationships of struggle for justice. Queer communities challenge racializing and fascist norms and uphold ideals and visions of democracy and freedom in refugees' new homes.
"Along the journey of asylum, refugees and asylum seekers realize that the promise of refuge, belonging and community turns into a demand for ongoing mobilization for justice in countries and communities of chosen refuge. My ethnographic research traced shifts in political thought and communal relationships in the mundane lives of queer communities."
Ali sees ethnographic research as highly political, because it values and highlights experiences and knowledge otherwise discounted in the mainstream.
"Problematizing the mainstream is a vital ethnographic practice, without which, claims of homogeneity become an unchallenged form of oppression, and democracy and freedom in places of assumed refuge become a travesty of themselves. Queer journeys are endless, they keep problematizing complacency and resist normalizing violence."
Exile: The journey beyond destination or origin
For people in exile, the biggest change is not the trip as it appears on a google map, but the realization that safety and justice is not located on a map but created along a lived journey. This requires politics, connections, and creating places of home in new countries. The realization that true justice and safety do not exist drives and energizes collective struggle for justice and safety. This change might not be obvious, but it affects how exiles connect with each other across boundaries of identification and understand the injustices inherent in identity categorization, like race, nationality, gender, and citizenship.
"The biggest shift in journeys of exile is not the territorial move, but the changes in the person's and the collective's sense of what matters. While exiles' sense of hope of a safe haven triggers their departure from previous communities, arrival in idealized communities does not take place. Human rights, dignity and the universal right to safety are not readily available anywhere in this world."
Ali sees that the pain and the cultural shock of realizing that there is no place of absolute justice or safety turn into a ground for connection and collective and global struggle for justice and safety everywhere.
"This is why I use the word "exile"; to keep true, and do justice, to the grave sense of alienation and longing for companionship through injustice and loneliness. Maybe we find home or solace among those who have grown more sensible to the injustice of identity politics (of race, nation, sex and citizenship, and the list is long)."
Exile is a journey that does not follow a direct path or time frame. People on the move encounter injustices in new forms and circumstances and realize how different forms of injustice connect globally and historically. 'Queer' politics can sadly merge into spiritless and sloppy mainstream identity talk. Lively queer activism keeps challenging violence and refuses complacency and complicity in violent structures.
"The journey of exile is not even temporally linear. Along displacement we revisit and wake up to injustices that we already experienced in the places we departed from, but we never really connected those issues to the brokenness of global politics. Identity divides had always been characteristic of the colonized world and the (colonially) globalized soon thereafter."
The Mundane as Scholastic
The intensity of gender and race politics is experienced in day-to-day encounters and situations. Racialized non-citizens constantly fear and face bureaucratic trouble and everyday racism. Ali calls this constant apprehension and expectation of injury 'the chronic pain of race and citizenship.' This makes exiles' social and political engagement more taxing and challenging. However, despite these challenges, exiles' choices about where and how to engage and where to appear heightens their sensibility to the particularities in personal and political relations and the relation between these (personal and political).
"I see personal and day-to-day encounters as the primary place of experiencing the intensity of politics, and this is the focus of my current research. It is in the daily life that we encounter how racist injuries are enacted but also addressed and redressed. The day-to-day personal encounters are also where relations of sustenance and repair take shape and traction. In the national order of things, the non-citizen and the non-native are easy/normalized targets of bureaucratic and mundane harassment. I call this state of heightened vulnerability to injury chronic pain of race and citizenship."
The suffering of chronic pain is not only limited to the onset of painful fits, but involves the constant fear of injury that might happen anytime anywhere. Likewise, the non-citizen and the racialized person are the targets of injury of public, official and street actors anytime anywhere. According to Ali´s research, this makes the non-citizen's and the racialized person's political participation and appearing in the mundane and public life more demanding and psychologically taxing.
"However, as we learn to navigate safety in ways that might not figure as political, by minding where we appear, around whom to appear or by choosing to appear less, in the confines of these attempts happen an intricate and precious reconsideration of relations of kinship, community and what we mean when we say the personal is political."
"The racialized and the noncitizen are often constrained by a sense of demoralization and anxiety for admission into the national European order. This demoralization started history-long before the person seeking refuge in the foreign country. The sense of inadequacy and nonbelonging to the sphere of European safe(r) land started during the long periods of colonial indoctrination into dogmas of superiority of the colonizing and the white."
Ali says this continues in more bureaucratized forms in the case of (queer) asylum seekers and noncitizens, most of whose energy and life-making is channeled to speaking the language of bureaucracies, to prove their queer identity or their qualification for the labor market in countries of exilic refuge.
"But what happens to all horror of alienation and sense of global insecurity that they live? In this heightened sense of exile, much conceptual and relational shifting takes place: reconsideration of what matters and who matters, what home and belonging mean and what relations of survival and politics make sense."
Community work is a continuous rethinking and reordering how people belong and communicate. Rather than settling on fixed identities and jargon, community is a place where members explore dynamic modes of belonging. Experiences in exile and research have taught Ali and research participants that meaningful community lies in the sense of shared loss and unfinished projects of collective sustenance and healing.
"The work of community, if it is worth working on, is to always keep vitalizing and rethinking modes of belonging and communication, to keep rethinking the terms of belonging and how we belong in the community, rather than claiming settlement on identities and jargon and mass-producing them. What I learned from my exile and research in and on exile, and what many others (research participants) accompanied me through, is that companionship in loss and injury is community; it is queer kinship that refuses being possessed by the market and bordered by the state."
