Queer Migration on Stage: Performing and Reimagining Sexual Politics in Germany

This article explores how staging, performing, and re-narrating experiences of queer migration can serve as radical tools to reimagine queer migrants’ subjectivities and political agency in contemporary Germany. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2024, including 33 qualitative interviews with drag performers, I examine the emergent ‘migrant drag’ scene. Rooted in transnational histories of queer performance and border-crossing, migrant drag functions as a creative and collective practice that challenges normative scripts of sexual citizenship. Ultimately, the work of migrant drag shows that sexual citizenship, sustained by (homo)normative sexualizations and hierarchical racialization, could be ‘crossed’ and reimagined through the collective and creative work of a community in search of alternative worlds.