Queer mountains: Migrant drag performers reimagining sexual citizenship in Germany

Abstract

This article seeks to understand how staging, performing and re-narrating experiences of queer migration can be utilized to radically reimagine queer migrants’ subjectivities and politics in today’s Germany. Informed by ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2023, including 22 qualitative interviews with drag performers, I focus on the emerging scene of ‘migrant drag’ in Germany, informed by transnational histories of queer performance and border-crossing. Through acts of migrant drag, ‘building queer mountains’ appears as a queer migrant practice of finding alternative pathways to overcome obstacles that limit queer migrant subjectivities and to claim locality and stages for queer migrant politics beyond the normative scripts of sexual citizenship. Ultimately, ‘building queer mountains’ 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.

Introduction

‘Once upon a time, a couple of queens arrived in Berlin and started a house’. This was the opening line of the Drag Cinderella show, a reinterpretation of the beloved fairy tale with the cast of Germany’s biggest refugee drag and performance collective, Queerberg. In the Refugee Queendom of Queerberg, the evil stepsisters were played by Palestinian and Iraqi belly dancers, the fairy godmother was Libyan, the prince was a gay drag king and the princess was a lesbian drag queen. During the interludes, one of the founders of Queerberg, known by the name Prince Emrah, appeared onstage in a shimmering green gown and sparkly tiara recounting anecdotes of his experience as a queer refugee performer:

When I first arrived in Berlin, I reached out to the popular drag venues to perform. They sent me a long list of requirements to be considered for bookings. Sorry darlings, I didn’t have time to pose for professional photos and write a two-page text when I was crossing fields and rivers.

The audience let out a collective chuckle as the two contrasting images of Emrah hung in the air, one of the border-crosser stereotyped in the media as a young man in worn-out clothes being held in police custody, and the other of a glamourous drag queen performing on stage. Queerberg was founded in 2018 to create a platform for the growing number of queer migrant and refugee performers in Germany. Later, in our interview, Prince Emrah explained the message behind the name ‘Queerberg’, which means ‘queer mountain’ in English:

When you are a refugee you often have to cross borders on foot. If you lose your way, you have to climb a hill to see where you are. We started Queerberg to be that mountain for people who may be feeling lost or wondering where to go next.

Emrah had to leave Turkmenistan at the age of 18 due to the oppressive policies of the former Turkmen president, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, which led him to eventually leave his family and seek asylum alone in Germany in 2016. ¹ Once he had arrived, Emrah had to spend the first years of his life in Germany isolated in the mandatory accommodation of refugee Heime (refugee housing), unable to start what he had hoped would be his life in Europe: ‘I was not allowed to work, study, or rent my own apartment. I wasn’t connected to family or friends back home. After all the things I had been through, it was so difficult to be lonely’. Emrah’s situation is the outcome of the strict asylum regulations and the overlooked afterlife of queer border-crossings: of what happens to queer migrants and refugees after they arrive in Germany, yet continue to face difficulties sustained because of racism and homophobia. ² After experiencing severe symptoms of depression, a doctor advised Emrah to pick up a hobby. Emrah chose belly dancing, an activity that reminded him of summer weddings in Turkmenistan. After a short while, a volunteer at the refugee housing recommended Emrah as a performer for a show, which eventually became the beginning of his performing career in Germany. During the first two years of performing on different stages and building an online audience, Emrah began receiving messages from other queer refugees and migrants who, like him, faced feelings of isolation and limitations due to legal and social obstacles. It was at this point that Emrah came up with the idea of Queerberg, a collective stage built by the work of queer migrants and refugees to offer alternative pathways to achieving queer migrant hope, survival, community and joy.

Inspired by the insurgent strategies of overcoming European border regimes, building queer mountains is a queer migrant practice that aims to navigate and traverse obstacles that limit, exclude and disadvantage them in everyday life while creating new pathways that reach far beyond the normative scripts of migration and sexuality in Europe. Informed by ethnographic research conducted with several drag and performance collectives between 2020 and 2023, I inquire into the queer possibilities which staging, performing and re-narrating experiences of queer migration uphold as a means of reimagining queer migrant subjectivities and politics in Germany. While doing so, I focus on the experiences of queer migrants from the Middle East, a group that is at the centre of discussions on migration and sexuality in Germany. I do not mean to suggest that the Middle East is a coherent, singular location. Rather, it is shaped by the geographical imaginations of othering in Europe, encompassing the broader region of the Middle East, North Africa, and, occasionally, some parts of the South Caucasus. I use ‘queer migration’ and ‘queer migrants’ to include diverse LGBTQ experiences of border-crossing in response to discrimination, persecution and violence, as well as migration out of a desire for a better life and greater freedom. The perceived differences between so-called ‘voluntary’ and forced migration or legal and ‘illegal’ migrants is used to normalize criminalization, violence and discrimination against some migrants who are deemed undeserving of rights and protection (Luibhéid, 2020). These lines are often blurred in the lives of queer migrants from the Middle East, and migration consists of multitudes of motivations beyond the single-issue characterization of East-to-West mobilities as moving from repression to ‘sexual liberation’.

I foreground drag as a queer artistic practice offering a diverse set of tools and spaces for queer migrants to create new drag personas, develop skills, present shows to audiences and meet with other performers sharing similar interests. My goal in this article is to decentre reductive readings of drag as a mere performance of gender and reorient my focus on the potential ‘political power of drag’ (Muñoz, 1997) in reimagining sexual citizenship and presenting ‘unruly visions’ (Gopinath, 2018) of queer migrant subjectivities and politics in public. In doing so, I revisit sexual citizenship as a background to develop my analysis and rethink the concept with perspectives ‘from below’ (Sheller, 2012) that are embodied and performed by migrant drag performers in Germany. What emerges in the colourful intersection of migration and drag is ‘migrant drag’, a category informed by rich and transnational histories of queer performance and border-crossing. In the lives of queer migrants from the Middle East in Germany, migrant drag exists within the ‘(im)possibilities of telling’ (Luibhéid, 2020: 63), ‘haunted and entangled with colonialist binaries of out/closeted, visible/invisible, home/homeless, and victim/agent’ (Luibhéid, 2020: 65). In response, migrant drag creates the conditions to move beyond these limiting and exclusionary narratives with representations of trans-masculine and trans-feminine migrant stories, queer Muslims, queer-femme Arabs, villains, queer spies and revolutionaries. Ultimately, the work of putting on drag becomes a gateway to build queer mountains and reimagine the conditions which queer migrants are subjected to in Germany.

Notes on methods: Researching drag

In early 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdowns in Berlin, I attended a series of fundraising events and digital parties featuring performances by emerging artists in Germany’s drag scene. I gradually adopted these events and people as the foundation of my fieldwork and conducted 22 semi-structured in-depth interviews with migrant queer performers, drag queens and drag kings in Germany. In addition, between 2020 and 2023, I conducted over 60 hours of participant observation at drag shows, workshops, panels, festivals and events in Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne, three of the German cities with an active drag scene. Berlin remained as a central hub for the migrant drag scene and has fostered the emergence and continued existence of migrant and refugee drag performers more than any other German city. A small number of participants preferred to call themselves ‘queer performers’ rather than ‘drag queens’ or ‘kings’ to avoid being boxed into mainstream drag styles and the binarized gender distinctions of queening and kinging. ³ Despite these divergences, ‘drag’ served as a form of community glue holding together different styles of queer performance.

I used a purposive sampling strategy to select participants from among LGBTQ migrants who had arrived in Germany sometime in the past 10 years and who performed at drag events. Among the 22 participants, eight had arrived in Germany as asylum seekers, and 14 as non-refugee migrants who arrived via their studies or marriage. The participants were from Iraq, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine and Egypt. The manner of their arrival and their country of origin did not correspond to differences in socioeconomic status. Nor did they adequately capture the complex relationships among the participants and the difficulties they faced in their everyday lives despite the differences in their legal statuses as migrants, refugees and citizens. ⁴ Many of the participants identified with multiple pronouns, while others didn’t care how they were addressed. ⁵ Keeping this fluidity in mind, at the time of the interviews, four out of 22 participants identified as men, seven as non-binary, five as trans, and six as women. ⁶ Most of the participants were active members of drag and performance collectives, among them Queerberg, Cabaret of Shadows and Queens Against Borders. Because the higher number of venues and drag shows made it possible for some Berlin-based performers to make drag their full-time profession, participants from other German cities who had to keep a day job on the side often looked up to the Berlin drag scene.

My personal and scholarly investment in drag and my position as a queer migrant from Turkey had an important impact on the conduct of this research. Starting this fieldwork, I had no experience performing in drag, and considered my lack of first-hand experience an obstacle. However, during the interviews, I observed that my presence as a non-drag-performer researcher relieved most of the participants of the worry of being judged by a fellow performer. The naming of the participants in the research was a complicated subject: most agreed to use their drag and non-drag names but wished to remain anonymous for parts of the interview. To balance the competing needs of giving credit to the participants and at the same time protecting their privacy, I implemented selective anonymization. ⁷

Migrant drag and queer migrant reimaginings of sexual citizenship

Drag has long been understood as a queer subculture of dressing up and performing as the ‘opposite gender’, mostly practiced by gay men performing in what is considered as ‘feminine’ styles. This simplified definition has expanded globally over the last two decades with the ‘drag boom’: the exponential growth of drag’s mainstream popularity following the widespread visibility of drag performers on social media and the commercial success of the US reality TV competition RuPaul’s Drag Race. The drag boom has brought visibility to diverse forms of drag, with drag kings, trans performers, cis women drag queens, and drag monsters. Despite this growing popularity, drag remains an understudied subject in sociology, with the majority of the studies offering a one-dimensional view of drag as a queer art form invested in gender. Moreover, the overbearing influence of US representations limits the existing discussion on drag outside of the US and renders the changing sociohistorical context of drag invisible. I experienced this phenomenon during the earlier presentations of this work when I was asked the question: ‘isn’t drag the same everywhere?’ The expectation was perhaps that drag queens all around the world lip-sync to American pop hits and perform more or less in similar styles. This is, of course, a very thin description of drag’s potentials and shows the necessity to understand drag’s own ‘translation’ – not to suggest that drag had a distinct origin to begin with, but to understand the necessity to approach drag as a dynamic concept, finding new meanings informed by transnational histories of sexuality and queer performance. ⁸

To think through the mutual influences of migration and drag, I take inspiration from the extensive queer diaspora and ‘queer of colour’ literature and reframe their insights in the context of Germany. José Esteban Muñoz (1999) conceptualizes drag as a key site for articulating a ‘queer utopia’, a set of practices that radically reimagines social and cultural norms and rejects the oppressive structures that limit the ability to create societies that are more just and equitable. Similarly, in his book Decolonize Drag (2023), Khubchandani shows the deeper links between colonialism and drag, and how queer racialized bodies are managed through pathologization, orientalism, incarceration, criminalization and displacement. Khubchandani conceptualizes what he calls ‘technologies’ and ‘techniques’ of drag: technologies referring to the things put onto the body and techniques referring to the ways of doing or using the body to create meanings. In this view, drag expands and ‘transgresses’ dominant narratives and systems of power as a disruptive and imaginative form of queer artistic practice and holds the potential to mobilize ‘the aesthetics of gender, race, Indigeneity, class, and disability to recall and speak back to multiple and overlapping legacies of colonialism’ (Khubchandani, 2023: 151). Migrant drag emerges in this complexity as a tool to reimagine queer migrant subjectivities and politics as opposed to the normative scripts predicated in Europe.

What makes sexual citizenship deeply relevant to migrant drag is the tension between transgression and normalization and the never-ending process of assigning value to some groups while reinscribing stigma onto others. Sexual citizenship has emerged as a critical area of scholarship to understand how state policies and legal systems have uphold a heteronormative national citizenship on the bases of homophobia and transphobia, and the resulting LGBTQ struggle for inclusion and recognition (Richardson, 2017; Sheller, 2012). With the formation of the ‘sexual citizen-subject’ as the claimant of rights in Europe (Held, 2023; Luibhéid, 2020; Luibhéid, 2023), the literature has expanded to show the use of ideals around sexual rights to produce and sustain the cultural/civilizational divide between Europe and the Middle East, and to portray Middle Eastern migrants as ‘dangerous’ ‘homophobic’ and ‘backward’ while showing Europe as the centre of sexual liberation (Bracke, 2012; El-Tayeb, 2011; Puar, 2006; Sabsay, 2012; Wigger, 2019). The institutional experiences of queer asylum-seekers from the Middle East have calcified this dynamic with the emergence of a ‘rescue narrative’ (Bracke, 2012) showcasing ‘vulnerable queer refugee’ who needs protection from their own homophobic culture (Haritaworn, 2012; Murray, 2014; Saleh, 2020). ⁹ This has further contributed to the mainstream ideas of queer migration from the Middle East as a journey from ‘repression’ to ‘liberation’ (Luibhéid, 2008) and has shown the rigid sociolegal conditions in which rights and protection were granted to queer migrants in Europe. Under this new light, sexual citizenship as a European phenomenon appears as a structure that separates ‘good’ or ‘deserving’ queer migrants from the ‘bad’ ones, while reinforcing binaries, such as citizen/migrant, saviour/victim and visible/invisible. These binaries limit the overlapping possibilities of queer migrant subjectivities (on the level of personal and interpersonal) and politics (on the level of collective processes and public spaces) and naturalize differential mobilities for LGBTQ people in Germany.

As Gayatri Gopinath’s (2018) states in her pioneering work, ‘queer diasporic aesthetic practices’ are ‘unruly visions’ in that they reveal what has previously been invisibilized: the legacies of imperial, colonial and racial regimes of power and the contested visions of the queer regional imaginary. Queer migrant and refugee narratives also remain on the margins of the dominant model of visuality that allows us to see forms of sexual subjectivity, desire and relationality rendered visible and possible by privileged trajectory of sexual citizenship and ‘Euro-American articulations of queerness’ (Gopinath, 2018: 6). Regimes of vision speak volumes to the practices of migrant drag, which is inherently invested in the narratives that are often constrained, silenced, and erased from the racialised configurations of queer identities in Europe. From a multi-level perspective, migrant drag allows new possibilities to exist on the level of personal and interpersonal relations, as well as in collective processes and public spaces. Circling back to Luibhéid’s ‘(im)possibilities of telling’ (Luibhéid, 2020), migrant drag constitutes ‘an alternative model of visuality’ (Gopinath, 2018) of queer migrant subjectivities and politics and introduces a new set of tools (as mentioned above, ‘technologies’ and ‘techniques’) to reimagine and perform sexual citizenship in Germany. ¹⁰

Visions from queer mountains

Reimagining queer migrant subjectivities

Migrant drag begins where any drag performance does – from the moment of putting on drag. Although the meaning of ‘putting on drag’ is subjective, many participants defined it as choosing the right make-up, coming up with a drag name and deciding on the type of performance they want to showcase on the stage. The work of ‘putting on drag’ was often transformative for the participants, which showed itself in the interviews in their self-descriptions of feelings ‘braver’, ‘more confident’, and ‘more outgoing’ while in drag vis-à-vis their non-drag experiences in Germany. The experiences I gather in this section respond to the limiting capacities of sexual citizenship on the level of personal and interpersonal relations, for example: (1) the treatment of certain queer migrant subjectivities as an anomaly in Europe, such as the effeminate queer Arabs and trans masculine and feminine Middle Eastern subjectivities and (2) the Orientalist impositions on queer Middle Eastern sexualities, such as fetishization and othering. Through migrant drag, performers show ways to move far beyond these narratives and open the door to possibilities for queer migrant subjectivities that are trans, glamorous, seductive, empowered and uncompromising of their migrant identities in Germany.

Ismail, a 30-year-old drag performer from Azerbaijan, is known by the name of Aurah Jendafaaq. Onstage, Aurah often wears make-up with heavy eyeshadow, a tarboosh hat, and a variation of trousers, skirts and revealing see-through tops with high heels. He explains:

The name Aurah is from Islam and means the shame you have to cover. For example, the hair of a woman is her aurah – that’s the Islamic term. Because half the time I am practically naked onstage or wearing close to nothing, in a way, it’s my shameless shame, my aurah.

Ismail described Aurah as a kind of onstage armour that shields him against feelings of fear, shame and guilt, all projected from Ismail’s own experience of overcoming his conservative upbringing and the limiting and exclusionary narratives he faced in his adult life as a queer Azerbaijani person in Berlin:

It’s been said many times before by other performers, but I will repeat it again: it begins with the make-up. It really makes a difference to you when you put on the make-up, get into the outfit, the wig and your high heels. It does something to you that is beyond the mere act of putting some things on – it’s beyond that.

The notion of drag as protective armour speaks to the deep relationship between in-drag and out-of-drag experiences, and how the embodied performance of drag helps the participants out-of-drag to navigate their lives as queer Muslims, refugees, or Middle Easterners. In Ismail’s case, Aurah was born from the experiences of being read and sexualized as a Middle Eastern man in Germany: ‘Turkish people and Middle Eastern people have been stereotyped as macho lovers, so there are not many links in Berlin connecting gay sexuality, Muslimness, and femininity’. The ‘macho lover’ trope speaks to the conflicting Orientalist fantasies that situate Middle Eastern masculinities within an extreme binary: either hypermasculine ‘savages’ or ‘ideal victims’ that need saving (Abbey, 2021). In Ismail’s account, Aurah becomes a platform to reclaim his body and sexuality and to showcase a version of himself that is unapologetically ‘gender-fuck’ and feminine.

Migrant drag’s role as protective armour was also present in the experiences of trans participants. In these experiences, migrant drag allows the participants to explore their trans identities onstage, identities which are often submerged and rendered invisible in the mainstream discourse. Aysan, a Turkish drag performer known by the name of Turkish Delight, explained that he discovered his transness in 2018 in a drag workshop in Berlin. Turkish Delight’s drag draws on cultural and folkloric references from Turkey, notably the Aşuk ve Maşuk where two male performers appear onstage with everything above their chest covered in a fabric intended to look like a hat, and a face drawn on their bellies, giving the audience the impression that the performers’ torsos are actually their heads. While performing this historically male-only show, Turkish Delight both transforms the Turkish traditions and showcases a representation of the trans masculine migrant figure in Germany. Aysan’s drag name, Turkish Delight, comes from the widely advertised traditional Turkish confectionery. When I asked Aysan about his drag name, he shared that Turkish Delight is his way of saying that he can be ‘Turkish, trans and queer without sacrificing any one aspect’. The emphasis on the ‘sacrifice’ comes from the shared understanding that queer migrants have to leave their ‘repressive cultures’ behind to integrate into the European sexual rights discourse.

Being a migrant changed almost everything in my life. It is about going through endless paperwork, being asked to prove you are ‘integrated’ and not like other ‘bad migrants’. Reclaiming my Turkishness onstage is political, it is a way to express who I am, what I feel and the journey of my trans migrant body on stage.

Aysan’s drag transforms an everyday object of consumption into a living and breathing performer engaging with folklore, masculinity and transness in Berlin. Informed by his experience, Aysan sees his migrant drag as a ‘point of view’ that many non-migrant drag artists simply cannot possess.

For other trans participants, however, the line between their in-drag and out-of-drag personas was blurry. Keil Li Divõn, a drag performer and queer trans refugee from Libya, built her drag persona around her transition and dedicated her onstage performance to soul-stirring ballads. Divõn comes from a mixture of diva and divan, a low bench common in Middle Eastern countries: ‘I love couches!’ says Keil Li with a playful expression.. Keil Li, on the other hand, represents her experience as a trans person with the masculine name ‘Keil’ being feminized with the addition of the ‘Li’, thus sounding like Kylie, an allusion to the American socialite Kylie Jenner. Because Keil Li’s transition and drag career unfolded in parallel, ‘putting on drag’ entails the performance of her everyday life onstage through songs of empowerment that deal with her struggles in Germany. In her song ‘Revive’, Keil Li wrote an ode to her life in Germany:

Verse:

I should be proud of who I am

No one has to understand

‘Hear me out’, I’ll say out loud

Chorus:

We’re gonna survive

We’re gonna be fine

Come and take me tonight

And we will revive

During her shift from being a student to an asylum seeker in Kassel, Germany, Keil Li was dependent on the financial support of her family. However, her father’s unexpected sickness left Keil Li with no financial support and delayed Keil Li’s application for asylum, which made her paperless for a period of time:

I was freaking out. I was living in a club, actually, in a room in the club. I had to make a living somehow, so I told the owners that we should organize a gay party where I could perform. I performed, and then they paid me. I used that money to take a train to go to Giessen to seek asylum. The money came from drag.

Keil Li’s work dedicated to empowerment and survival draws a different picture of a queer refugee: one that is not the passive ‘victim’ waiting to be saved by Europe, but one that is creating the conditions of her own asylum and border-crossing.

Similar to Aysan’s motivation to adopt Turkishness in his drag persona, many of the performers used drag to reconnect with a sense of transnationalism and history that had previously been submerged and silenced. ‘I became a fighter for more than just the right to be queer. I’m also a fighter for the right to be an Arab queer, and I have more reasons to speak up’. These were the words of Lebanese drag performer Hassan Dib, known by the names Queen of Virginity or Hassandra. Hassan sees migrant drag as a form of archiving:

My drag is a love letter to my younger self, and, in a way, it is creating an archive, an archive of being a queer Lebanese drag queen in Berlin who’s trying to survive. This is already a form of resistance.

Similar to Turkish Delight’s deliberate message to put Turkish, queer and trans identities together in his drag, Queen of Virginity’s drag is moved by a form of ‘disidentification’ (Muñoz, 1999), a queer method of managing an identity that has been ‘spoiled’ in the majoritarian public sphere. This can be seen in the workshop So What if I’m the Villain? organized by Queen of Virginity, and accompanied by the image of the queer-coded villain HIM from the American cartoon series The Powerpuff Girls (1998–2005). By asking who decides what is good and evil, Hassan makes visible the double standard that they experience in Europe as a person defying both ‘gendered and racialized norms’. The question of being the villain becomes an invocation to not be afraid to do the ‘wrong’ thing and to intentionally make ‘mistakes’ as a form of freedom to break away from the hypervigilance imposed on queer migrants from the Middle East in Europe. In all these experiences, building queer mountains appears as a queer migrant practice to determine the conditions of queer migration and find alternative pathways to ‘cross’ and ‘transgress’ normative scripts of sexual citizenship in Germany.

Reimagining queer migrant politics

In October 2022, during the opening night of the Go Drag Festival, ¹¹ a queer Iranian performer and singer known as Dornika took to the stage dressed in a black bodysuit with a front zipper:

There is something I want to share with you. In my country of origin, Iran, a 22-year-old woman was murdered last week by the morality police. Female, trans, ethnic minorities and many other marginalized groups are being targeted by the system.

Before a large audience at Tipsy Bear, a queer Berlin bar, Dornika shared her experience of growing up in Iran as a queer woman, having to cover her hair, always being watchful of the morality police and under strict state surveillance. ‘I was arrested three times, so you can call me a criminal’ she added, explaining that each time was due to alleged breaches of morality rules. ‘I’m processing a lot of emotions right now. Anger towards the system. Sadness for all the lives lost and hurt. Fear for lives that might be lost. And hope. My stance here is a refusal of silence’. Dornika talked about Iran, the strategies used by the Iranian state to silence the protestors during the 2019–2020 Iranian protests, known as Bloody November, and the human rights abuses. Before she left the stage, she unzipped her bodysuit to show her bare chest inscribed with words in Kurdish and English: Jin, Jiyan, Azadî! Woman, Life, Freedom! Queer, Trans, Freedom! The audience chanted the slogans as Dornika cut her hair in solidarity with the slain Iranian activist, Mahsa Amini.

The previous studies on drag have highlighted its role as ‘an embodied tactic that … criticize [s], resist [s], and undermine [s] conventional notions of gender and sexuality’ (Rupp and Taylor, 2015: 220). The question ‘what is migrant drag capable of?’ is itself an entry point to develop my inquiry into reimaginings of sexual citizenship on the level of collective processes and public spaces as the basis for exercising queer migrant politics. This would include but not be limited to issues such as demanding rights, recognition and protection on transnational as well as domestic issues. Sexual citizenship limits the political possibilities of queer migrants both due to their legal status (as noncitizens) and (non-)belonging (exclusion from public spaces). In a co-authored blog post, Hassan Dib explains this phenomenon in detail and the difficulties of doing politics while being hyper-politicized in Germany:

But what is ‘political’ for the European? For me, it is sharing my traumas, speaking my language, and showing my body hair. For white drag queens, it is sticking up the middle finger to Trump - a ‘safe’ enough option - and preaching for ‘love and peace’ but not once suggesting anything concrete. Yet I am the ‘more’ political choice of the two, even if it seems that the queer Arab artist cannot claim anything, neither titles nor concepts, without the approval of a supervising Westerner. Gay-ropa ¹² does not want Arab queens with opinions on freedom, and sharp tongues (as well as strong as nails) (Hassandra and Gutierrez, 2023).

Migrant drag emerges in this conflating space between the de-politicization and hyper-politicization of queer migrants in Germany. Building queer mountains, in this regard, takes on a new meaning. Among many German neighbourhoods that end with the suffix -berg (e.g. Kreuzberg, Schöneberg), Queerberg also claims a location, a place for its residents, which – in my fieldwork – appeared as a stage to claim queer migrant politics invested not only in conventional notions of gender and sexuality, but also in overlapping issues of border politics, migration and racism in Germany and beyond.

In April 2022, Queens Against Borders, a performance collective in solidarity with trans and queer refugees in Germany, organized a solidarity event in support of refugees from Ukraine to raise funds and grant visibility to trans and sex worker refugees who are affected by war. Awadalla, a queer Egyptian writer, HIV activist and performer known by the name of Katharina von Morgenland (meaning ‘of the Orient’ in German) appeared on stage as a queer spy from ‘the Orient’, basing the character on their experience of growing up in a hostile enviroment, where their queerness was concealed like the secret identity of a spy. This dual existence was further solidified during Awadalla’s early adult years as an activist standing against the Mubarak regime during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Their lip-sync to the 1999 theme song of the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough took on a new meaning onstage with the histories and stories evoked by Katharina’s presence:

The world is not enough

But it is such a perfect place to start, my love

And if you’re strong enough

Together we can take the world apart, my love

Katharina ended the performance with a statement of solidarity with the refugees from Ukraine and reflected on the violence of European border regimes:

When I came here, I was a refugee. I was fleeing. Now the cycle repeats itself with a different community. What I want to talk about is borders. Borders aren’t real. Nothing proves that borders are an illusion more than the bodies of queer refugees. Queer refugees are proof that borders do not exist. The fact that we are here today shows that borders are fake and that we should abolish them.

Katharina’s performance in front of a full audience at one of Berlin’s performance venues, Oyoun, lent a personal and human angle to a topic that is often deemed distant and bureaucratic: European border and migration politics. Incorporating symbols from James Bond, a series rooted in the colonial geographical imaginations of the British Empire and the Orient/Occident divide, Awadalla’s performance embodied various forms of ‘disidentification’ (Muñoz, 1999) in which Awadalla reimagines their sense of secrecy and incapability in Egypt and their queer Middle Eastern identity in Europe. In this process, Katharina, a queer spy from ‘the Orient’, became the key to unlock Awadalla’s overlapping experiences of queer becoming and border-crossing. By offering themselves as the evidence that borders can be overcome, despite the regulations that limit the movement of people like Awadalla, Katharina’s presence onstage became a queer mountain offering a vision of queer Middle Eastern subjectivity contesting colonial legacies, state violence, Orientalism, and border regimes.

Darvish, one of the members of Queens Against Borders, is a queer refugee from Syria who is known for being a self-taught dancer mixing belly dancing with voguing and other contemporary styles. During an April 2022 event, Darvish appeared onstage in a long white gown embellished with the slogans ‘Trans is beautiful’, ‘BLM’, ‘End Occupation’, ‘No War’, ‘All Refugees Welcome’ and ‘Feminism’ before addressing the audience: ‘this is my way of using my platform to share through performance art what is very important. Everybody is welcome, all refugees are welcome, no matter where you are from’. Bearing in mind the twin meanings of Queerberg, both as a metaphor of finding new ‘pathways’ to determine the conditions of queer migration, and as a -berg, a form of claiming locality and platform in Germany, both Awadalla’s and Darvish’s performances show a sense of solidarity they both feel toward other communities who likewise suffer the effects of border politics, stigmatization and social inequalities, and who share their continuous investment in anti-racist, pro-migrant, pro-LGBTQ, anti-war values. These acts of solidarity onstage inform Germany’s queer migrant politics as a cluster of issues that are not only limited to a specific group’s interests but which expand to respond to issues that are affecting other marginalized and underrepresented groups (see also Altay, 2023). When I asked Prince Emrah about his collective’s investment in politics, Emrah explained it as an extension of his experience as a queer refugee: ‘when you are a refugee, you are stateless. You understand the experience of others who feel publicly marginalized and misunderstood. I will always stand with the oppressed’.

Building queer mountains

During the final act of Drag Cinderella, the fairy godmother, played by the Libyan drag performer Keil Li Divõn, convinces the drag prince and princess to forget about the ‘social constructs of monogamy and marriage’ and start a drag family instead, a queer modification of the normative fairy tale ‘happily-ever-after’. This ending itself is a queer mountain which reimagines the meaning of one’s happily-ever-after as a queer migrant in Europe. Understanding sexual citizenship to entail both belonging and legal status (Luibhéid, 2020), any manifestation of ‘transgression’ not only correspond to non-belonging, but also to differential conditions as citizens and noncitizens in Germany, in which the capacity and recognition of rights has often been tied to queer migrants’ assimilation into normative scripts of sexual citizenship (Luibhéid, 2023; Saleh and Tschalaer, 2023; Tschalaer, 2019). This article showed the potentials of migrant drag to enable and deploy alternative models of visuality to reimagine queer migrant subjectivities and to claim locality and stages for queer migrant politics beyond the normative scripts of sexual citizenship. Through acts of migrant drag, building queer mountains appeared as a queer migrant practice of radically reimagining queer migrant subjectivities and politics through the collective and creative work of others who ‘crossed’ the multi-layered landscapes of sexual citizenship, shaped by histories of colonialism, global capitalism and border politics in Germany.

Migrant drag offers new tools, as in ‘techniques’ and ‘technologies’ (Khubchandani, 2023) for the emergence and presentation of queer migrant subjectivities and politics in Germany. Migrant drag encourages the participants to narrate their stories through drag personas and build ‘alternative worlds’ with glimpses of their anticipation for ‘queer migrant utopias’. Through their shows, the participants showed ‘unruly’ visions of queer migrant subjectivities beyond the demarcated zones of queer people versus migrants/Muslims/Others (El-Tayeb, 2012) with representations of trans-masculine and trans-feminine migrant stories, queer Muslims, queer-femme Arabs, villains, queer spies and revolutionaries. However, based on the selection of cases in this article, I do not argue that migrant drag is inherently oppositional or liberatory. This would be an oversimplification of a widely heterogeneous scene that is mostly glued to Berlin’s colourful nightlife culture. I have also intentionally avoided reducing migrant drag to the discussion of authenticity versus self-exoticism (Sellers-Young and Shay, 2003), which, although a valid discussion, seriously hinders the academic relevance and the analysis of queer performance from the Middle East and Asia to an either-or paradigm. If we treat Orientalism as a normative script managing queer Middle Eastern subjectivities in Europe, building queer mountains could also hold the potential to determine the conditions of performers’ engagement with these narratives, everything from direct confrontation and resistance to more subtle forms of conciliation and compromise.

Ultimately, this article shows that sexual citizenship could be reimagined through the efforts of those who challenge its conventions from below. In these efforts, I explored two meanings of ‘queer mountains’ as a response designed to amplify queer migrants’ abilities to explore subjectivities and politics vis-à-vis the sociolegal structures and dominant narratives that shape their lives in Germany. My conceptualization of ‘queer mountains’ is inspired by the insurgent strategies of overcoming European border regimes and is an attempt to move away from the traditional top-down approaches to theorizing queer migrant lives, and instead to strive to theorize alongside them, as I do here with Prince Emrah’s vision. Building queer mountains will continue to gain new meanings over time as power relations shift and new subjectivities and political agencies emerge. As migrant and refugee drag performers continue to take to the stage, queer mountains will remain tall, offering views redefining which stories can be told and which lives can be lived in Germany.