Abstract
This article provides a review of extant research on sexual normativity as a key logic that undergirds the legal, political, and social processes that shape migration and cross-border mobility. Three thematic trends in queer migration studies are identified: law and policy governing queer migration; sexual politics of citizenship and borders; and sexual transnationalism and globalization. Future directions for research at the intersection of sexuality with mobility, citizenship, and transnationalism promise to be generative and vital—especially in the face of increasing polarization and exclusionary politics.
What is queer about mobility? Indeed, sexuality and migration might appear to be a strange pairing given their somewhat incongruous standing with liberal governance in the West. Whereas sexuality has become more liberalized in recent years, migration has faced unprecedented restrictions through militarized borders and policing. A quick look at our history, however, reveals the connections between sexuality and migration that warrant a closer examination of how they are co-constituted and deployed. For example, immigrant deservingness is often framed according to sexual and reproductive desirability. Similarly, sexual deviance is seen as unnatural and foreign, thus warranting discrimination and exclusion. Despite divergences in how they have fared in modern politics, sexuality, and migration are embedded processes. Non-normative sexuality has long been used to dictate eligibility to travel across borders and access to status and rights. The figure of the queer migrant is a generative lens through which we can examine sexual normativity as a key logic that undergirds the legal, political, and social processes that concern cross-border mobility.
This article provides a review of extant research on sexual migration in sociology, as well as adjacent fields such as anthropology, geography, political science, race and ethnic studies, and sexuality studies. Given the rapid expansion in research on sexuality and migration (as well as the intersection thereof), this review will focus on research on non-normative sexuality, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identities and practices. Notable volumes and issues published recently explore asylum (García Rodríguez 2023; Lewis and Naples 2014; Mole 2021), geography (Brown and Browne 2016), and queer politics (Luibhéid 2008; Luibhéid and Cantú 2005; Luibhéid and Chávez 2020). In addition, there exists a large body of research on the intersection of normative (straight) sexuality and migration, regarding law (Hacker 2017), marriage (Brettell 2017; Constable 2005; D’Aoust 2022; Moret, Andrikopoulos, and Dahinden 2021), families (Van Hook and Glick 2020), and gender and intersectionality (Merla et al. 2024). Such works will be mentioned below to the extent they illuminate our knowledge of non-normative sexual migration, but this review centers on how non-normative sexuality interacts with migration and mobility. With some skew toward studies on the United States, the review brings together cases from around the world for comparative analysis. Likewise, South-to-North and rural-to-urban migration comprise the majority of cases cited below, reflecting the state of existing research.
The article is divided into three thematic sections that cover trends in the field, as well as areas for major interventions in future research: law and policy; the politics of citizenship and borders; and transnationalism and globalization. The first section overviews how laws and policies controlling mobility and citizenship rest on the logics of desirable sexuality. Sociolegal scholarship shows how legal processes not only determine queer migrants’ mobility but also shape their identities and behaviors. Moving beyond the law, the second section explores how queer migration figures into the politics of citizenship and borders. Key theoretical contributions like sexual citizenship and homonationalism are highlighted to show how discourses and social movements concerning sexual migration are premised on logics of nationhood. The final section takes an expansive approach to mobility by considering cross-border connections and flows that (re)make sexuality an identity and practice. Social remittances, tourism, and institutional networks trouble binary or essentialist understandings of sexual migration, which should be seen as a messy, contradictory, and dynamic process.
Law & Policy Governing Queer Migration
Concerns around sexuality, kinship, and reproduction have historically informed laws and policies governing mobility across borders and membership into the polity. The family is considered the site of biological reproduction and symbolizes the nation (Sarkisian and Gerstel 2012; Yuval-Davis 1997). As such, migration controls that dictate who should be granted entry and status are critical to maintaining the moral foundation of the nation-state. Sexual deviance has long been understood to threaten the stability and security of a nation and justified the exclusion of non-normative populations (Luibhéid 2008).
Gay men and lesbians were unable to obtain immigration benefits from the United States until 1991 (Schulzetenberg 2002). People living with HIV face significant restrictions to their mobility throughout the world, which disproportionately affect LGBT and Black migrants (Amon and Todrys 2008; Bayramoğlu 2021; Kashnitsky 2020). Both liberal and illiberal governments enacted these bans in response to moral panics about non-normative sexuality as vectors of instability. Remnants of these exclusionary laws persist in contemporary immigration law, including the ban on polygamy (Smearman 2009). Sexual anxieties are often entangled with racist exclusion. For example, Chinese exclusion from the United States was legitimized by their supposed sexual deviance and immorality (Volpp 2005). Today’s anti-immigrant rhetoric in the West demonizes non-White immigrants as immoral and sexual threats to (White) women (McMahon and Kahn 2018).
Family relations remain the primary pathway for legal immigration and citizenship in most nation-states (Hacker 2017). Even in the so-called nation of immigrants, U.S. immigration policy categorically prefers family reunification, which was intended to curb inflows from Asia and Latin America and instead promote European migration (Lee 2013). The extension of family reunification benefits to same-sex couples as a result of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision United States v. Windsor (2013) was seismic for sexual migration, opening the most direct pathway to citizenship to queer immigrants (Edwards 2013). More countries are expanding immigration benefits to same-sex couples as these relationships receive legal recognition (Šalamon 2017; Suen 2021; Vuckovic Juros 2022). Other non-normative kinship formations, however, remain unrecognized and ineligible for family reunification. LGBT migrants with more capital can resettle and pursue family formation even without legal recognition of their marriage (Chauvin et al. 2021; Jones 2025).
Same-sex couples take part in transnational adoption, IVF, and surrogacy, given legal restrictions and cultural norms that push these couples to look beyond borders when pursuing parenthood. Not only do they have limited parenting rights in many countries, queer couples also experience discrimination throughout the welfare system. Transnational adoption from the Global South has become one of the few viable options for wealthy queer couples seeking parenthood in the Global North, which they often navigate by passing as straight and single (Dorow and Swiffen 2009). Queer couples’ rights to transnational parenthood exist within a complex, contradictory, and ever-changing terrain of family law and immigration law (Abrams and Piacenti 2014). Even within the European Union, queer couple’s rights to transnational stepchild adoption, joint adoption, IVF, and surrogacy run the gamut across Member States (Amos and Rainer 2017).
Asylum is another major pathway for sexual cross-border migration. Though LGBT people are eligible to pursue family reunification or asylum based on gender/sexuality in an increasing number of countries, these two pathways are governed by different legal systems, processes, and logics (Šalamon 2017). Though more countries recognize gender/sexuality-based refugee claims, LGBT asylum-seekers face barriers to material survival (housing, employment, and health) and legal recognition (credibility assessment, bureaucracy) (Bhagat 2023; Shakhsari 2014). Relatedly, LGBT people among displaced groups seeking refuge in another country experience marginalization, exclusion, and even expulsion for their differences (Diab and Samneh 2024).
Claims for asylum are evaluated on a case-by-case basis and are notably fraught for gender/sexuality-based claims because claimants’ identities must neatly fit into rigid categories of asylum eligibility. Since Western countries started recognizing gender/sexuality-based asylum cases, legal scholars and practitioners have highlighted the challenges associated with the ever-changing labels, definitions, and standards used by legal actors (Park 1994). Following the UN Convention, gender/sexuality-based claims fall under the asylum category of “membership in a particular social group,” which each petitioner must prove by persuasively demonstrating the authenticity of their LGBT identity (Murray 2016; Vogler 2016). U.S. asylum law started recognizing “transgender” as a separate category only in 2015, though transgender migrants sought asylum under a broader gender/sexuality umbrella previously (Vogler 2019).
Notably, these legal processes have been critiqued for their essentialist and Eurocentric tendencies, which impact not only who is given legal recognition but also how LGBT refugees experience their everyday lives (Cantú 2009). In specifying eligibility for rights and benefits, legal categories like “gay and lesbian,” “transgender,” and “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI)” can reify certain behaviors as normative and identifiable (Canaday 2003; Fassin and Salcedo 2015). These terms travel globally through international humanitarian organizations and become embedded into the lexicon and identities of LGBT migrants from the Global South as they seek to make themselves legible to the law (Saleh 2020). In addition, terms that inscribe refugees’ standing for claims (“LGBTI refugees,” for example) have the effect of flattening these populations’ otherwise complex experiences and identities with race, gender, and sexuality that transcend tidy categorization (França 2023; Vogler 2019). García Rodríguez’s (2023) comprehensive review of the literature on LGBT refugees and asylum-seekers highlights certain subpopulations, including transgender migrants and minors, whose experiences should be further studied.
Research on immigration law and sexuality has seen tremendous growth in recent years, and there are several areas for future exploration. First, scholarship at the intersection of sociolegal studies and migration studies has revealed the extent to which state apparatuses shape the most intimate aspects of immigrants’ lives, including family formation and (hetero)sexual behaviors (Asad 2023; Enriquez 2020; López 2022; Menjívar and Lakhani 2016). Given the increasing legal recognition of LGBT migrants, how might the law intervene in the everyday practices of queerness in durable and consequential ways? Second, categories and labels are especially fraught for LGBT migrants. Yet, they must be legible to transnational classificatory systems to receive rights and recognition (Luibhéid 2008). How do non-normative subjects uphold and trouble these hegemonic logics that shape identities, labels, and categories? Third, legal definitions of kinship remain mostly unchanged even with greater queer inclusion. For LGBT migrants, traditional conceptions of family restrict opportunities for cross-border movement, given the preference given to family-based immigration (García Rodríguez 2023). What are the legal possibilities for (re)imagining notions of kinship that make queer mobility more unencumbered?
Sexual Politics of Citizenship and Borders
The politics of sexual migration are concerned with broad notions of borders, citizenship, and recognition. Bringing together research from feminist and queer studies, migration studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies, this line of research asks how borders are discursively and materially (re)drawn in relation to sexuality. Extending from the logics of nationhood to everyday behaviors, these politics are extensive, complex, and often contradictory. However, they highlight the ongoing relevance of sexuality in how the boundaries of citizenship and the nation are imagined, constructed, and policed. In response, governments and activists engage these logics and discourses in justifying and making claims for exclusion and belonging.
Gender and sexuality are central to national projects, including who belongs in the nation-state and which imagined others ought to be excluded. Deviance is understood to undermine the reproductive needs of the nation-state and threaten the moral fabric of its people (Kim-Puri 2005). As such, the state has an interest in regulating intimate matters such as marriage, sex, and reproduction, especially for populations that must seek approval for entry and status (de Hart 2015). While sexual deviants at home often face repression and marginalization, migrants who challenge gender and sexual norms have historically been prevented from crossing borders altogether (Girard 1987). Even as de jure discrimination against LGBT migrants has diminished in recent years, the (hetero)normative pressures of institutions and networks encourage conformity at the risk of exclusion.
The concept of sexual citizenship underscores how citizenship has always been about sexuality (Richardson 2018). Citizenship here refers both to formal (legal membership to the state that grants rights and status) and informal (practices and identities that engender belonging—regardless of status) ways of relating to the state and social institutions (Bloemraad 2018). Claims for recognition and membership depend on what kinds of behaviors are emblematic of “good” and “deserving” citizens (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2014). Sexual migration brings these dynamics to sharp relief, wherein sexuality becomes a key factor for claims for citizenship and cannot be disentangled from immigrant inclusion.
Sexual identity has long been used to determine deservingness and eligibility for citizenship in terms of entry at the border and full membership with rights (Luibhéid 2002). Historically, LGBT people were categorically banned from entering the U.S. as immigrants. It was not until recently that same-sex couples started becoming eligible for family reunification and that gender/sexuality-based asylum claims became recognized, allowing queer migrants to receive legal status based on their identity. In response to outright exclusion, activists rallied around these intersecting identities—LGBT and immigrant—to advocate for policy changes and construct an identitarian community, creating a collective sense of belonging and attachment for queer migrants (Escudero 2020; Mayo-Adam 2020; Terriquez 2015). These practices have brought about discursive transformations and shifts in national boundaries of belonging, as with granting (legal) rights and (social) recognition to this historically abject population.
Sexual citizenship also brings attention to the behaviors and characteristics lionized as deserving and (re)productive to society, thus eligible for rights and belonging. In addition to the categorical exclusion of queer migrants, many forms of difference associated with sexual deviance are associated with scrutiny, conditional acceptance, and exclusion. Sex work, HIV positivity, and polyamory, among others, are grounds for immigrant exclusion in many countries and disproportionately affect queer, non-White, and low-income migrant communities (Luibhéid and Chávez 2020). In addition, widespread and ongoing anxieties over national security fuel state scrutiny of immigrants’ moral character, chief among them being sexual behavior. During the so-called Lavender Scare, for example, those suspected of being queer were stripped of rights and blacklisted, given fears of national security threats (D’Emilio and Freedman 1997). Groups have sought to destigmatize these “deviant” characteristics through awareness-raising and inclusive narratives around sexuality (Chávez 2013).
In today’s contemporary era of queer inclusion in the liberal West, states use selective evidence of LGBT inclusion (e.g., the end of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, legalization of same-sex marriage, and pride parades) to justify their nation-building projects, a concept that Jasbir Puar (2007) calls homonationalism. This discursive move specifically implicates migration in several ways. First, the racism, imperialism, and immigrant exclusion concomitant with nationalism are legitimized by LGBT-friendly domestic policies that paint the West as civilized and superior. For many non-White and non-Western LGBT people, however, their material reality remains unchanged, with limited immigration pathways and destabilized homelands (Atshan 2020). Second, queer migrants and refugees are expected to embody homonationalist values when seeking state recognition. LGBT asylum-seekers in Canada, for example, strategically invoke homonationalist discourses by portraying Canada as “liberating” them from their “backwards” home country (Murray 2016). Last, social movements deploy homonationalist messages in advocating for rights and recognition (Dryden and Lenon 2015; Zivi 2014). Some queer immigrants reject these strategies in favor of radical resistance that reimagines kinship, citizenship, and nationhood (Cisneros 2018; De Graeve 2014; White 2014).
Given rapid shifts in political discourse on sexuality and migration during recent years, this area of research will remain vital. The homonationalism critique was prescient in articulating the paradoxical relationship between sexuality and the nation in the liberal West. Yet, we see regressive sexual politics on the rise as a backlash against the historic LGBT inclusion observed during the early years of the 21st century, when we also saw resurgent nationalisms. How might new discourses around sexuality and migration affect policies, social movements, and the everyday lives of queer migrants? With increasing polarization and exclusionary politics, solidarities across minority groups (immigrant, LGBT, labor, etc.) may strengthen. Alternatively, groups might make exceptional and isolated appeals to inclusion by embracing nationalist messages in exchange for (conditional) acceptance. With borders and boundaries between nation-states, groups, and identities being solidified and policed at unprecedented levels, sexual citizenship will prove to be a generative lens for analyzing these developments.
Sexual Transnationalism & Globalization
The social life of sexuality must be understood as one that takes place across borders. Transnational migration extends beyond migrants, including so-called social remittances, such as “ideas, norms, practices, and identities” (Levitt and Jaworsky 2007:132). As such, sexual migration is as much about the unidirectional movement of queer people as it is about the embeddedness of sexuality in sites across borders. In an increasingly connected world, sexuality has also become mobile, thanks to unprecedented levels of international travel, information and communications technology, and global networks of institutions. Sexual culture traverses through transnational circuits and is (re)made across time and context.
A rapidly growing body of research considers the transnational lives of (almost exclusively) gay men who engage in South-to-North migration. These studies highlight the global connections that shape their lives well before they leave their homelands and throughout their post-migration years. In their homelands, these men encounter global cultures around migration and sexuality that inform their migration strategy, sexual identity, and practices of desire (Carrillo 2004). Once arriving at their destination country, immigrants are confronted with xenophobia, racism, and inequality in their newfound sexual communities and cities (Benedicto 2014; Carnassale 2023; Carrillo 2018). Queer immigrants engage with the cultural practices of their homelands in their daily lives in the diaspora as they (re)imagine globalized sexuality, which in turn shapes global sexual cultures (Decena 2011). Scholars emphasize these subjects’ agency in leading transnational lives, which range from cultural and religious practices (Manalansan 2003) to global activism (Karimi 2020). Queer immigrants reject the burdens of familial expectations back home, on the one hand, and the xenophobic and homonormative queer mainstream in the destination, on the other. In response, they form alternative communities and practices, which have been called “borderland spaces” for Latina lesbian migrants (Acosta 2008).
For many LGBTs in the Global South, their sexual identity and practices are informed by contextualized understandings of gender and sexuality that often incorporate “Western” and “local” conceptualizations around masculinity and femininity, desire, and sexuality. In addition to members of the diaspora who provide social remittances back home, tourists have been documented as a notable source of sexual identities, practices, and communities for LGBT people (Carrillo 2004). This is especially common in sex tourism destinations, where locals and tourists interact as a result of global capital and (exoticized) desire (Cantú 2002). Local sex workers’ lives are fundamentally transformed by the intimacies facilitated by queer tourism, including how they understand and perform racial and sexual identities, negotiate gender expectations, and pursue new livelihoods and relationships (Mitchell 2015; Ocha and Earth 2013; Padilla 2007). Queer-friendly tourist areas more broadly become unsettled locales where sexually non-normative people migrate (both domestically and internationally) for identity exploration, as well as social and economic mobility (Centner and Pereira Neto 2021; Collins 2009; Statham and Scuzzarello 2023).
Despite critiques of queer tourism as reinforcing capitalist and neocolonial inequality (Benedicto 2014), these fraught sites also have the potential to generate activism, global connection and solidarity, and resistance (Binnie and Klesse 2011; Puar 2002b). In this way, queer tourism is a prominent process by which sexuality crosses borders by bringing seemingly disconnected peoples, practices, ideas, and identities together in the formation of global sexualities. Much of the literature on queer tourism remains focused on male sexuality, with limited research on how queer women and transgender people engage in the tourism industry and the workers embedded therein (Hughes 2006; Puar 2002a). Early studies on lesbian and trans tourism suggest distinct motivations, identities, and desires are in action (Johnston 2007; Monaco et al. 2024; Monterrubio, Rodríguez Madera, and Pérez 2020; Therkelsen et al. 2013).
Beyond individual-level migration, complex networks of nongovernmental organizations, governments, and capital play a role in how new ideas and policies around sexuality spread across borders. There has been a remarkable shift in how countries discuss and legislate LGBT issues during the past half-century, including in decriminalizing ‘deviant’ behaviors (e.g., sodomy and sex work) and legalizing non-normative practices (e.g., same-sex marriage and gender-affirming care). Globalization and increased mobility have played an outsized role in the rapid spread of LGBT rights (Suen 2021). International nongovernmental organizations have accelerated the circulation of pro-LGBT activism and policy change in recent years (Velasco 2018). Regional and geopolitical dynamics within transnational networks determine any given country’s political climate on LGBT rights (Ferguson 2022; Gonsalves 2021; Velasco 2023). Nongovernmental organizations also spread global discourses and vocabularies on sexual identity that then become localized in ways that simultaneously reproduce hierarchies and create possibilities for non-normative sexualities (Biruk 2020).
With ever-increasing global connections, research on transnationalism and mobility in sexual migration has greater relevance to contemporary life. First, researchers ought to pay greater and particularized attention to queer women and transgender people as they engage in tourism and social remittance. Much of the extant literature on this topic has explored queer male sexuality, with limited exploration beyond this group. Early scholarship on other queer subpopulations suggests notable divergences that deserve additional empirical exploration. Second, future research should place greater agency and focus on LGBT people in the Global South, including by decentering and provincializing the Global North and its sexual culture. Scholars have critiqued stereotypical narratives that paint LGBT people from the Global South as oppressed subjects looking to (“illegally”) cross borders, whereas those from the Global North are “visitors” or “expats” in search of pleasure and freedom (Carrillo 2004). In addition, great attention to South-to-South sexual migration will be important as regional migration is rising (see Diab and Samneh 2024; Fortes De Lena 2024; França 2023; Saleh 2020). Last, queer digital cultures remain underexplored in how identities and practices of sexuality are mediated, negotiated, and adopted transnationally in the digital age. Scholars in communication and media studies have made headway in this pursuit (see Bayramoğlu, Szulc, and Gajjala 2024 for review), and social scientists across disciplines would benefit from incorporating these methodologies and perspectives that might help locate globalized and transnational queerness in different mediums.
Future Directions
Roughly two decades following trenchant critiques of migration studies for its heteronormativity (Luibhéid 2004; Manalansan 2006), scholarship on queer migration has burgeoned across disciplinary bounds. As such, this review is far from comprehensive and represents a segment of the ever-growing body of research on sexual migration. By weaving through a wide range of social scientific studies, this review highlights extant developments and identifies directions for future research that build on these insights.
We will need theoretically deliberate and methodologically innovative research on discourses and movements given the swift changes in the politics of sexuality and migration globally. Timely analyses of juridical developments in sexuality, kinship, and migration will be necessary to understand changes in queer migration. Future research should pay greater attention to how legal recognition and inclusion transform everyday aspects of queer migrants’ lives. Family formation and sexual practices, individual and group identities, and ideologies are likely to respond to the incentive structures and normative pressures embedded in liberal governance (Tudor and Ticktin 2021).
The proliferation of global connections has aided the mobility of not just sexual migrants but also queer ideas and practices, capital, and institutions across borders. This area of scholarship, in particular, will require additional research on understudied populations and more comparative research across regions and groups. Despite the homogenizing effects of global capital on queerness (Jackson 2009), we continue to see notable differences by gender, class, race and ethnicity, religion, and other axes of difference when it comes to queer migration. The intersection of sexuality with mobility, citizenship, and transnationalism promises to be a generative and vital location for critical scholarship on some of the most pressing issues of the contemporary moment.
