Performing Politics: Drag, Queer Migration, and the Aesthetics of Postmigrant Survival

This talk draws on a book-in-progress that uses migrant drag performance as a lens onto three interconnected issues: the politics of queer migrant representation, the limits of queer migrant legibility, and the role of “drag” as a discursive battleground and political infrastructure for reimagining conditions of life under growing anti-gender, anti-migrant, and anti-rights mobilizations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2026, including 25 in-depth interviews with drag performers, the talk focuses on the emerging scene of drag in Germany shaped by histories of migration and displacement. Migrant drag appears in this scene as a strategy through which queer migrants navigate racialized and sexualized regimes of citizenship by forging alternative pathways, reclaiming stages, and producing forms of visibility that exceed liberal frameworks of inclusion. Migrant drag emerges not simply as representation, but as a mode of world-making that remediates injury, marginalization, and exclusion into shared infrastructures of care, endurance, and political imagination. Taken together, the book proposes a way of reading sexuality and migration in an era moving towards reactionary and retrogressive movements, pro-natal conservatism, and anti-trans politics. 

Speaker bio: Tunay Altay

Tunay Altay is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology and Co-Head of the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Migration at Humboldt University of Berlin. Tunay’s research focuses on migration and sexuality in Germany, Turkey, and the broader context of Europe and the Middle East. He is the co-editor of Queer and Trans Life: Anthropological Future (2025) and Resisting Far-Right Politics: Queer Feminist Critiques (2024). Tunay published in top-ranked journals, including Sexualities, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and European Journal of Politics and Gender. He is the co-chair of the Gender and Sexuality Research Network at the Council for European Studies.

Everyone welcome - no need to book.