Performing Politics: Drag, Queer Migration, and the Aesthetic of Postmigrant Survival – Tunay Altay

In this talk, Tunay Altay (Humboldt University of Berlin) draws on a book-in-progress that examines migrant drag performance as a lens onto the politics of queer migrant representation, the limits of legibility, and the changing conditions of queer migrant political life under intensifying anti-gender, anti-migrant, and anti-trans mobilizations.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2026, Altay’s book focuses on Germany’s migrant drag scene and the ways it has been shaped by histories of migration, displacement, and racialized belonging. At the centre of the book is a double movement. Drag has increasingly become a discursive battleground onto which anxieties about gender, sexuality, migration, and the nation are projected, turning aesthetic difference into an object of political contestation and demands for regulation. At the same time, migrant performers use drag to navigate and contest racialized and sexualized regimes of citizenship: forging alternative pathways to political participation, reclaiming stages and public space, and producing forms of visibility that exceed liberal frameworks of recognition and inclusion. Migrant drag therefore emerges not simply as representation, but as a political and aesthetic practice of world-making through which experiences of marginalization and exclusion are reworked into infrastructures of care, endurance, collective identification, and political imagination. The book ultimately asks what migrant drag can tell us about the changing relationship between sexuality, migration, and citizenship at a moment when the boundaries of legitimate gender, belonging, and public visibility are being aggressively redrawn.

Dr. 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. Tunay is the co-chair of the Gender and Sexuality Research Network at the Council for European Studies.