Abstract
While migration and queer studies are respected and well-established, their intersection as an interdisciplinary alliance deserves further research. This paper is part of the critical psychology project ‘Queering migration, migrating queer studies’ to discuss and address primarily the main challenges LGBTIQ+ migrants face around accommodation and mental health in detention in the UK context. Given the recent anti-immigration bill passed in July 2023 by the British parliament and the escalating difficulties to obtain asylum in this hostile environment, the paper reviews academic literature published between 2017 and 2023 on services LGBTIQ+ refugees and asylum seekers have received or have had access to in the UK. It critically reflects on what accommodation means within detention and removal centres and how the latter affects mental health and service provision questions for the LGBTIQ+ community.
Bringing to the fore Achille Mbembe’s conceptual framework of necropolitics in dialogue with Frantz Fanon’s psychosocial analytics of racism, this paper shows how LGBTIQ+ migration walks in between Foucauldian biopolitics and necropolitics as an emerging discourse. By mobilising a case study, the paper focuses first on why necropolitics is a useful framework to shed light, expose and resist existing hegemonies on LGBTIQ+ migration issues, particularly in the UK, and second, shows how ‘deathworlds’, and the living dead can be observed in the lives of LGBTIQ+ refugees and asylum seekers coming from Global South and detained in the UK. Nevertheless, we also understand the role of queerness in challenging misconceptions and resisting hegemonies in detention centres, which is a task for critical psychologists