Ameliorative homecomings: framing the queer migrant in A sinner in Mecca (2015) and Who’s gonna love me now? (2016)

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Cakirlar, C. ORCID: 0000-0003-1171-8635, 2020. Ameliorative homecomings: framing the queer migrant in A sinner in Mecca (2015) and Who’s gonna love me now? (2016). The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums and Culture (01), pp. 245-263. ISSN 2633-4534

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.35074/GJ.2020.1.1.015

Abstract

This study critically analyzes representations of the queer migrant subject in two documentaries, A Sinner in Mecca (2015) and Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (2016). Both films construct a drama of conflicting intersections between religion, national belonging, and sexual identity, which is resolved through a normative pull towards home and its affective restructuring of intimacy in the context of queer migrant subjectivity. The ameliorative status of homecoming operates as a default resolution in these films. A longing for home is that which both films register as the queer migrant’s constitutive attachment. These documentaries’ (re)domestication of the queer subject seems to promote a neoliberal identity politics of sexual humanitarianism, in which collective struggles are occluded by individual, heroic testimonials of homecoming.

Item Type:

Journal article

Description:

01 issue title: Transitory parerga: access and inclusion in contemporary art, edited by Vlad Strukov.

Publication Title:

The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums and Culture

Creators:

Cakirlar, C.

Publisher:

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

Date:

30 November 2020