Exploring Southeast Asian queer migrant biographies : queer utopia, capacitations, and debilitations

In this chapter, we explore the migration biographies of queer individuals who have emigrated out of their Southeast Asian home country. Possessing mobility privileges, the respondents in this study, including the authors, emigrate to a relatively more queer-hospitable country where we seek a queer existence with safety, legitimacy, and recognition. The exploratory study makes use of our autobiographical data, and qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews with lesbian, gay, transgender, gender non-binary, and queer participants from Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand to understand the circumstances and contexts behind emigration and post-migration settlement experiences. Combining queer studies concepts from Southeast Asia and the Global North, namely, postcolonial queer theorisations and concepts of queer utopia, capacitation, and debilitation, we discuss how Southeast Asian migrants of this study navigate their post-migration worlds, pursuing capacitation projects in the face of ongoing debilitations to seek a queer utopia that does not necessarily lead to a happy-ever-after. The chapter addresses these questions: How do we develop survival strategies to capacitate ourselves for queer life-affirming projects? What resources, privileges, and reserves do we possess to succeed in capacitation of self and significant others? What kind of trade-offs are implicated? What persistent forms of debility exist in our queer migrant lives? In working out our queer migrant trajectories, we suggest that migrant struggles, queer or otherwise, are symptomatic of broader debilitative conditions of living in which people are continuously seeking, moving, improvising, and dreaming of near and far possibilities to survive the present.