On Immigration Status

Besides ‘regular’ immigrants, in this study the term ‘migrant’ has also addressedSans Papiers – undocumented immigrants – (who were eventually not represented in the sample), asylum seekers, and naturalized immigrants. The latter were considered because they remain marked asAusländerinnenin their everyday lives even after they become Swiss citizens. As one informant phrased it: “Here, I will always be a foreigner.”

Asylum seekers andSans Papiershave been included because, while most migration scholarship continues to frame ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ migration as entirely different spheres of experience by radically separating ‘trafficked’ people and refugees from

‘regular’ immigrants, I argue with Eithne Luibhéid that this distinction “urgently needs to be rethought to account for how most migrations in fact straddle choice and coercion” (Luibhéid 2008a:178 and 2008b). Luibhéid further notes:

Such distinctions are less reflections of empirically verifiable differences among queer migrants, who often shift from one category to another, than techniques of nation-state power that remain centrally implicated in neocolonial hierarchies and that clas-sify migrants in order to delimit the rights that they will have or be denied, and the forms of surveillance, discipline, normalization, and exploitation to which they will be subjected. (Luibhéid 2008a:186n)

Thespatialitiesof migration further destabilize the logic of such a separation. Just like other migrants, asylum seekers andSans Papiers, too, have traveled from one place to an-other, and they, too, have an everyday life in Switzerland, albeit a specifically structured one. Their lives rather center on waiting for refugee status, sometimes for several years, and on the fear of becoming exposed as undocumented or expelled from the country.

Since it was these everyday lives and spaces in particular that were under scrutiny here, as well as how participants’ perceptions of their sexual Selves shifted through these experiences, an a priori exclusion of asylum seekers andSans Papiersdid not seem jus-tified.

3.5.5 On Language

The call for research participants was provided in German, French, and English (and later also Albanian). Eventually, all interviews were held in German, Swiss German, French, and English. In many cases, research participants did not speak their mother tongues in the interviews (and neither did I, my mother tongue being Swiss German), which emphasized the already sensitive issue of researchers doing research in, and translating data from, a ‘foreign’ language (Müller 2007, Smith 1996).⁶²In the call, I offered the possibility of bringing one’s own interpreter, but nobody made use of this option. I ascribe this to two facts: First, the snowball system worked rather poorly in this project. I had hoped that people who had participated in the research or had seen the flyer would refer the information to friends, family members, or community members who did not speak any of the languages used in the call, but this only happened in one instance (which eventually did not result in an interview). Second, many research participants were more than capable of speaking in one of the offered languages. This was partly also owed to the fact that most participants were well-educated. Usually, everyday use of one of the interview languages was normal, and it was sometimes also the language used by binational couples to communicate. This is not to deny but perhaps to qualify the often-lamented loss of nuance and detail when speaking in a foreign language.

A few cautionary notes on the definition of the subject(s) of this study to conclude. Like any other, this definition of the research subject – ‘queer migrant women’ – includes certain subjects and subject positions while excluding others. Markingmati,lesbian, tomboy,supi,bisexual, and other sexual identities as ‘queer’ may be a noble gesture to demonstrate open-mindedness and resistance to closure. However, it also glosses over the fact that we as researchers simply cannot include the things in our study concepts that we cannot think because we don’t know them. With the theoretical tools we have available in queer postcolonial theory to date, we can always only think as far as we can namespecificsexualities, and maybe we can analyze some interactions between them, or suspect the limitations of their conceptualization. However, even today, we cannot know what next letter will be attached to the acronym LGBTIQ⁺, or what alternative conceptualizations of sexuality may further transform queer theory in the future.

At the same time, an open mind – as the concept of ‘queer’ requests – may help us to look actively for ways in which analyses conducted in the ‘dirt and rock’ of everyday lives and spaces may change our thinking about sexuality. Indeed, at the outset of this

62 However, Fiona Smith warns against binarizing doing research in the ‘home’ language versus do-ing research in a ‘foreign’ language, seedo-ing that even within one ldo-inguistic community language is never transparent or directly representative of a reality outside of it. Smith therefore advocates a productive approach to doing research in foreign languages, arguing that reflections on the trans-lation of key terms can open spaces in between languages that in turn can create new spaces of insight which are not inhabitable when working from within the ‘home’ language – and which si-multaneously effectively de-center the assumed transparency of the ‘home’ language, too (Smith 1996:162-163).

research, I could certainly not have come up with the definition of the research sub-ject I have just written; it was not forged at the outset, but rather at the close of this project, and thus was a result rather than an axiom, betraying the text’s seemingly lin-ear logic. Time and again, what I thought were the subjects of my reslin-earch and the field of research escaped my grasp, just as I already feel my latest attempt slip through my fingers now. At this point, therefore, I can do no better than to tell some of the tales from the field in which all of this slipping occurred, emphasize the provisional nature of the above outline, and invite suggestions for its enhancement, extension, or productive dissolution.