Chronic Pain of Race and Citizenship: Profound Subtleties of Injury and Redress in a Community of Queer Exile

This article is about the torturous and protracted experiences of racialization and migration bureaucracies. I call these experiences of chronic pain. This is to (1) convey the damage they cause in the corporeal and social life of the racialized and the noncitizen and (2) to protest how in such experiences, the subject withdraws from politics. The article is based on ethnographic research at a support group for queer migrants in Helsinki. I locate the article in queer studies and their premise that the particular/personal is political and effects change within and beyond a given community or group. I expand on queer studies’ investment in the intimate and the mundane for less injurious communities and relationality. With the ubiquity and recurrence of injurious bordering, the subjectivity of the racialized and noncitizen might shrink in pain, short of subversive sociopolitical mobilization. My question is: What becomes of community politics and (queer) kinship when we relinquish all subjectivity to conformist methods of numbing? I go through different strategies for how subjects numb physically and/or narratively numb or alleviate protracted injuries. Then I argue how these strategies can break into relational and communal aspects that invigorate and transform modes and methods of sociopolitical redress.