Heimat is a place of safety and belonging, but also a time of limited solidarity and folk fabulation. It is national ideology camouflaged as Heimatliebe; there to exclude and divide but also to unite and conquer. These tensions change meaning depending on which side of the border one finds themselves.
In Queerdos Heimat, we stop being the object of your polemics and radicalization. Narratives of displacement are construed as four short performative acts and an epilogue that subvert the patriotic gaze and viewed as constitutive of new queer migrant subjectivities.
We are rudimentary and dirty and improvisational, poor and lo-fi; we are the exiled bodies stripped naked, swimming in mud, trying to build homes on quicksand. Our bodies are exoticized, eroticized and terrorized, and our existence is contested and met with biases. But still, we keep going, pushing through land borders, gender spectrums and sexual orientations.
We acknowledge the heterogeneous nature of our place of (be)longing. We reject the influences of geopolitics, patriotism, and cultural superiority in our existence; instead, we embrace queer desire, fragility and unpredictability as our modus operandi.
In English with Ukrainian, Romanian, Hebrew and Arabic excerpts
Content Note: retelling of racist, queerphobic and violent situations.
