Ambivalent im/mobilities: rethinking South Asian migrations to Italy through and beyond queerness

This thesis explores a largely overlooked trajectory within contemporary South-North migration: the relocation of sexually and/or gender non-conforming people from South Asia to Italy. Rather than focusing on a single national, religious, or social group, it adopts a deliberately broad framework structured by the simultaneous lenses of ‘South Asia’, ‘Italy’, and ‘queerness’. In the absence of prior scholarship systematically connecting these three dimensions, the project seeks not to define a cohesive category of ‘South Asian queerness in Italy’, but to rather open grounded, subject-centered windows onto a neglected migratory reality. Based on two and a half years of qualitative, patchwork-style ethnographic fieldwork (2023-2025), the study draws on participant observation, biographical and semi-structured interviews, and mobile methods, implemented with a small and diverse group of participants: primarily young men from Pakistan and Bangladesh, who migrated to Italy often, though not exclusively, through SOGI-based asylum pathways. Informed by queer migration studies, but ultimately also aiming at moving beyond some of its core assumptions, the research examines how migration and sexuality mutually shape one another. It asks how participants negotiate in/visibility, racialization, homonationalism, and precarity in their everyday lives; how queerness informs migratory trajectories and diasporic inhabitation; and how migration regimes and Italian social contexts reshape the meanings and lived experience of desire. Challenging assumptions that migration to Europe necessarily expands sexual freedom, the thesis interrogates desire as a terrain structured by class, citizenship, and racial hierarchies, and in doing so, it questions whether migration may, in some cases, narrow rather than broaden queer possibilities, and for whom. Bridging South Asian migration studies and Italian queer migration scholarship, the thesis proposes an ‘area-sensitive’ approach that holds together region-specific histories and sexual subjectivities. Across three ethnographic ascending scales of im/mobility – namely, ‘gesturing’, ‘walking’, and ‘migrating’ –, this work ultimately conceptualizes migration as an ongoing, multi-scalar process, coterminously unfolding across bodies, spaces, and desires.