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Review of: Lunau Dejgaard, Marie. 2023. The Affective Politics of Queer Migration: On Affective Ambivalence, Truth and Queerness. PhD diss. Roskilde University: The Doctoral School of Social Science & Business. (268 pages)

What do tests performed on human bodies tell us? Hormones and genetics have become increasingly central to contemporary understandings of identities and kinship. In this article, narratives around hormone and genetic testing are examined through two examples: the use of DNA testing in migration control and hormone testing in sports. In the name of “fair sport” and “fair migration”, people are being tested because of regulations by the federation or by the state. Testing is said to produce better knowledge, where knowledge without testing is unreliable and defined as a problem which constitutes a risk to fair participation or belonging. In the narratives examined in this article, there is a simultaneous stabilization and destabilization of identity, gender and race. We argue for a slightly different articulation of molecularization, compared to how it has previously been conceptualized in canonized scholarly work. When considered as strategic and entangled with gender, race, and sexuality, molecularization appears as not only a development within or from biopolitics but also as a part of necropolitics. The relation between politics and molecularization is here centred on control by knowing the individual through biological tests, a form of control which we call testinaming.

This paper explores the concept of “safe spaces” in digital learning environments, specifically in the context of gender studies educa-tion. Through a pedagogical development project called Safe Spaces Online, we collaborated with colleagues and students to address the complexities of safety in online education. Rather than reproducing the often-sensationalized portrayal of gender studies students and university settings found in mainstream media, our project examines how concerns around safe spaces are understood and realized in our courses and how these concerns influence our pedagogical practices. Drawing on our project experiences, this paper discusses how safety is understood and conceptualized in our gender studies teaching.

Our discussion reflects insights gained through dialogue with both colleagues and students, aiming to enrich and bring nuance to the polarized debates on safe spaces in higher education, particularly those concerning gender studies students. Our analysis reveals that online safe spaces in gender studies are understood in ways that significantly diverge from popular media portrayals. Contrary to narratives dominated by terms such as “trigger warnings” and “cancel culture”, students express a need for safe online spaces characterized by structure, clarity, relational engagement, and teacher presence. This paper seeks to contribute to a more balanced understanding of safe spaces by highlighting the practical and relational aspects valued by students in gender studies learning environments.

After people flee to Sweden and are granted asylum, their family members must apply to the Swedish migration authorities in order to be reunited with their loved ones in Sweden. As part of this process, some applicants must prove their relationships through DNA analysis. In such situations, ‘family’ is conceptualised as meaning only genetic parent-child relationships and couples who have a child to whom they are both genetically related. This contrasts to more varied constructions of family in other contexts, not least compared to queer family and kinship practices. In this thesis, I analyse the use of DNA testing in family reunification in Sweden, its consequences, as well as how ‘family’, ‘migration control’ and ‘knowledge’ are constructed in this practice. Drawing on postcolonial and queer feminist theorising, as well as feminist science and technology studies, I examine the interrelatedness of power, body, scientific knowledge production, experience, and critique. I interrogate the use of DNA tests in migration control through an ethnographic study consisting of interviews and observations, as well as policy and published material. The study involves people who have applied for family reunification, civil servants at the Swedish Migration Agency, officials from the Migration Courts, staff in laboratories analysing DNA, representatives from migrant rights organisations and lawyers.

When DNA tests are used in family reunification proceedings they come to function as the ultimate arbiter of who counts as ‘family’, and are a determining factor in whether family reunification is granted. I argue that this is based on hierarchical valuations of different knowledges. It also relies on a combination of racialised and heterosexual schemes of (un)intelligibility that shape which families, relationships, and lives are thought of as deserving protection or family reunification. My analysis of how DNA is analysed and constructed as knowledge demonstrates the gradual reduction of ambiguity and corollary stabilisation of meaning this process involves. This occurs within the laboratory processes themselves, and then when test results are subsequently used within the legal system. Despite the contingencies of these processes of production and interpretation of knowledge, DNA analyses are constructed as unchallengeable; they are seen as providing clear-cut answers as to who is family. I contend that DNA testing in migration control reproduces an epistemic order in which migrants’ accounts are devalued and treated with suspicion, and where technoscience assumes the function of a producer of facts and truth. I argue that the use of a form of knowledge that is constructed as objective, neutral, and reliable leads to migration control itself being constructed as neutral, and as characterised by administrative justice. Through the example of DNA testing, this thesis claims that racialised and sexualised discourses in combination with the mobilisation of what is considered infallible knowledge function to legitimise and naturalise migration control.