The Queer Laugh of the Postmigrant

This chapter focuses on a very specific type of laughter: the queer laugh of the postmigrant. Postmigrants are subjects who are treated as outsiders because certain aspects of their physical appearance, their cultural practices, or sometimes just their names are supposedly foreign. Even if they were born in the city or in the village, even if their families have resided there, sometimes for generations, postmigrants remain the odd ones out. They are ‘‘odd’’ as in ‘‘queer,’’ which originally meant strange and peculiar but has acquired the additional meaning of resisting the rigid separation between male and female, gay or straight. ‘‘Queers’’ and ‘‘postmigrants’’ are the building blocks on which this chapter rests. The words queer and postmigrant are used here as bridges between perspectives and different disciplines that have attempted to fight xenophobia, racism, and homophobia or transphobia. Since the 1990s, queer has been one of the master concepts in gender studies, whereas postmigrant will sound familiar (though not immediately recognizable) to students and scholars interested in racialized bodies in a globalized community. The queer laugh of the postmigrant is proposed as a powerful tool for subjects who are constantly gendered or racialized so as to be ostracized.