Transnational Queer Necropolitics

In January 2014, the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act was legislated in Nigeria, inducing a steady migrational flow of queer Nigerians to the US. Using ethnographic data collected through oral history interviews and participant observation with queer Nigerian migrants who have resettled in the Greater Chicago area, this thesis seeks to illuminate that queer Nigerian migrants are subject to multiple necropolitical regimes throughout their migration experience. Initial crises in Nigeria can be linked to the state's postcolonial insecurity and corruption. These are, then, substituted with the haunt of neoliberal capitalism and racism in the US and new tensions with queer identity politics. I argue that migration provides queer Nigerian migrants with comparatively better chances of survival than "salvation" from brutal regimes and that their continuous precarity, together with other complex socioeconomic structures surrounding their migration, becomes obscured under liberal, imperialist discourses on queer migration. To end, this thesis shows how the interlocutors forge transnational networks and perform care within these networks and their areas of residency to make "home."