Refracted belongings of Turkish-speaking queer migrants in the UK

Mainstream migration studies remain anchored in cis-heteronormative assumptions, overlooking how queer migrants navigate multi-sited marginalisation and belonging across origin, settlement, and diasporic contexts. Through four years of ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2025) in several UK cities with significant Turkish-speaking populations, this article investigates how Turkish-speaking queer migrants in the UK experience fragmented marginalisation and forge refracted belongings across Turkey, the UK, and Turkish-speaking diasporic spaces, and in which ways their experiences of (dis)identification harbour political potential. Queer migrants inhabit a lenticular mode of existence shaped by homing desire, disidentifying with exclusionary regimes in all three terrains while sustaining affective, cultural, and political attachments that cannot be captured by linear narratives of integration or by protective transnationalism. A mediating space is required to build negative capability that facilitates disidentification in everyday life, enabling migrants to cultivate forms of survival, solidarity, and visibility that exceed narrow minoritarian framings while remaining ambivalent and disoriented within refracted belongings. The article extends Muñoz’s theory of disidentification by specifying its mediating processes and introducing negative capability as central to counterpublic formation, thereby reorienting migration and diaspora studies towards more expansive, queer-informed imaginaries of political subjectivity, belonging, and homemaking.