Queer Migrants in Transnational Social Spaces Chossière & Charles 2 Call for Papers — Special Issue Proposal Queer Migrants in Transnational Social Spaces: Sexualised Geographies of Power Florent Chossière, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS-France)- Géographie- Cités Carlo Handy Charles, University of Windsor (Canada) and University of Michigan (USA) Framing Over the past two decades, queer migration has emerged as a vital field of inquiry, drawing attention to the specific trajectories, exclusions, and lived realities of LGBTQI+ individuals in contexts of global mobility (Luibhéid and Cantú, 2005; Cantú, 2009; Chávez, 2013; Carrillo and Fontdevila, 2014; Mole, 2021; Jones, 2023). Scholarship has illuminated how queer migrants navigate departure, asylum, integration, and identity transformation, with a central focus on border regimes shaped by heteronormative and homonormative logics —especially within SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) asylum systems (Murray, 2014; Akin, 2017; Giametta, 2017; Tschalaer, 2019; Shakhsari, 2020; Danisi et al., 2021; Cesaro, 2023; Bouchet-Mayer and Ferez, 2024; Hamila, 2025; Lunau and Schröder, 2025). Yet, as Charles (2023, 2024) has noted, relatively little attention has been paid to how queer migrants inhabit transnational social spaces—the lived, affective, and material ties that span countries of origin, settlement, and beyond—after they have migrated. This gap is especially notable given the long- standing engagement of queer and LGBTQI+ studies with transnationalism. Foundational debates on queer globalization and imperialism (Altman, 1996; Massad, 2002; Puar, 2007; Jackson, 2009; Perreau, 2018), the global circulation of sexual identity categories (Boellstorff, 2005; Roux, 2009), transnational activism (Ayoub and Patternote 2014; Manalansan, 2006; Cruz-Malavé & Manalansan, 2002), and North–South intimacies (Lewin & Leap, 2009; Nixon, 2015; Mitchell, 2016; Padilla, 2019) have laid the groundwork for a robust transnational critique. However, these interventions have often centred macro-level dynamics and asymmetrical global relations, sidelining the everyday practices, attachments, and tensions through which queer migrants enact, negotiate, and contest belonging across borders. This special issue aims to address this gap by queering the field of migrant transnationalism—foregrounding how LGBTQI+ migrants shape and are shaped by transnational connections, and how such practices reshape our understandings of queerness, space, and migration. The central contribution of this special issue is to theorize, through innovative empirical research, the mutual constitution of queer sexuality and transnational social spaces. Queering Transnational Social Spaces We begin by queering the concept of transnational social space, a central notion in migration studies that refers to the enduring social practices and identifications connecting geographically distant but socially linked locales (Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Faist, 2000, 2015; Levitt and Jaworsky, 2007; Satzewich and Wong 2011; Ma Mung 2012; Schmoll, 2017; Zéphirin 2018; Lacroix, 2019; Audebert 2020, 2022). While this concept has been instrumental in analyzing migrant networks and attachments, it often relies on heteronormative assumptions about kinship, belonging, and mobility. By introducing a queer lens, we