This panel proposes to examine literary and artistic representations of queer migration experiences to question the extent to which these queer migration experiences, as represented in art and literature, can renew our understanding of contemporary forms of community and the creation of safe spaces and brave spaces. The aim here is to examine, from an intersectional perspective, how issues related to migration and those related to queer experiences can shift, reinforce each other, or come into tension depending on the context. The focus will be on exploring what these relationships produce on an aesthetic and narrative level.

Comparative perspectives can provide insight into how literary and artistic works contribute to the redefinition, shifting, or challenge of traditional categories of migration, exile, and diaspora. What theoretical limitations (e.g., national anchoring, implicit hierarchies, heterocentric historiographical frameworks) do these works reveal or even destabilize? Indeed, queer practices subvert these terms by developing non-linear temporalities (transtemporalities, affective archives, marginal rewritings of history), dissonant spatialities (disorientation, third places, movements between centers and peripheries), and hybrid modes of enunciation (multilingual writing, multimedia devices, fragmentary narratives). How do these formal strategies affect the way we conceptualize the migratory experience itself?

These aesthetics facilitate the conception of community as a relational and situational process, notably comprising precarious forms of belonging, temporary coalitions, artistic or digital micro-communities, and transnational networks that are formed less around identity than around the circulation of emotions, references, and practices. Cultural productions transform the notions of safe spaces and brave spaces, which are often defined and mobilized in activist contexts, into a field of aesthetic experimentation. In this field, minority spaces of expression, sensitive configurations of resistance, and narrative scenes are created, in which conflict itself becomes a resource. What limits or tensions do these spaces reveal in the narratives?

This panel invites contributions focusing on literary and artistic corpora that explore these reconfigurations. Propositions should examine, from a comparative perspective, how and to what extent queer migrations generative alternative models of community, solidarity, and subjectivation that could renew the theoretical frameworks of contemporary comparative studies.

Please send a proposal of no more than 250 words by January 15, 2026, to the following two email addresses: priscilla.wind@uca.fr and flora.roussel@mcgill.ca. This panel will be proposed for the annual conference of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association (CCLA), which will take place from June 8 to 10 in a hybrid format (in-person and online) at McGill University (Canada). Please note that if the panel is accepted, a fee will be required to participate in the CCLA conference.