Searching for Belonging and Living with Saudade: Emotional Geographies of Brazilian LGBTQ+ Migration to Canada

Abstract

Many LGBTQ+ Brazilians drastically remap their lives by emigrating to Canada, having often been denied place-making and the safe (re)production of their queer identities in their homelands. This research traces such northern geopolitical migration trajectories and seeks to understand them at the intersection of queer and emotional geographies. Particular attention is directed to interpreting the feeling of saudade, a cultural emotion specific to the Lusophone sphere. Drawing upon 14 semi-structured interviews, a focus group, and 29 photographs of objects that symbolize saudade, I operationalize the multi-scalar relations between the queer Brazilian body and the home, the nation, and transnational flows. The findings of this research outline those relationships, highlight spatially contingent and transforming othering processes, and explores the emotional processes that lead to a queer Brazilian diasporic identity of in-betweenness, physically in Canada, but oriented towards queer Brazil.