Ameliorative Homecomings: Framing the Queer Migrant in A Sinner in Mecca (2015) and Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (2016)

This study critically analyzes representations of the queer migrant subject in two documentaries, A Sinner in Mecca (2015) and Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (2016). Both films construct a drama of conflicting intersections between religion, national belonging, and sexual identity, which is resolved through a normative pull towards home and its affective restructuring of intimacy in the context of queer migrant subjectivity. The ameliorative status of homecoming operates as a default resolution in these films. A longing for home is that which both films register as the queer migrant’s constitutive attachment. These documentaries’ (re)domestication of the queer subject seems to promote a neoliberal identity politics of sexual humanitarianism, in which collective struggles are occluded by individual, heroic testimonials of homecoming.