Description
Despite the focus on the everydayness of ontological (in)security in Ontological Security Studies (OSS), the intricate relationship between everyday geopolitics and psychoanalytical ontological (in)security remains underexplored. This oversight limits psychoanalysis’s potential to deepen our understanding of how geopolitics and the binaries sustaining spatial divisions are perpetuated through fantasies of completeness. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by integrating insights from gender, feminist, and queer studies into Lacanian ontological (in)security. Building on existing research on intimacy in war and security, the theoretical framework will connect Cynthia Weber’s concept of the ‘immigrant on the move’ as a ‘perverse homosexual’ to narratives of completeness that shape space, borders, and in-betweenness. It argues that fantasy narratives enable and legitimise sovereign statehood by sexualising and racialising some mobile bodies and subjectivities. The analysis calls on OSS scholars to seriously consider heteronormative (and sometimes homonormative) regimes to advance our understanding of how fantasies operate. The paper will illustrate this argument through the dehumanisation narratives of LGBTQ+ Syrian refugees in Turkey, depicted as ‘perverse homosexuals on the move’.
