Lesson 4.3: Care & Survival in Exile

View

This topic explores aspects of survival and political resistance that are often intangible—emotional support, informal care, and everyday acts of solidarity—but we will anchor these in concrete examples to try and grasp them. We learn how care, friendship, and solidarity networks sustain life in exile and become the infrastructure of political agency. In contexts where institutions fail, these acts of mutual support are not simply emotional responses - they are political practices that make survival possible.

4. Conclusions: Exile & Care

Across this session, we have seen that ‘anti-gender’ politics do not stop at the physical border. They generate displacement, shape the journeys of those who flee, and continue to affect life in exile through suspicion, bureaucratic violence, and unequal forms of belonging. For many queer, trans, feminist and LGBTIQ+ individuals, exile is not a moment of safety but a continuum of vulnerability, where authoritarian repression merges with racialised and gendered forms of exclusion in host countries. At the same time, the session has shown that people are never passive recipients of these harms. Participants across the RESIST project — from Turkey, Northern Kurdistan, Belarus, and various EU countries — emphasised that exile is also a site of agency, creativity, and political continuity. Even when formal protections fail, migrants rebuild their worlds through care networks, collective knowledge production, and quiet forms of resistance that challenge both authoritarian regimes and restrictive migration systems. These practices highlight that survival itself is political.

A key insight from this session is that violence and resistance are intertwined. The pressures that drive people to leave — repression, delegitimisation, criminalisation — reappear in new forms through border controls, asylum procedures, and racialised encounters with European institutions. Yet these same pressures reveal the transformative power of solidarity, mutual aid, and community care. These practices not only sustain life under precarious conditions but also generate transnational feminist and queer politics attentive to difference, power, and justice.

 

Exile produces new forms of knowledge, new alliances, and new imaginaries of belonging that challenge simplistic narratives of victimhood.

As we move to the next session, we will further explore how displaced activists shape political struggles across borders, and how care, creativity, and collective action become infrastructural to resistance.

  
Tags: