The Infrastructure and Integration Lab

Graduate Student Researcher: Tori Shucheng Yang, PhD in Sociology.

Integration has occupied a central place in sociological inquiries since the Durkheimian tradition. Despite its importance in explaining the dynamics between minority and majority groups, integration has become a rather all-encompassing concept under which a wide range of social phenomena fall. Among the subfields that engage with the concept most extensively is sociology of migration, where integration is primarily examined through an ethnic lens as the process in which immigrants get incorporated into the host society over time.

However, even within migration studies, Robinson (1998: 118) describes “integration” as “a chaotic concept: a word used by many but understood differently by most”. Amidst the myriads of areas scholars identified as key to integration, we focus on friendship as a fertile yet under-researched site to understand integration on a micro and meso level (Ager and Strang 2008). While scholars agree that immigrant friendship is crucial to a sense of belonging and emplacement (Wessendorf and Phillimore 2019), work remains to be done in understanding the diversity of these friendships along multiple axes of difference.

By extending the discussion of integration beyond ethnoracial identities, scholarship on sexualities opens an interesting avenue to examine the multifaceted meanings and dimensions of what constitutes the “mainstream.” Sexual integration has caught scholarly attention as the greater accepter acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals marks one of the most fundamental shifts in the North American society over the past few decades. Integration directly impinges on friendship patterns between the sexual minority and the heterosexual mainstream.

As a pioneering attempt to bridge the conversation on the social integration of LGBTQ+ individuals with the debates on migrant integration, we examine how queer migrants make sense of friendship qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 50 skilled Chinese LGBTQ+ migrants in North America.

Our preliminary findings reveal that although almost all respondents agree that there is greater acceptance towards LGBTQ+ individuals in their host contexts, diverse attitudes towards queer friendships underpin varying approaches to integration practices. These differences illustrate a multiplicity of modalities of belonging with different groups at various points along their trajectories. Sexual integration and migrant integration are interwoven processes that shape group dynamics in complex ways.

Our study contributes to the growing literature on friendship formation and friendship group composition among migrants in their host countries. We demonstrate the importance of bringing together sexuality scholarship and migration studies to better understand how multiple dimensions of differences underlie the concept of integration.