Temporalities in Tension: Rethinking Healthcare Provisions for Sexual Migrants

There has been a growing volume of research in recent years on the wellbeing of "sexual migrants," that is, individuals who migrate to more freely express their gender and/or sexual identity. However, little attention has been paid to defining "migration" in this literature, which is often understood in a purely spatial sense. In this project, I claim that sexual migrants - whether from the UK or abroad - traverse temporal, as well as spatial, boundaries, and that sexual wellbeing and risk cannot be holistically understood without taking these temporal migrations into account. Through ethnographic research in a London sexual health clinic, I seek to uncover the extent to which abrupt shifts between timelines, such as "coming out of the closet" or transitioning, contribute to sexual risk. This research will have several policy implications, including the identification of measures aimed at increasing the uptake of sexual health services by "temporal migrants."