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This article examines how concepts of gender and sexuality are increasingly being mobilised as symbolic values in Danish immigration politics. The Danish national self-perception rests on an idea of widespread tolerance, especially regarding gender and sexuality. However, understandings of gender and sexuality as represented in Danish immigration discourse draw clear boundaries between insiders and outsiders. As of 2017, Danish asylum centres introduced compulsory teaching of so-called 'Danish sexual morals' as an attempt to prevent sexual violence by educating asylum seekers in sexual conduct. Based on fieldwork conducted in a language and culture class at an asylum centre, the analysis demonstrates how the teacher simultaneously reproduces and challenges concepts of differing national sexualities as they appear in the teaching material, and how the students push back against culturally specific conceptualisations of gender and sexuality by offering personal narratives countering those ascribed to them in the stereotypical representations.

In order to understand how sexual and romantic relations are established and negotiated in discourse, the field of language and sexuality is dependent upon empirical data from naturally occurring spontaneous interaction. However, detailed discussions of research methods are lacking in the field. In this article, I explore ways of accessing intimate spontaneous data in a heterosexual online dating context. Through interactional analysis of three types of online dating interaction, I examine the multi-faceted context for securing informed consent while at the same time preserving participants' intimacy. I argue that institutionalized informed consent procedures may undercut participant agency and expose symbolic violence towards their carefully built interactional framework. The analysis demonstrates participants' ability to negotiate ethical issues and to turn such issues into a contribution to the ongoing flirtatious interaction. As a result, I suggest a method that integrates participants' interactional expertise in the consent-gaining process.

This introduction frames the special issue 'Mobilising Language, Gender and Sexuality Studies', situating the contributions in relation to interdisciplinary scholarship on migration, gender, sexuality and language. In particular, this introduction draws attention to Global South theorisations of migration as resistance, suggesting that scholars of language, gender and sexuality can build on such approaches to trace forms of agency that otherwise might go unnoticed. The contributions to this special issue investigate how gender and language circulate in dominant migration discourses and are contested by mobile communities, linking normative ideologies to individual bodies and lives through the use of stereotyped figures. The introduction also highlights how themes of time, place and nation weave through the contributions and calls for a scalar approach that resists the widespread downscaling of migrants' own discursive acts. It concludes with a call to action that urges scholars to consider how they might support the ways in which mobile communities are making sense of and taking action in the world.