Real Queer? Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus by David A. B. Murray. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. 194 pp (original) (raw)
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Excerpt: "In Real Queer?, anthropologist David Murray recounts and analyzes how SOGI refugee claimants learn to navigate the complex refugee determination system in Canada. Murray observes how SOGI claimants learn to be LGBT in ways that are legible in the Canadian legal context to those deciding the claims—namely, refugee board members. Board members’ perceptions of what it is to be authentically LGBT are shaped by cultural understandings that may not align with the diverse backgrounds shaping the identities of refugee claimants. This diversity is illustrated through the stories of claimants (drawn from interviews), introduced in the first chapter and traced through the conclusion. Interview data are complemented by Murray’s selfreflexive participant-observation as a volunteer in SOGI refugee support organizations, and observation of Immigration and Refugee Board hearings."
Refugee Queerings: Sexuality, Identity and Place in Canadian Refugee Determination
Over the past decade, the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) of Canada has granted asylum to several thousand refugee claimants on the basis of sexual orientation. To receive refugee status, claimants must demonstrate "membership in a particular social group" - homosexuals - and a future likelihood of persecution for this reason. Drawing from interviews, media and government texts, and observation of refugee determination hearings, I examine the geographical imaginations shaping asylum decision-making, and consider how identity and place are articulated and assessed in refugee determination proceedings. Often predicated upon essentialized, heteronormative and ethnocentric representations of sexuality and space/place, analyses of sexual orientation-based asylum cases must be queered in the interests of promoting a more just and humane refugee system. I contend that the scale of the body, as well as differences of gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and class, should be foregrounded in considering the security of sexual dissidents.
Becoming Queer Here: Integration and Adaptation Experiences of Sexual Minority Refugees in Toronto
Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees, 2013
Since the early 1990s Canada has become a primary destination for individuals who make refugee claims on the basis of sexual orientation persecution. However, until recently, there was little research focusing on this growing component of Canadian urban queer communities and their experiences of the refugee claim process, and their integration and adaptation to Canadian society. This paper, based on interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) refugee claimants and participation in LGBT newcomer support groups in Toronto, explores the formal and informal processes, spaces and practices through which LGBT refugee claimants learn about the Canadian nation-state, citizenship and queer identities and communities, and in so doing enter a space/moment of becoming a ‘becoming’ refugee as they learn the social, cultural, and bureaucratic processes and norms of the Canadian refugee apparatus.
Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and the Refugee Determination Process in Canada
2013
Paper prepared for the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada in support of a presentation made to the Board members on sexual orientation, gender identity and the refugee determination process. The paper reviews developments and issues specific to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered refugees and the Canadian inland refugee determination process.
Liberation Nation? Queer Refugees, Homonationalism and the Canadian Necropolitical State
REMHU: Revista Interdisciplinar da Mobilidade Humana, 2020
This paper presents an overview of the Canadian state’s refugee determination processes for persons lodging asylum claims in Canada on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity expression (SOGIE). Canada has an international reputation for being a welcoming nation to SOGIE (as well as other categories of) refugees, a reputation that is much promoted by the Canadian government and mainstream media. However, in my ethnographic research with SOGIE refugee claimants navigating the Canadian refugee determination process, I reveal that claimants must quickly learn how to construct an ‘authentically’ gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender narrative that meets refugee adjudicators’ standards of credibility, or risk being identified as a ‘fake’ refugee, and thus face incarceration and/or deportation. I argue that sexuality now forms a crucial component of the nation-state’s gate-keeping apparatus, with uneven effects for queer migrants.
Limbo Life in Canada's Waiting Room: Asylum-seeker as Queer Subject
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2017
This paper puts queer theory's ''subjectless critique'' of identity to work in challenging the state's biopolitical use of essential, authentic identities in asylum law and practice. It not only builds upon, but also departs from existing scholarship that calls on state actors to recognize a wider range of forms of gender and sexual diversity that make people vulnerable to persecution. By contrast, I investigate how the practices of ''destination'' countries produce asylums-seekers as dispossessed, deportable, precarious queers, regardless of sexual identity or practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with asylum-seekers and their supporters in Toronto, Canada, I highlight the waiting room as one type of material and metaphorical space that produces asylum-seekers as liminal queer subjects. I argue that approaching queerness as precarity, rather than lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identity or even sexual and gender diversity, provides alternative and expansive ethical horizons for queer and migration politics.