John Benjamins Publishing Company Testimonies of LGBTIQ refugees as cartographies of political, sexual and emotional borders (original) (raw)
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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.
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."
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.
Queer Settlers: Questioning Settler Colonialism in the LGBT Asylum Processes in Canada
Refugee and forced migration studies have focused primar- ily on the refugees’ countries of origin and the causes for migration. Yet it is also important to also critically investi- gate the processes, discourses, and structures of settlement in the places they migrate to. This has particular signifi- cance in settler states like Canada in which research on refugee and forced migration largely ignores the presence of Indigenous peoples, the history of colonization that has made settlement possible, and ways the nation has shaped its borders through inflicting control and violence on Indigenous persons. What does it mean, then, to file a refu- gee claim in a state like Canada in which there is ongoing colonial violence against First Nations communities? In this article, we will explore what it means to make a refu- gee claim based on sexual orientation and gender identity in a settler-state like Canada. For sexual and gender min- ority refugees in Canada, interconnected structures of col- onial discourse and regulation come into force through the Canadian asylum and resettlement process. It is through this exploration that ideas surrounding migration, asylum, and settlement become unsettled.
Legally Queer: The Construction of Sexuality in LGBQ Asylum Claims
Using court decisions, interviews with legal actors, and ethnographic observations , this paper analyzes the development of sexual identity classifications for sexual minorities seeking asylum in the United States and argues that the adjudication of such claims works to consolidate and regulate sexual identities but also creates possibilities for recognizing marginalized queer identities. Asylum seekers must prove their sexual identities, and immigration officials must classify claimants as belonging to a protected group. At the inception of queer asylum law in 1990, protected categories were highly circumscribed, but the indeterminacy of the law allowed advocates and asylum seekers to challenge existing categories and stake out new claims based on their sexualities. Against the backdrop of extant criticisms of the asylum process for queers, this paper suggests that the way asylum law has been elaborated, adapted, and interpreted , particularly in approximately the past decade, offers possibilities for making unique identity claims that are not recognized in existing scholarship.
Displaced Subjectivities: the Queer Refugee Body in Law
Validating asylum claims on the basis of a person’s sexual orientation rely on discerning what constitutes sexuality and a ‘well founded fear’ of persecution. However, the way these questions assume relevance and are interpreted in asylum law is fraught with epistemological challenges. Authenticating refugees on the basis of sexuality relies on suturing narratives of ‘functioning’ sexuality as causally related to specific incidents of persecution. Emotion, desire and feeling are obscured by a culturally coded administrative method of verification, a narrative process which produces a caricatured, ethnocentric and over determined legal trope of the gay or lesbian asylum seeker. Responding to this, my paper will examine how and why the queer refugee remains grounded in these narratives of fixed identity. Moving beyond such a parochial legal imaginary, I will consider the possibilities of conceiving queer refugee experiences through relational representations and affect.
Global North Homoimperialism and the Conundrum of Queer Asylum
On Othering Processes and Politics of Unpeace, 2024
The Anglophone Caribbean continues to be positioned as violently homophobic and transphobic; a narrative that bolsters an idea that queer people must leave the region in order to stay alive. But what happens when queer refugees receive asylum in countries like Canada and the Netherlands? How do they emerge in these countries as subjects indebted to the “help” that they receive? Drawing on the personal accounts of queer refugee experiences, this essay examines these questions as I interrogate how queer asylum seekers from the Caribbean are impacted by prevailing racial, political, cultural, and social dynamics in these assumed safe-havens.