Death Zones, Comfort Zones: Queering the Refugee Question (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Refugee Imaginaries: Research across the Humanities, 2019
The politics of sexual asylum expands, and displaces the queer critique of the human subject and its purported sexual identity, while offering a queer reappraisal of the Humanities-based critique of sexual regulation (Foucault). The essay first analyzes the writing in of the asylum-seeker through law which produces a queer subject shuttling between the poles of normalization and critical destabilization. This dialectic of sexual normalization and deregulation Building on crucial work around the global traffic in women and the rights of child asylum-seekers (Bhabha), the essay argues that the politics of sexual asylum is a potential operator for rethinking sexual identity. Secondly, the queer figurations of the sexual subject in asylum cases are analyzed in relation to the anti-normative critiques of sexual identity offered by queer theory. The essay argues that the vantage point of contemporary globalization, in particular forced migration and asylum advocacy, provides a powerful supplement to queer theory's critique of sexual normativity. The displacement of sexual identity from biology to performance, and from self-understanding to social perception in sexual asylum cases provide a far queerer and more interruptive reformulation of sexual identity than the "good homosexual" (Stychin) produced for example by laws governing same-sex marriage in the context of migration. Increasingly, research on sexual identity has focussed on the trope of travel, and the experiences of migration in particular. The global politics of sexuality has been convincingly critiqued for producing a dynamic of normalization and exclusion, for example through analyses of labour movements (Manasalan) and same-sex marriage/partnerships (Stychin). As Stychin argues "the homosexual is put into place" by legal discourses around homosexuality. The essay argues that the politics around sexual asylum shifts the focus from normalization to the de-regulation and dissensual reconfiguration of sexual identity. The "homosexual" asylum-seeker is written by law, yet this writing in the Refugee Convention of 1951, and subsequent additions such as the 1967 Protocol, as well as the actual judgments of courts, continually displace the figure of the homosexual asylum seeker. Analyzing the unconventional and unforeseen consequences of the Convention as well as specific court cases (Landau, Marouf), I argue that the politics of sexual asylum is a laboratory in which sexual identity, and the category of the "human" (Butler) in human rights discourse, are being critically decomposed and productively reconfigured. The homosexual produced by asylum cases propels sexual minorities into a to and fro between attempts at normalization and disruptive figurations of mobile, contingent sexual subjects. The vantage point of forced globalizations from the vantage point of claims for sexual asylum invites a reappraisal of the politics of the "the Global Queer" (Altman, Symons). The critiques of that politics focussed primarily on the defence of cultural difference and fears of western domination abetted by queer theory. The politics of sexual asylum joins that powerful critique of queer sexual identity without necessarily essentializing cultural difference. Centralizing the reality of forced migration in contemporary globalization, the essay argues that the politics of sexual asylum unconventionally, perhaps despite itself, draws figures of queer sexual subjects that move beyond the politics of identity and difference. Sexual asylum conventions and advocacy generate what Gillian Rose identified as "a multiplicity of eventualities" from which to think sexual identity. These contingent inscriptions of sexual asylum conventions exemplify "the creative involvement of actions in the configuration of power and the law" (Rose).
European Sexual Nationalism: Refugee Law After the Gender & Sexuality Critiques
In this lecture, I take stock of what the gender and sexuality based critiques of refugee law formulated over the past decades have achieved. I first address statistical issues. Then I address the question how law is being applied today, now the gender and sexuality critiques of refugee law have been incorporated in legal practice. I focus on the case of A.A. and others v Sweden about forced marriage, and on discretion reasoning in sexual orientation cases. Having done that, I will try to understand this reformulated refugee law by using the concept of sexual nationalism.
Affective Displacements: Understanding Emotions and Sexualities in Refugee Law
Validating asylum claims on the basis of a person’s sexual orientation relies on discerning what constitutes sexuality and a ‘well founded fear’ of persecution. This administrative process works by suturing narratives of ‘functioning’ sexuality to specific incidents of persecution. Emotion, desire and feeling are obscured in this ethnocentric method of verification. In attempting to dislodge how sexuality remains a fixed and universal identity in the law, this article traces how emotion can be considered in spatial and culturally specific terms, to represent how asylum seekers experience persecution in relation to their ‘queerness’.
Introduction: Queer Migration, Asylum, and Displacement
This special issue of Sexualities emerges in response to the growing visibility of LGBTQI immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers within global gay rights advocacy. Despite the increasing prominence of LGBTQI issues on the international human rights agenda, there has been relatively little discussion of the relationship between queer migration and LGBTQI human rights activism in the field of sexuality studies. This special issue seeks to bring queer migration and sexual citizenship studies into critical conversation with current literature in the area of gender, sexuality and human rights.
ACME, 2020
A burgeoning interest in lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) rights has been noted to raise among the World Bank and supranational institutions such as the EU Parliament dealing with the allocation of monetary funding, as well as within the corporate world at a global scale. The LGBT acronym thus gains new meanings, as it is used and valorized by capital institutions and corporations. Importantly, the re-signification of the LGBT category has also occurred within the system of international protection and immigration policies at a time of strong immigration restrictions. In this article, we examine how neoliberalism reshapes the LGBT signifier as a valorized protection category by looking at the case of asylum for gender and sexual minorities within EU geopolitics. By specifically analyzing the French asylum system, we want to address the question of why and how refugee-granting processes erase or flatten locally-situated queer histories, experiences and social worlds. We argue that it is important to move away from an analysis aimed at reinforcing the 'sexual democratic' values of some countries versus what is cast as the 'cultural homo/transphobia' of others. Through a particular attention to the mapping of homophobia, the article will aim to unpack how queer asylum claimants are situated in a giuridico-legal interstice from which they cannot challenge a colonial structure of thought about the schematic geography of homo/transphobia.
Logics of Citizenship and Violence of Rights: The Queer Migrant Body and the Asylum System
Border and migration studies document how states produce migrant subjectivities via bio-political practices, which are plotted against the figure of the ‘undeserving’ migrant. However, there is little research on the politics of the recent but growing tendency in Western states to include the category of ‘LGBT’ in their asylum policies. Furthermore, there has been little attention to the role of activists in border regimes. Hence academia fails to fully grasp the violence of rightsbased migration politics and to understand the dispersed sexual politics of borders. This article examines the relationship between LGBT emancipation, border enforcement and migration activism in the United Kingdom. It appears that asylum policies construct hierarchies of migrants, currently with the LGBT asylum seeker towards the top of the pecking order. Activists contest, but simultaneously perform, the sexual and territorial border. The save-ability of the queer migrant is constructed at the same time that immigration violence is conducted, through indefinite detention and the Detained Fast Track system. Law turns out to be a violent governmental technology when gender and sexuality rights are used to further close the border.
Queering Asylum… or Human Rights in Europe
ADiM Blog, 2021
After 70 years since the conclusion of the Convention relating to the status of refugees, the process of ‘queering’ asylum law is beyond doubt, as we have explored in The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law(Chapter 4). This process of ‘queering’ asylum law has certainly reached its highest peak in Europe, where the needs of people claiming asylum on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) are increasingly taken into account in law and practice. Yet, a four-year research project carried out across the EU has found that a range of issues remain problematic, or even unaddressed, in this field. These include: the lack of information on SOGI as grounds to claim international protection at arrival to Europe; the lack of specific procedural arrangements, including the choice of the interviewer and of the interpreter, and of appropriate reception conditions; a persistent culture of disbelief and the use of stereotypical views on sexual and gender minorities during the adjudication process of asylum claims; and the misuse and low quality of Country of Origin Information. Some of these problems could be addressed in the context of the current reform of EU asylum law, given the need to improve the Common European Asylum System in this respect. However, such a reform might not be enough, especially if we consider the evolution of European human rights law in relation to SOGI asylum.
Springer, 2021
This two-volume open-access book offers a theoretically and empirically-grounded portrayal of the experiences of people claiming international protection in Europe on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity (SOGI). It shows how European asylum systems might and should treat asylum claims based on people’s SOGI in a fairer, more humane way. Through a combined comparative, interdisciplinary (socio-legal), human rights, feminist, queer and intersectional approach, this book examines not only the legal experiences of people claiming asylum on grounds of their SOGI, but also their social experiences outside the asylum decision-making framework. The authors analyse how SOGI-related claims are adjudicated in different European frameworks (European Union, Council of Europe, Germany, Italy and UK) and offer detailed recommendations to adequately address the intersectional experiences of individuals seeking asylum. This unique approach ensures that the book is of interest not only to researchers in migration and refugee studies, law and wider academic communities, but also to policy makers and practitioners in the field of SOGI asylum.