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This article explores how deportation as a state of emergency structures the queer migration narratives of lesbian refugees and asylum-seekers. The first part of the article discusses the ways in which the political asylum system produces queer, and specifically lesbian, migrants as deportable subjects. The second part examines queer anti-deportation advocacy emerging from within these spaces of deportability or crisis. The third part analyses a 2010 piece of performance art, Oreet Ashery’s Staying: Dream, Bin, Soft Stud and Other Stories, that reflects upon the everyday practices and embodied experiences with deportability. What is crucial about this particular text is that it enables the lesbian refugees involved in the project to take an active role in the production of their asylum narratives. In doing so, the article suggests, media and cultural advocacy on behalf of lesbian asylum can provide a site for the articulation of new sexual rights claims.

RICHTLINIE 2013/32/EU DES EUROPÄISCHEN PARLAMENTS UND DES RATES

vom 26. Juni 2013

zu gemeinsamen Verfahren für die Zuerkennung und Aberkennung des internationalen Schutzes (Neufassung)

This article examines the challenges that transgender claimants face in demonstrating that they are at risk of persecution. The UK Border Agency’s training manual ‘Gender Identity Issues in the Asylum Claim’ directs decision-makers to the Country of Origin Information (COI) to determine if persecution against transgender individuals exists in the claimant’s country of origin. This can be problematic given that COI is only updated periodically, that there is little or no information on lesbians and transgender people in most COI reports and that the lack of trans–specific discrimination information is frequently viewed by decision-makers as an absence of threat.

Im Rahmen der feministischen Theoriebildung zum Konzept der Intersektionalität, definiert als die Verwobenheit oder Überlagerung hierarchisch angeordneter Achsen der Differenz, wird die „klassische Triade“ von „Rasse“, Klasse und Geschlecht zunehmend um weitere Dimensionen soziokultureller und ökonomischer Ungleichheit ergänzt, darunter auch um die Dimension der sexuellen Orientierung. Zeitgenössische Paradigmen der Intersektionalität unterscheiden sich vor allem im Hinblick auf die Anzahl der Achsen, die für relevant erachtet werden (Anthias 2001; Klinger 2003; Knapp 2005; Lutz und Wenning 2001). Sexuelle Orientierung wird mittlerweile relativ regelmäßig miteinbezogen; Heteronormativität wiederum wird in immer stärkerem Maße als wichtige Dimension der meisten Geschlechterregime erkannt.

RICHTLINIE 2013/33/EU DES EUROPÄISCHEN PARLAMENTS UND DES RATES

vom 26. Juni 2013

zur Festlegung von Normen für die Aufnahme von Personen, die internationalen Schutz beantragen (Neufassung)

Those involved in queer politics were caught somewhat off guard when Judith Butler refused Berlin’s Christopher Street Day (Gay Pride) Civil Courage Prize being awarded to her due to the failure of the organisers to distance themselves from a political programme that uses racist discourse for political gain. This paper will not focus on the homonationalist organisations associated with the festival organisers but rather on progressive queer and feminist groups who claim an anti-racist position yet do not change their white-dominated structures to engage in anti-racist praxis. It remains a challenge for white-dominated progressive feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)/queer groups to change racist structures. This has the effect of propagating an exclusionary white queer and feminist politics. To counter this, white allies need to commit to an accountable positionality.

Guided by the claims of the feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social movements and international human rights agendas, governments in late modern democracies have been implementing (or pressured to implement) new juridical frames to recognise sexual diversity. As a result, in the last two decades, gendered and sexual ‘others’ have been ‘included’ in citizenship leading to the formulation of what has been called ‘sexual citizenship’, propounding the formation of new sexual rights-bearing subjects. However, this seemingly respectable and progressive contemporary sexual citizen has become the benchmark against which all sexual subjects are measured, and involves a particular liberal self that has been constituted against a myriad of ‘others’ marked by cultural, religious and racialised differences. How has this ‘sexual citizen’ been constituted and how does it operate within the political field of struggles over sexual freedom and justice? This article explores to what extent the sexual citizen has been configured in Euro-American terms within political liberalism, and how colonial and orientalist ideas about sexual citizenship and democracy follow on from this restricted notion of the subject of rights.

This article traces not only some of the borrowings but also the differences between feminist and gay politics in the context of the post-1989 ‘multicultural debate’ and the hegemony of civilizational politics. This investigation is empirically grounded in one national context, that is, the Dutch case, which is exemplary when it comes to bringing politics of gender and sexuality to bear on national and cultural identity politics. The article recapitulates some insights on how feminist politics can get entangled with (neo)colonial and (neo)imperialist politics and traces these connections in a Dutch context. It goes on to review some of the forms homonationalism and homonostalgia take in the Netherlands. And it concludes with a discussion of the resemblances and differences between the ‘saving women’ and ‘saving gays’ narratives that inform civilizational modes of feminist and gay politics.

Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage der Abgeordneten Ulla Jelpke, Dr. Barbara Höll, Jan Korte, weiterer Abgeordneter und der Fraktion DIE LINKE. – Drucksache 17/8228 – Asylrechtlicher Umgang mit homosexuellen Flüchtlingen und der Einschränkung der sexuellen Vielfalt