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Some legal scholars have asserted that rigid notions of homosexual identity shape adjudicators’ approach when evaluating asylum claims based on sexual orientation. Recent ethnographic research at the French Court of Asylum, in charge of reviewing appeals on decisions from the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, shows indeed that adjudication is based on particular gender stereotypes. However, my analysis centers on an unexplored but related issue: the relationship between the problems raised by adjudicators when facing what they call “intimacy cases,” specifically regarding the administration of proof and stereotyped performances. Through ethnographic data drawn from encounters with adjudicators and asylum seekers at the French Court of Asylum; through interviews with judges, rapporteurs (reporters), interpreters, and lawyers; and by examining 60 court rulings, I argue that sexual orientation-based cases crystallize the importance of intimacy in the politics of asylum, helping to seize the new shapes of the refugee as well as the growing difficulties for judges in relying on material evidence.

Abkommen über die Rechtsstellung der Flüchtlinge vom 28. Juli 1951 (In Kraft getreten am 22. April 1954)

Protokoll über die Rechtsstellung der Flüchtlinge vom 31. Januar 1967(In Kraft getreten am 4. Oktober 1967)

This article explores the framing of conflicts over public space as they unfold in a climate of neoliberal urban transformation in contemporary Germany. Examining how the alleged concerns of a ‘queer community’ have been pitted against the alleged moral agenda of Muslim immigrants in the country, examples of conflicts over ‘queer’ public leisure spaces in Berlin will give insights into how different cultural minority positions are mobilized against each other in the context of both urban and national citizenship debates that are marked by a neoliberal re-evaluation of diversities and inequalities.

Asylsuchende transgeschlechtliche Menschen sind im Zuge ihres Verfahrens mit besonderen Herausforderungen konfrontiert. Sie stehen vor der Hürde, ihre Glaubwürdigkeit, die zugleich Kern des Asylverfahrens bildet, vor dem Hintergrund liberalerAuffassungen von Staatlichkeit und Politik sowie einer verallgemeinerten dominan-ten Wahrnehmung sozialer Wirklichkeit, die von Heteronormativität und naturalisierter Zweigeschlechtlichkeit geprägt ist, zu etablieren. Dieser Beitrag befasst sichmit der Situation von transgeschlechtlichen Menschen aus Ecuador und Peru, die sichunter Berufung auf politische Verfolgung in ihren Heimatstaaten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland um Asyl bemühen. Nach einer Darlegung der rechtlichen Grundlagen und einer Beschreibung des Verfahrens folgen Fallbeschreibungen von drei Transfrauen aus je einer Entscheidungsphase des Asylverfahrens. Anhand einer Analyse und theoretischen Einordnung prägnanter Aussagen der jeweiligen Entscheiderin den Fallbeispielen wird deutlich, dass obengenannte Normen und Verfahrenswei-sen ineinander greifen. Dies geschieht zudem in einem Maße, dass nicht davon ausgegangen werden kann, dass das Asylverfahren unter den gegebenen Umständen transgeschlechtlichen Menschen strukturell und individuell Schutz vor Verfolgungbieten kann.

As part of an emerging field of films documenting the obstacles faced by sexual minorities fleeing persecution and seeking political asylum, the film Getting Out documents both the persecution of sexual minorities in Uganda and the obstacles individuals face in their attempts to get political asylum in South Africa. Using the film as a springboard, we assess the larger issues of recognition, visibility, hypervisibility, and performativity in encounters between sexual minorities, their advocates, and political asylum officials. The rhetorical power of Getting Out lies in its performative staging of LGBTQI asylum seekers’ navigation of often competing cultural and legal logics on sexuality. The film calls attention to profound contradictions in the political asylum system for sexual minorities and for any others who challenge the normativity of a social group.

The article is based on extended ethnography with people who have claimed asylum in the UK on the grounds of their sexual orientation. This migrant group negotiates their sexual and gender identities across cultural constructions of gender liminality that do not match the repertoires of western sexual identifications. On the one hand I pose the question: How do religious non-heteronormative refugees situate themselves within broader discourses of progress, particularly when confronted with the legal framework? On the other hand I ask: What role do western temporal categories of progress and backwardness play when the migrant seeks to stake a claim to subject-status in the current UK social world?

Canadian media coverage of sexual orientation and gendered identity (SOGI) refugees presents a relatively uniform story of these queer newcomers. While LGBT media have identified problems in some Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) decisions, the hegemonic narrative remains one of ‘migration to liberation nation’. In this article I argue that this hegemonic narrative is produced in relation to particular socio-cultural and juridical-legal categories which are themselves historically produced in and through the bureaucratic machinery of the state, human rights organizations, and some legal scholarship. The effect of this model narrative is to reinscribe what Ahmed (2010) calls the ‘happy migrant’, that is, someone who espouses national ideals which are couched in terms of empire, the new twist being that sexual diversity is now held aloft as justification of empire’s liberation from abjection. Based on interviews with SOGI refugee claimants in Toronto.

This article argues that the essays in the special issue on ‘Queer Migration, Asylum and Displacement’ collectively problematize how official identity categories trouble, and are troubled by, queer and asylum-seeking migrants. It discusses the future research and activist possibilities that these essays open up.

Using the ethnographic data from interviews with the Iranian queer and transgender refugee applicants in Turkey, the UNHCR, and NGOs in Istanbul, Ankara, Denizli, Kayseri, and Nevsehir, I explore the way that refugee rights as a temporally and spatially contingent concept normalizes queer and transgender refugee subjects, while managing the lives and deaths of different populations. Through examining the chronopolitics and geopolitics of rights within the refugee discourse, I point to inconsistencies in the universality of human rights and argue that while the designation of an act as “violation of human rights” committed by states or citizens, is arbitrary and contingent on the place and time of the act, the recognition of the refugee in the human rights regimes relies on essentialist and timeless notions of identity that travel in the teleological time of progress. The Iranian queer and trans refugees in Turkey are suspended in an in-between zone of recognition where rightfulness and rightlessness come together in a temporal standstill. The “protection” of trans and queer refugees under the rhetoric of rights in this in-between zone is tied to the management of life and death of populations through the politics of rightful killing.