Database

This article examines how gender, sexuality, race and class intersect in queer asylum claims to influence the perceived credibility of gay and lesbian asylum applicants. Building on recent scholarship in queer migration studies that considers the role of gender and sexuality in the social construction of migrant illegality, this article explores how practices of credibility assessment in the political asylum process produce women and sexual minorities as deportable subjects. As I argue, the tactics utilized by gay male asylum applicants to resist deportation show how practices of credibility assessment in the political asylum process are linked to the state’s reproduction of sexual citizenship narratives, narratives that have a disproportionately negative impact upon queer female migrants of color. Accounting for the intersections among gender, sexuality, race and class in influencing the perceived credibility of gay and lesbian asylum applicants is thus crucial for conceptualizing alternative forms of queer anti-deportation activism.

This article explores the challenges of developing queer migrant justice strategies within nation-state contexts. With a focus on the Toronto-based ‘Let Alvaro Stay’ campaign (2011) and Julio Salgado’s collaborative ‘I Am Undocuqueer’ project, I critically examine queer anti-deportation activists’ reliance on methodological nationalisms and visibility politics in making claims hearable to the state. While such tactics risk reinforcing the nation-state as a primary site of identification, thereby contributing to its naturalization as an inevitable horizon of belonging, I argue that they also open space for imagining queer(er) no borders futures.

Stories matter for refugees. Refugees make sense of their past and present experiences, claim identities, interact with each other, and participate in cultural, political, and social conversations through the sharing of their stories. When we record oral histories, we not only capture important narratives about the lived–experiences and lived–histories of refugees, we also see how the narratives themselves “represent the constantly evolving ways in which migrants make their lives through stories.”

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.

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)