Real Queer?: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus - Softcover

Murray, David A. B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783484403 ISBN 13: 9781783484409

Verlag: Rli, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

"How do I prove I'm gay?" This is the central question for many refugee claimants who are claiming asylum on the basis of sexual orientation persecution. But what are the inherent challenges in obtaining this proof? How is the system that assesses this predicated upon homonormative frameworks and nervous borders? What is the impact of gender, race and class? What is an 'authentic' sexual or gender identity and how can it be performed?

Real Queer? is an ethnographic examination of the Canadian refugee apparatus analysing the social, cultural, political and affective dimensions of a legal and bureaucratic process predicated on separating the 'authentic' from the 'bogus' LGBT refugee. Through interviews, conversations and participant observation with various participants ranging from refugee claimants to their lawyers, Refugee Protection Division staff and local support group workers, it reveals the ways in which sexuality simultaneously disrupts and is folded into the nation-state's dynamic modes of gate-keeping, citizenship and identity-making, and the uneven effects of these discourses and practices on this category of transnational migrants.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David A.B. Murray is Professor of Anthropology at York University, Canada.

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Real Queer?

Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus

By David A. B. Murray

Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.

Copyright © 2016 David A.B. Murray
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-440-9

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1 Queering the Queer Migration to Liberation Nation Narrative, 
2 Becoming an 'Authentic' SOGI Refugee, 
3 How to Be Gay (Refugee Version), 
4 Producing Documentation for SOGI Refugee Claims, 
5 Discourse and Emotion in SOGI Refugee Hearings, 
6 National Documentation Packages and Expert Witness Reports, 
7 The Challenge of Home, 
Conclusion: The New Normal, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

Queering the Queer Migration to Liberation Nation Narrative

The 2005 documentary film 'Gloriously Free' was summarized on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation website as follows:

'Gloriously Free' is the first documentary to explore the world of gay immigration, and the desperate search of five young men to find welcoming arms outside their countries of birth – where persecution and hatred of alternative lifestyles may lead to torture or death. What they find is Canada, leading the world as the safest haven for persecuted gays and lesbians.

A more recent documentary film, 'Last Chance' (2012), focuses on the similar topic of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) refugees in Canada, but offers a more nuanced perspective on the migration stories of five LGBT refugee claimants, including some footage of the challenges they encounter with the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB), particularly in relation to problematic IRB members (adjudicators) who do not believe their claims of LGBT identity and/or of persecution in their country of origin.

'LGBT refugees' appeared in another media format in September 2012, when thousands of 'lesbian and gay Canadians' were surprised to find an email in their inbox from Jason Kenney, Canada's then minister of citizenship, immigration, and multiculturalism, which contained a similar message to that of the documentary films. In this mass emailing, Minister Kenney informed us that, 'Canada is a place of refuge for those who truly need our protection. ... We welcome those fleeing persecution on the basis of sexual orientation ... (and) we have taken the lead in helping gay refugees begin new, safe lives in Canada.'

As noted in the Introduction, despite differences in opinion over the Canadian government's treatment of LGBT refugees, in these films, news articles and emails we see a similar story with similar characters, which I call the queer migration to liberation nation narrative: LGBT refugees' countries of origin are depicted as nations of 'hatred of alternative lifestyles' or 'rabidly anti-gay'; the refugee has 'no choice' but to 'flee', 'escape' or 'leave', and decides to seek refuge in Canada because it is the 'safest haven for persecuted gays and lesbians' and 'Canada considers gays and lesbians to be ordinary people. ... This is where you go for freedom.'

While I do not wish to dispute the facticity of certain claims in these media reports, in this chapter I want to examine the discursive effects of the architecture of the queer migration to liberation nation narrative, which operates as a hegemonic discourse across numerous media platforms in which nations, cultures, sexual identities and values associated with those identities are described, connected and evaluated in similar ways (Grewal 2005: 181). As these hegemonic narratives of liberation are repeatedly circulated through pages, screens and Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) refugee adjudication hearings, I wonder about their effects on different groups of listeners, readers, decision makers and the story-tellers themselves. As with all storytelling, choices are made about what to include or exclude, what to speak about and what to be silent about. What don't we hear in hegemonic or popular narratives of sexual and gendered refugee persecution, flight and freedom? Why do some features and characteristics of refugees, their countries of origin and destination nations appear again and again, while others do not? Are there other ways to tell the story, and does it matter if we tell another version? These are some of the questions I wish to investigate in this chapter.

In thinking about the effects of hegemonic narratives, Sara Ahmed's discussion of migrants, happiness and empire provides a number of key insights that help to frame my argument. In her analysis of claims that multiculturalism is a failed project in the UK, she identifies the presence, or more accurately, the absence of the 'happy migrant', that is, someone who espouses national ideals, which are couched in terms of empire. Migrants to the United Kingdom are subject to 'the happiness duty', a kind of moral training in which the migrant is supposed to gratefully learn the ways of the civilized empire (2010: 130). As Ahmed reminds us, this is not a new discourse. Through the writings of classic nineteenth-century liberal philosophers John Stewart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, Ahmed demonstrates how the project of justifying empire as liberation from abjection has been around for a long time (2010: 122–25). However, the SOGI refugee queer migration to liberation nation narrative adds a new twist to Ahmed's 'happy migrant' in that some configurations of sexual orientation and gendered identity have recently become an additional feature of 'empire', that is, it is assumed that the SOGI refugee is a happy migrant because he or she has arrived in a nation where sexual diversity is held aloft as a feature of a 'civilized' society, opposed to 'uncivilized' societies characterized by their rampant homophobia. This is a similar argument to Jasbir Puar's analysis of the operation of homonational sexual identity politics in post 9–11 America, where a highly delimited definition of sexual identity — in other words, one that is gendered, raced and classed — is employed (in a deeply contradictory way) to justify the heightened security and militarization of US borders in order to protect 'tolerant' America from the homophobic, intolerant, monstrous, racialized immigrant other (2007).

To put it in slightly different terms, these hegemonic SOGI refugee narratives are rendered literally and figuratively straight in their temporal, spatial and sexual orientation and gendered identity in that they follow an essentialist, linear path of sexual identity development (Ahmed 2006), from closeted, repressed and/or persecuted in their country of origin to 'out' and 'free' in Canada. These are narratives of unidirectional migration towards the nation of refuge, culminating in the liberatory moment of the refugee hearings where the claimants can officially 'come out' to the state who will protect them and allow them the freedom to be openly 'gay' 'lesbian' 'bisexual' or 'transgendered', with the expectation of grateful, docile citizenship in return. The result, as Jenicek et al. note, is reinforcement of a culturally racist paradigm, which reproduces simplistic imperialist tropes of the civilized West/uncivilized rest, but also silences ongoing experiences of homophobia, racism, sexism and classicism in Canada (Jenicek et al. 2009).

In this chapter, I explore how we might challenge, complicate or mess up these hegemonically straight sexual and gendered refugee narratives. Rather than reproducing a teleological narrative that is straight and forward in its...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rli
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783484403
• ISBN 13: 9781783484409
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 194
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland