The Sexual Politics of Asylum

Calogero Giametta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317200581
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Today within neoliberal democracies, gender and sexuality provisions give people the opportunity of being granted social and legal protection. But how does the asylum system intervene withinclaimants' understandings of themselves and in what ways does this affect their livelihoods in the country of arrival?

The Sexual Politics of Asylum emerges from a 2 year long ethnography, which explores the experiences of 60 gender and sexual minority refugees in the UK. Bringing previously unheard stories to the forefront, this enlightening volume challenges dominant notions about the construction of sexuality and gender as an instrument for claiming rights in a world shaped by postcolonial relations. Giametta first examines why the migratory experience of the studied migrants is located within a set of humanitarian-inflected discourses that privilege suffering and trauma. This is then followed by an assessment of the respondents' biographical accounts, which consequently uncovers how being situated in liminal socio-political and legal interstices produces precarious forms of life.

Whilst the topic of asylum for gender and sexual minorities has attracted wide media coverage over the past decade, there persists a lack of academic attention to the complex experiences of these refugees. As such, this timely book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in human rights, sociology, anthropology, migration, sexuality, gender and cultural studies, as well as people working within the refugee granting process.

1 Introduction

Gender and Sexual Minority Migrants and the Asylum Process in the UK

It’s the early autumn of 2012 in London. The sky is overcast, the air crisp. I finally manage to meet Umar,¹ a twenty-five-year-old gay man from Pakistan. Umar is a migrant in the process of claiming asylum in the UK. We meet at the place where he is staying on the outskirts of south London. It’s a small flat provided by the Home Office while they assess his asylum application. In a small room in this suburban block he tells me that, at this point, he can no longer live in Pakistan without fear of harm—this is the reason Umar has come to Britain. To break the ice, I comment on the quick arrival of winter and we laugh about the predictability of bad weather in London. Jokingly Umar tells me that the weather is so miserable that it often gives him sleepless nights. His tone then changes suddenly and with a grave expression he tells me: “I can’t sleep because I’m obsessed with the idea that the judge won’t understand how bad it is in my country for people like me.”

After the rejection of his initial asylum application from the Home Office, Umar is now waiting for a decision from the immigration tribunal. Throughout the asylum determination process he has felt obliged to enunciate his personal suffering by telling what has now become for him a well-rehearsed account about his intimate sexual history and “the killings of gay men” in Pakistan. Since the beginning of the asylum process he has started to feel that he should only talk about the abuse and violence he was subjected to back home. He is aware and conflicted by the fact that the account he is giving of his country is only part of a much larger picture.

This is a common scenario from the ethnography I conducted with gender and sexual minority asylum seekers and refugees. When the asylum claimants I spoke to told their stories to the Home Office asylum caseworkers,² the lawyers, the judges or the asylum support workers, they had to somehow fit their narratives into a recognizable repertoire of asylum stories. Like Umar, all asylum claimants are put in the position of having to provide a biographical narrative vis-à-vis border control and immigration administration, thus often reconstructing themselves as archetypal asylum seekers.

* * *

Christelle arrived in London with a six-month visitor visa about twelve years ago, a few days before her thirty-third birthday. She didn’t know much about London when she landed in Heathrow. She was fleeing civil war in the Ivory Coast at that time and flew to the UK because she had a friend living in east London who was willing to provide shelter for her. That situation quickly deteriorated and, after being thrown out and sleeping rough on and off, she was moving regularly from one place to the next. After befriending an older Ivorian man who let her sleep on his sofa for a couple of years, Christelle is now applying for asylum to regularize her immigration status. She had never wanted to apply before as she had heard some bad stories about asylum and her fear of being sent back home was “all too real.” But, as she tells me: “asylum is important, at some point you need it to have financial freedom, to work, and to be relaxed—at some point you are blocked if you don’t have it.” The hardship of being an undocumented migrant for over eleven years in London has taken a toll on her, but she is still excited about the city. She asks me to meet her on the Southbank promenade just under the London Eye. She likes the mix of people you get in that part of the city, the buzzing pubs, theaters, and art venues. Most of all she likes the proximity to the Thames and its “dirty brown waters,” which she describes with sardonic affection.

She talks about how her first attempt to claim asylum failed a few months earlier as the Home Office caseworker who interviewed her didn’t believe that she was a lesbian. During the interview, Christelle couldn’t understand why the caseworker remained so focused on asking questions about her childhood. One question in particular appeared to create a long-lasting troubling effect on her—a question about whether she used to play with dolls when she was a child. She told the truth; she liked dolls and she would often play with them. The caseworker might not have paid much attention to her answer as she was going through the main areas to cover in the interview, from the claimant’s childhood to the present, but Christelle thinks that it was the revelation of this very “girly” preference that made the interviewer incredulous about her lesbianism. She tells me: “I was such a fool to say that, from that moment on she [the caseworker] started to be suspicious.” Could it be that easy to disbelieve someone? I wondered. There are many respondents’ stories that denounce the stereotyping attitudes presuming what migrants’ gender and sexual histories might have really been. In Christelle’s case the caseworker found a number of inconsistencies in her story. But it was interesting to note that Christelle’s main regret—about how she conducted herself in the interview—was having confessed to being fond of dolls. This revealed that she was starting to think very carefully about how her gender had to be performed if she wanted to be considered a real lesbian. According to her, the dolls, symbols of innocent girlhood, betrayed her by becoming the most discrediting element in her biographical account.

Sexualities, Gender (Identity), and Asylum

The migrants who experience the asylum determination process, and on whom I focus in this book, must provide their own accounts of how they understand their sexual orientations and gender identities. Asylum decision-makers and immigration judges seem to resolutely look for coherence between an asylum seeker’s sexual orientation and gender expression when assessing their sincerity. Yet, as Butler theorized in Gender Trouble (1990) “the construction of coherence conceals the gender discontinuities that run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, and gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire, or sexuality generally, does not seem to follow from gender” (1990, 2008: 185, emphasis mine). The legal request of this type of coherence produces a distinctive stereotyping and misrecognition of people’s histories of gender and sexuality. In this book I will often join the terms sexuality/gender with a slash to indicate the decision-makers’ attention to how asylum claimants ought to perform their inner sexual orientations through their outer enactments of masculinity and femininity. In fact, the performativity of the rights claimant’s gendered body is very often understood as that which tells the ultimate truth about their sexuality. Thus in the stories analyzed here sexual orientation can never be severed from the province of gender expression.

Importantly, gender identity is the category through which trans migrants can apply for asylum. Among people applying on a gender identity or a sexual orientation basis there are overlapping issues and also intersecting identities. However, during the research for this book—given the small number of applicants on gender identity grounds I could find—I started to wonder if trans migrants were facing other challenges to obtain validation in the asylum certification process. Through talking to trans refugees, lawyers, and asylum support workers it appeared that there might have been two main reasons for the scarcity of trans respondents. Primarily, trans asylum claimants are concerned that their stories about their transness are too complex to tell and they would rather lodge a claim under the gay or lesbian category. In general this seemed to apply to those transpeople who did not fit conventionally into a binary embodiment of their gender. Second, some transpeople’s stories were “simplified” and misrepresented by their own legal counsel when preparing their cases. In addition some stories would not be taken into full account by the immigration judges who would only be able to see a feminine man or a masculine woman in front of them. In the process trans autobiographies would often become gay or lesbian biographies. If being believed is one of the major obstacles in the process for gay men and lesbian women, for transpeople it is to be thought of as plausible subjects. The disappearance of some forms of transness throughout the asylum certification process could be linked to the disappearance of bisexuality. Again, this seemed to occur because of the insistent search for coherence on the part of the decision-makers between who someone says they are and the bodily enactments that support their account.

The dimension of sexuality/gender was important from the outset of this study because today, more officially than ever, it plays an important role within the geopolitics of international relations as well as humanitarian-inflected discourses emanating from the Global North. In recent years, politicians from left to (far) right³ have used the notion of sexuality, or more precisely of tolerance toward homosexuality, as a political tool to talk about one’s civilized and emancipated national citizenry. When I discuss sexual politics⁴ in this book, I refer to the political objectives emerging from the early 1990s that focused on achieving equality for gender and sexual minorities through the language of citizenship, and also to the new emancipationist ideas advanced by women’s rights and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans) political discourses. In this context I analyze how one can claim asylum as a sexual minority or gender non-conforming person in the UK. Gender and sexual minority refugees have become a new “migrant group” across Europe—in academic debates, amidst social policy working papers as much as in the media they are talked about as a minority within a minority, as those who are doubly marginalized. They not only face marginalization because of their immigration status in the country in which they reside, but also from unsympathetic co-nationals who have migrated for different reasons. In this book the migrants’ stories will complicate these suppositions by challenging some and confirming others.

Paradoxically, on the one hand, sexuality/gender becomes a legitimate object for claiming rights (this being consolidated within government equality debates and policies), whilst on the other, the gender or sexual minority migrant in need of protection becomes an unwelcomed object of scrutiny in the eyes of the Home Office as the reduction in migration numbers and the fallacy of control have become central in contemporary political discourse. In this respect it became particularly interesting to explore how gender and sexuality-based asylum claims are treated within a newly consolidated form of migration regime in the UK, as in other EU countries, whose purpose is to proactively contain and manage migrant numbers (Geiger and Pecoud 2010, 2012). But it is important to bear in mind that, although a significant part, an exclusive emphasis on the control of migrant numbers can be misleading in the analysis of the refugee-granting process. Instead, it is more revealing to historicize the changing signification of asylum as an international right and a political instrument since its inception in the post-war period in the 1950s.

The Book’s Focus

Today in Britain asylum claimants form a very small segment of migrant numbers, yet asylum is a very strong theme in dominant British migrant-phobic political speech. Among the overall number of asylum claims, those based on sexuality or gender grounds are an even smaller fraction. However, as soon as lesbian, trans, gay, and bisexual people were granted the right to claim asylum for fear of persecution because of their sexual orientation and gender identity, the press did not hesitate to send out the alarm that “hordes of gays would be flooding”⁵ the British shores.

In this book I examine the lived experiences of gender and sexual minority asylum claimants and refugees who are in the UK to avoid (the fear of) persecution in their countries of origin. I concentrated on the experiences of sixty asylum seekers and refugees living in Britain by exploring their personal migratory trajectories, their interactions with the system of institutions that would grant or refuse them the right to remain in the UK, as well as their everyday lives within and beyond the legal radar. To date, academic research conducted on gender and sexual minorities experiencing the asylum process has mostly been based on socio-legal investigations (Millbank 2003, 2005, 2009a, 2009b; LaViolette 1997, 2009a, 2009b; Cowen et al. 2011; Robson and Kessler 2008; Stychin 1995, 2003). Here I attempt to put under scrutiny political, humanitarian, and social discourses on the “sexual victim” in ways that go beyond the analysis of the law, or of the individual directly confronting the law. By questioning the universalizing badge of victimhood commonly applied to gender and sexual minority asylum seekers and refugees, I describe the various ways in which they navigate the asylum process as well as the moments when they are faced with support organizations and broader LGBT communities in the country of arrival. While this raises questions on the modus operandi of the asylum institutions, the book also seeks to shed light on how these migrants negotiate their place in new social worlds and the tensions arising from their precarious living conditions because of the widespread risk of poverty among them.

Studying sexuality/gender in the context of asylum enabled me to trace similarities and differences among the conditions of subalternity to which gender and sexual minorities can be exposed in different geopolitical spaces. I want to stress that I use the notion of subalternity with caution here. In my ethnography I focused on people who come from a number of diverse countries in which same-sex desire is legally punishable (or not socially accepted). My intention was not to solely examine respondents’ supposed subalternity in their countries of origin but rather to investigate the situations that produce states of subalternity when living in Britain (I will expand on this in Chapter 2). In fact, an exclusive analytical focus on the former would produce a homogenizing picture of how homophobia operates in the countries from which refugees often come.⁶ In so doing I sought to highlight that the passage from oppression in one’s country to liberation in the UK is much more complex than is generally portrayed in media and politics. Thus questioning the ideal of “freedom” for gender/sexual minorities in North-centric societies and the “lack of freedom” for gender/sexual minorities in the Global South and East became a central critical focus of the book. Considering the unwelcoming context of UK immigration practices, I wanted to look at how sexuality/gender is used as a political instrument both nationally and internationally and to pose a set of critical questions on how gender and sexual freedoms are translated into rights-claiming objects.

The underlying analytical focus of the book is to explore what occurs when the categories of sexuality and gender move. My analysis does not delve into the possibilities that cultures can be translated, which would go beyond the scope of this study, for that I refer to Spivak’s formulations (2008) pertaining to the unknowability of cultures and the risks of entering the realm of misleading cultural relativism. Rather, throughout the book I engage in exploring what is lost in the act of translating, and more specifically, how the loss in translating gender and sexual categories has material consequences when it is politically used against the very subjects of the research. In the chapters ahead, the object of the study is sexuality/gender in the context of migration when it is set in motion across different geopolitical settings. In the UK, sexuality and gender currently provide people with the opportunity of asking for state protection. This set of rights-claiming acts happens when the rights claimant confronts the legal interface, namely, when making their story intelligible within the language game available to them. This (legal) language game is, in turn, influenced by a specific vocabulary established by humanitarian discourses on social interventions (Figure 1.1).

Asylum: Essential Facts and Where We Are Now

The modern use of the term asylum emerged in the post-Second World War period from the pages of the 1951 Geneva Convention, through which an asylum seeker became a legal person within the context of post-war Europe. The 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, also known as the New York Protocol, removed geographical and temporal restrictions from the Convention and in so doing it extended the protection to anyone who fitted into its definition of a refugee.

Figure 1.1 The Asylum Claimant Vis-à-Vis the System of Protection within the UK Asylum System.

Across Europe in the 1950s and 1960s the aim was to regulate labor migration toward the north-west areas of the continent (Castels and Miller 2009). In the mid-1970s la...