Discourses on LGBT asylum in the UK

Constructing a queer haven

Thibaut Raboin

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719099632
• eBook ISBN: 9781526108159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book looks at the specificities of the exclusion of LGBT refugees, to show how the cultural politics of queer migration help us rethink emancipatory sexual politics.

1

Narrating LGBT asylum

Before looking at the relationship between LGBT asylum and nationhood, as well as how they configure certain forms of queer optimism, it is essential to unpack the main ways in which LGBT asylum is defined as a social problem. Social problems engage the state, which is asked to deal with a particular problem and solve it. The social problem of LGBT asylum is therefore part of a process of collective definition, representation and narrativisation that gives a shape to what really is problematic about asylum, what needs to be solved, what wrongs must be righted and who is to blame. An important insight of social problem studies is the focus on the process of definition; as Dorothy Pawluch and Steve Woolgar put it, the definitionalist school considers that ‘social problems are sociologically defined as what people think they are’ (1985: 217). From this perspective, the social problem of LGBT asylum is an unstable entity that is the changing result of competing definitions in public arenas (Bosk and Hilgartner, 1988; Cefaï, 1996; Quéré, 1991). More importantly, studying a social problem is not based on understanding a social phenomenon that is presumed to pre-exist its definition, but rather it is a deconstructive approach claiming that the way we conceive of, represent and narrate a problem is what makes the ‘truth’ of this problem (Pfohl, 1985: 230). In the case of LGBT asylum, there are many countries of origin for which the information available in the UK is fragmentary at best; even for countries ‘famous’ for their homophobia, like Iran, there is much uncertainty about what exactly happens there, and how.¹ In this context the ‘real facts’ of homophobia in Iran and the ‘true stories’ of Iranian asylum seekers are partly a product of the collective work of definition and representation of Iran as a homophobic country: a process combining discourses from the state via its COIS reports, or NGOs’ reports and media discourses at large.

This study of LGBT asylum as a social problem thus proposes that the way asylum is understood and represented in public arenas, between a variety of social actors, has an impact on the type of solution that the state and advocates can imagine. This chapter will suggest that the centrality of an LGBT human rights perspective has a great impact on the modes of advocacy available to call on the state for policy changes. Likewise, the representation of homophobia in the definition of the social problem of asylum produces different categories, following a process of labelling (Becker, 1966; Cefaï, 1996): ‘homophobes’ are produced as a social group (which can be defined according to certain criteria, such as class, race, age, etc.), and at the same time those labelling this group distinguish themselves from it.

Resurgences of the social problem of asylum during the 2000s happened most often through individual cases, with notable exceptions such as the publication of Stonewall’s report on asylum and the landmark Supreme Court decision HJ & HT v Secretary of State for the Home Department, both in 2010. In this chapter, I consider the narrativisation of seventeen asylum cases in British newspapers between 2003 and 2014 in around 150 press articles, a BBC Two documentary about homophobia presented by British gay comedian Stephen Fry, some documentation produced by NGOs and some international legal documents and guidelines such as the Yogyakarta Principles for LGBT human rights. This chapter analyses the way in which circulating narratives in the 2000s gave a set structure for the conception of LGBT asylum: its victims, its temporality and its moral conundrums. Individual narratives play a central role in the debates around asylum and in the formulation of the social problem, and their study allows us to distinguish the main foundations upon which more complex arguments are built about the nation, optimism and the biopolitics of LGBT asylum. This chapter unpacks three aspects that are crucial for the problematisation of asylum that this book critically explores. The first is that narratives produce a specific temporality for LGBT asylum: complex interactions between impossible futures and broken pasts allow for the exposition of happier futures in the UK and the expression of colonial imaginaries. The second aspect is the importance of LGBT human rights in the way the social problem is perceived and, consequently, can be solved. The chapter argues that this universalist framework is the main regime of justification (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006) for public action, structuring the state response and advocates’ strategies. The third aspect concerns the way LGBT asylum cases serve to powerfully stage the position of the British state as queer-positive: they are a site for the negotiation of what it means to uphold sexual rights. Indeed, narrative analysis of individual cases shows that most narratives are written in a way that places the British liberal subject hoping to help refugees at the centre of their narrative configuration. These three aspects form the discursive premise for the deployment of the intertwined formulations of civilisational discourses (Chapter 2), exclusionary biopolitics (Chapter 3) and representations of neoliberal optimism (Chapter 5) that this book analyses.

The temporality of asylum cases

Narrative configuration, as Paul Ricoeur notes, homogenises and gives congruence to the heterogeneity that constitutes the diversity of events, causes, reasons, social actors and motives that inhabit the world of the action. Narrativisation organises these actors into characters with reasons and motives for actions, and gives chronological and causal relationships to events, etc. (1984: 52–91). This narrative intelligence does not simply make sense of particular cases, but provides powerful semiosis to the social problem of LGBT asylum by identifying specific social actors, their respective positions and the moral conundrums they might inhabit. In this regard, press narratives make sense of the social world by giving a generalisable quality to individual cases and stories. This generalisation, which ascribes an exemplary value to individual cases, is reinforced by the repetition of the same narrative tropes in each story. When the state faces repeatedly the same criticisms, asylum seekers the same hardships, activists the same struggles, then the social problem can take shape through press narratives, not just as a story but as a series of emerging political arguments concerning hospitality, the fair treatment of gays and lesbians, the reasons for claiming asylum in the UK and so on.

The narrative pattern for LGBT asylum cases, which in most cases is repeated with few differences (depending on the case, some events and items might be missing), is quite predictable and follows the process of claiming asylum: discovery of own sexual orientation or difference, realisation by other people, persecutions, escape from country of origin and arrival in the UK, trials during the process of claiming asylum, and the decision from the Home Office and Immigration tribunals. In many ways this narrative template follows a classic pattern as described by structural narratology, such as that of Algirdas Julien Greimas (2002), with the hero being on a quest (to escape persecution and settle in the UK) and enduring trials (a difficult passage to the UK, the possibility of deportation, a series of appeals in courts) before attaining its objects, encountering facilitators and help (local activists, lawyers) as well as opponents (an uncooperative Home Office, homophobes in the country of origin).

Likewise, the news narratives tend to set up a series of places and characterise them (the repressive country of origin, the tolerant but not necessarily welcoming UK, the prison-like detention centres, etc.) and use devices of dramatisation in the stories, helping their memorisation by readers and emphasising certain aspects of the narrative. For example, the trope of the last-minute decision against deportation, as exemplified in the cases of Brenda and Babi, on their way to the plane back to their countries of origin, is simultaneously dramatic and gives a vivid idea of the precariousness of their situation.

The temporality given to asylum through the repeated narration of individual cases revolves around three features: broken pasts, impossible futures and the latency of awaiting a decision. The general configuration of the social problem of asylum is closely enmeshed with this triple temporality. Past traumas and suffering set the scene for migrants desiring the nation, presenting the UK as a queer haven; impossible futures articulate death and survival and place the political management of asylum at the intersection of bio- and necropolitics; and, finally, the possibility of queer optimism is premised on the ability to live your life as opposed to being maintained in the uncertainty of potential deportation.

Broken pasts and impossible futures

Narrating past suffering and trauma is central to the production of a recognisable refugee experience and, in most cases, the narratives offered in the news describe what had happened to the claimants in their countries of origin. In LGBT cases, as in all asylum cases, these narratives are those of broken pasts: they show the reasons why life in the country of origin is not possible any longer. These back stories are opportunities for narrating different forms of homophobia in the countries of origin – whether they be politically or religiously motivated, revolving around the family, etc. (Chapter 2 will look at these aspects in detail). As Bohmer and Shuman note (2008), the narrative productions of refugees have the function of asserting one’s identity, proving that the negative events one underwent are true, and showing that these events make sense as a risk of persecution.

Beyond this primary function as the back story leading to an asylum claim, these narratives also work as the foundation for the possible representation and imagining of the UK, and the nation, as a queer haven. All asylum seekers fulfil a function in desiring the state: the desire to come in and benefit from hospitality is central in the self-representation of the state and of the nation as desirable (Butler, 2004; White, 2013). This process is equally true of LGBT claimants, and the narration of broken pasts positions the queer haven as the site of the only possible future for claimants. In order to imagine a queer haven, however, the desire for the nation has to be sometimes fantasised in the new discourse as this desire is partly a fiction: as many asylum narratives show, a great number of asylum seekers did not originally know that they could claim asylum on the grounds of sexual orientation and/or gender identity (Stonewall, 2010).

If traumatic pasts constitute a canvas upon which queer hospitality can be represented, the future plays a more ambiguous role. Most asylum narratives in news reports are centred on the impossibility of queer futures outside of the UK. This impossibility is often expressed using first-person direct speech, and ranges from evocations of danger, as in Babi’s case (‘my sister says that I can never step on Azerbaijan soil again because I have shamed, not only our family, but the town I’m from’) (McCarthy, 2008), to clear references to death, such as these examples from newspapers:

‘I’ll be tortured or killed if I’m sent back to Uganda’ (Brenda). (Butt, 2011)

‘I will try to hide myself somehow – change my name, not contact anyone I knew before. Maybe then I can survive. I’m terrified’ (Kiana). (Hari, 2010)

Jojo [...] believed he has been issued a death warrant in the form of a deportation notice from immigration officials. (Maddox, 2008)

Death is also common in advocacy discourses: it features prominently in Stonewall’s report, which illustrates its title No Going Back with examples of acts of suicide by rejected claimants. Likewise, on the website of the advocacy group called No Going Back (named after the latter report), one can read that ‘the reality of being sent back is basically a death sentence’ (No Going Back, 2015). Asylum decisions therefore bear not only moral responsibility, but have necropolitical implications. Some newspapers also describe the responsibility of the UK state in the administration of death – with the Home Office sending people back to ‘a likely death’ (Kamali Dehghan, 2011) – a characterisation that finds its apex in the story of Hussein, a gay asylum seeker who committed suicide in Eastbourne in 2004 after his claim was rejected, which was featured in several local and national newspapers.

It is perhaps Out There, a documentary presented by Stephen Fry and aired on BBC Two in 2013 (O’Brien, 2013), that illustrates most clearly how narratives of asylum present the necropolitics of LGBT asylum. The section of the documentary on asylum starts with Stephen Fry watching a video on a computer screen of the public hanging of presumed gay men in Iran. The camera shows some of these images on the computer screens, but mainly focuses on Fry’s reactions to what he is (and we are partly) seeing. Fry’s reactions convey the horror of the public hanging – we can see that he struggles to watch, sometimes averting his eyes. As Lilie Chouliaraki notes concerning celebrity humanitarianism, it is often the case that ‘the personification of humanitarian discourse takes place through first-hand accounts of human misfortune that the celebrity formulates as her personal testimony from the zones of suffering, balancing accurate description with the evocation of genuine emotion’ (2012: 89). In Out There, there are two testimonial voices: that of an asylum seeker himself, who later talks about his experience of fleeing Iran and seeking asylum, and that of Fry who, verbally or otherwise, gives the spontaneous expression of emotion of bearing witness to suffering. After watching the hangings, Fry interviews an asylum seeker who explains how he came to make a claim in the UK. When Fry asks him about how the Home Office is treating him, questions of death, the role of the state and the responsibility of the viewer come into play. The interviewee explains that, were he sent back: ‘There is no ... anyway ... just ... I’m thinking about suicide. I will kill myself, because it’s ... it’s better than hang up.’ Fry replies, with emotion: ‘it would be a crime that would be on the head of everyone. It would shame me.’ The interview offers the possibility to move away from the spectatorship of distant suffering epitomised by Fry watching the hangings on his computer, to the beginning of a social problem: the responsibility that Fry mentions were the interviewee sent back engages ‘everyone’. This ‘everyone’ has a moral duty to make the state, and in particular the Home Office, more responsible in relation to LGBT asylum. Celebrity humanitarianism, Chouliaraki notes, uses sincerity as a communication practice aimed at preserving the theatricality of pity, thereby teaching spectators about moving from their current pos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Narrating LGBT asylum
• 2 Imagining a queer haven
• 3 The biopolitics of recognition
• 4 Feelings of sympathy
• 5 The queer optimism of asylum
• Afterword
• References
• Index