Chapter 1
Queering the Queer Migration to Liberation Nation Narrative
The 2005 documentary film âGloriously Freeâ1 was summarized on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation website as follows:
âGloriously Freeâ 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 â 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.2
A more recent documentary film, âLast Chanceâ (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.
âLGBT refugeesâ appeared in another media format in September 2012, when thousands of âlesbian and gay Canadiansâ3 were surprised to find an email in their inbox from Jason Kenney, Canadaâs then minister of citizenship, immigration, and multiculturalism, which contained a similar message to that of the documentary films.4 In this mass emailing, Minister Kenney informed us that, âCanada 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.â
As noted in the Introduction, despite differences in opinion over the Canadian governmentâs 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 refugeesâ countries of origin are depicted as nations of âhatred of alternative lifestylesâ or ârabidly anti-gayâ5; the refugee has âno choiceâ but to âfleeâ, âescapeâ or âleaveâ, and decides to seek refuge in Canada because it is the âsafest haven for persecuted gays and lesbiansâ and âCanada considers gays and lesbians to be ordinary people. ⊠This is where you go for freedom.â6
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,7 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 donât 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 Ahmedâs 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 âhappy migrantâ, that is, someone who espouses national ideals, which are couched in terms of empire. Migrants to the United Kingdom are subject to âthe happiness dutyâ, 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: 122â25). However, the SOGI refugee queer migration to liberation nation narrative adds a new twist to Ahmedâs âhappy migrantâ in that some configurations of sexual orientation and gendered identity have recently become an additional feature of âempireâ, 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 âcivilizedâ society, opposed to âuncivilizedâ societies characterized by their rampant homophobia. This is a similar argument to Jasbir Puarâs analysis of the operation of homonational sexual identity politics in post 9â11 America, where a highly delimited definition of sexual identityâin other words, one that is gendered, raced and classedâis employed (in a deeply contradictory way) to justify the heightened security and militarization of US borders in order to protect âtolerantâ America from the homophobic, intolerant, monstrous, racialized immigrant other (2007).8
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 âoutâ and âfreeâ 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 âcome outâ to the state who will protect them and allow them the freedom to be openly âgayâ âlesbianâ âbisexualâ or âtransgenderedâ, 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 temporal and spatial movements and sexual and gendered orientations, I ask how we might render it queer, and what difference, if any, that might make (Ahmed 2006). In rendering SOGI refugee stories âqueerâ, this chapter reflects arguments found in recent queer migration scholarship, introduced in the previous chapter, which reconfigures temporalities and geographies by decentring nationalist frameworks premised on space-time binaries, developmental narratives and static, homologous models of culture, nation, race, sexuality, gender, class, identity and settlement (LuibhĂ©id 2008: 173). In challenging homonational components and characters in the queer migration to liberation nation narrative, I apply some of Ahmed, Castañeda, Fortier and Shellerâs arguments about home and migration (2003), which challenge reductionist theories and assumptions about the meaning of migration and home9 by âblurring the distinctions between here and thereâ and considering how processes of homing and migration take shape through âexperience in broader social processes and institutions where unequal differences of race, class, gender and sexuality are generatedâ (2003: 5). âHomeâ is a central and troubling concept in refugee research, and I will return to examine it in further detail in Chapter 7.
Through an analysis of conversations and interviews with four LGBT/SOGI refugee claimants, I will apply these queer theorizations of migration, which emphasize the complex and diverse ways in which sexual and gendered desires, identities and relationships intersect with other desires, and explore how multiple desires impact movements, relocations and regroundings within and across various national borders (CantĂș 2009; Decena 2011; LuibhĂ©id and CantĂș 2005; White 2013, 2014). That is, I will illustrate how the multiple, circuitous paths to becoming a SOGI refugee demonstrate that this migrant terminology tells us very little about the individuals who are labeled in this way other than how to think about them in relation to their mode of entry into the gate-keeping mechanisms of the nation-state (Grewal 2005: 175). However, I will also argue that SOGI refugees, like any other category of refugees, are highly vulnerable participants in the refugee determination apparatus and its constitutive policies, laws and narratives, and that in order to successfully navigate the apparatus they must quickly learn these narratives and the powerful structures within which they are located, resulting in migration stories that are compelled to contain statements which hue closely to homonational narratives while simultaneously complicating them (Lewis 2005; LuibhĂ©id and CantĂș 2005; OâLeary 2008; White 2013).10
It should be noted that my attempt to âqueerâ the straight narrative of SOGI refugees is based mostly on individual interviews, which often (but not always) followed a structure that replicated the very framework I am critiquing. That is, my questions were usually organized in a chronological fashion, such that I would begin by asking the interviewees to provide some background details about their family, childhood and the community they grew up in, followed by questions about desires and relationships as they moved into adolescence and adulthood, which would lead to questions about their migration to Canada. Thus, at one level I am guilty of the very thing I am trying to critique, in that the order and structure of questions asked in the interview risks reproducing a Western chronotope of sexual and gendered identity development and ârefugeenessâ (the movements, actions and qualities of becoming a refugee, Malkki 1995). However, while I am cognizant of the limits of the informal interview as a research technique,11 by paying attention to certain details in the answers, and the sometimes long and detailed tangential discussions of adventures, events and actions that emerged out of these questions, I hope to be able to reveal more of the rich complexity of movements, desires, relationships and identifications in these participantsâ lives. In addition, I include some comments and anecdotes that occurred outside the âofficialâ interview context, such as conversations held before and after the recording microphone was turned on, and from informal meetings on the street, at a cafĂ© or in a community centre lobby.12 While I focus on the narratives of four individuals from varied gendered, sexual, ethno-racial and national backgrounds in order to illustrate the diversity and complexity of movement, identification and desire, I will note where certain experiences, feelings and opinions overlap with narratives of refugees from similar backgrounds or identifications. In other words, while I am trying to elaborate the variability of individual lives, experiences and desires that are too often reduced to stock characters in the queer migration to liberation nation narrative, I also try to be attentive to the ways in which certain components of these stories are repeated by different interviewees, and sometimes collude with this hegemonic narrative, which helps us to see how pleasure, fear, anxiety and desire organize, orient and relate bodies, and the ways in which these feelings may be reorganized and regulated through the moral economy of the state and its attendant surveillance in order to avoid rejection and/or deportation.
Living, Loving, Leaving
The following four narratives are condensed versions of discussions from formal interviews and informal conversations with participants. While it might seem rather obvious, it is nonetheless important to preface these narratives by pointing out that none of the interviewees began their lives thinking of themselves as refugees, and in fact for quite a few, ârefugeeâ was a relatively new identity term imposed upon them by the process through which they migrated across national borders and into the Canadian governmentâs immigration apparatus. While I will elaborate the ways in which these narratives converge and diverge with a number of elements in the homonational queer migration to liberation nation narrative following this section, this obvious point â that most refugees only recently came to recognize or acknowledge this imposed identity â already begins to challenge any singular representation of the category âLGBT/SOGI refugeeâ.
Joe
Joe, who is in his thirties, and self-identifies as a âclassic transsexual maleâ, was born and raised in âthe Middle Eastâ13 in a âmiddle class liberal Muslimâ family who were financially âcomfortableâ. Joe knew he was a boy from an early age and didnât âfeelâ right as his body began to develop female features in adolescence. Joe remembered that as a child, he couldnât find any information anywhere about people like him, but around age of 9 or 10,
I saw Boy George on the TV, and I said to my mother ⊠how can she be called Boy George when sheâs a woman, is she a man? ⊠And there was an awkward response from my mother, so I was like, why is this person a boy. ⊠Later on ⊠I was told by my sister, who was older and wiser, that he was a man but he looks like a girl, so something was going on there.
Joe had huge fights with his mother when he told her he was a boy. She said he was going against God and that he would be cursed if he kept talking this way. However, Joe also had a nanny âfrom a Caribbean islandâ who was Catholic and conveyed a very different message about God: âMy nanny used to say things like God is Love and God loves you just the way you are. ⊠She would tell my mother to âjust let me beâ.â Joe was so deeply affected by his nannyâs perspective that he converted to Catholicism after arriving in Canada.
Joe remembered most of his childhood and adolescence in terms of strife and difficulty, particularly in his relationship to his mother. He was sent to a girlsâ boarding school in the United Kingdom where he was a difficult student because he was angry and unhappy. By the time he entered university (in his country of birth), he was starting to think of ways to get out of the country, as it was clear there was no place for people like him there. He studied psychology as an undergraduate in order to find out more about himself but there was no reference to his âconditionâ in any of his classes or texts. After graduating and working in banking in his home town for a few years, Joe heard about a local graduate program in cellular biology from his friend who told him there were lots of opportunities to get postdoctoral fellowships and work in other countries with this kind of degree, so Joe applied and was accepted. He did well in the program, and was then accepted into a postdoctoral job in a country in Northern Europe, which he thought would be more accepting of transsexual refugees based on what he had read on the Internet. After arriving in Northern Europe, Joe began to take hormones to initiate his transition, but he soon discovered he wouldnât be eligible for asylum there. Increasingly desperate, he emailed a Canadian friend of a cousin whom he had met a few years ago back i...