Queer Pathways: Identity and Belonging Among LGBTQ Forced Migrants not Claiming Sexuality-Based Asylum

• In Event: 097 - Section on Human Rights Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Queering Rights

Abstract

Recent research has increasingly explored the experiences of LGBTQ persons in the context of forced migration. Existing literature focuses overwhelmingly on asylees seeking protection specifically on the basis of sexuality, and emphasizes how asylees must perform sexuality according to dominant western models, with conformity to western sexual “coming out” timelines and stereotypes becoming criteria by which the veracity of one’s sexuality is judged. Human rights literature details how the performative requirements of LGBTQ asylum disadvantage asylees by creating impediments to successful asylum claims. Queer migration literature examines how these performative requirements impose western models of identity onto often non-western subjects, falsely universalizing western sexual categories and reinforcing discursive colonialism. This project seeks to explore the experiences of forced migrants resettled in the U.S. without status based on LGBTQ inclusion. Through in-depth interviews with queer forced migrants resettled in the Northeastern United States, this project investigates how queerness continues to shape the experience of forced migration even where sexuality is not central to asylum claims. How does sexuality-based discrimination and violence affect the lives and opportunities of forced migrants who don’t claim protection on the basis of sexuality? How do dominant western models of queer identity shape queer migrants’ relationships to queer identities and communities? How does queerness affect individuals’ sense of connection and belonging in migrant communities? We seek to expand both human rights and queer migration literature with an intersectional analysis of the complex relationship of sexuality to other forms of inequality in the context of forced migration.

Authors

• Brenna Harvey, University of Connecticut

• Kamryn Danielle Warren, University of Connecticut