Refugeeness, Sexuality, and Gender: Spatialized Lived Experiences of Intersectionality by Queer Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Paris

Abstract

In the last few years, asylum claims based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity (SOGI) have received increased attention within migration and queer studies. Mostly focusing on the refugee status determination process, these works have emphasized how the expectations of asylum institutions about “genuine queer refugees” lead to the exclusion of many applicants from SOGI asylum. This paper aims at shifting the analysis perspective from the legal categorization process to the impacts of everyday experienced categories of “asylum seekers” or “refugees” on queer migrants in the Parisian area. Using a three-year long ethnographic fieldwork, completed through interviews with queer asylum seekers and refugees, this paper investigates how refugeeness, understood as the objective and subjective effects of migration and asylum policies on individuals, contributes to shaping lived experiences of sexual and gender minorities in France. By drawing attention to the ways that the multiple power relationships queer asylum seekers and refugees have to face are spatially grounded, this paper discusses how an intersectional understanding of sexuality, gender, and refugeeness allows us to emphasize the role played by migration status in the negotiation of hetero- and cisnormativity. This paper also argues that far from remaining passive toward the categorization process they are subjected to, queer asylum seekers and refugees strategically appropriate the administrative categories with which they are associated. Such an analysis of lived experiences of queer asylum seekers and refugees in the country of arrival thus highlights the complex reshaping of social location caused by migration.

Queer Global Displacement: Social Reproduction, Refugee Survival, and Organised Abandonment in Nairobi, Cape Town, and Paris

“…As disposable people, queer refugees are abandoned in the wider terrain of French anti‐migrant sentiment. While Kenya and South Africa often avoid discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity, Florent Chossière (2021) highlights that France is preoccupied with the policing of queer refugee stories rejecting and excluding many people on the grounds of authenticity. This fact is echoed by what Giametta (2018) refers to as a filtering system in France where the key assumption of adjudicators is that refugee claimants are lying about their stories.…”

“…Scholarly contributions focus on the violence of bordering, the importance of queering the asylum-seeker subject, queer liminality-the politics of dis/belonging and precarity, and the impact of heteronormative asylum regimes on queer people (Mountz 2011;Wimark 2021). Although academic work regarding the experiences of queer refugees and their survival upon relocation is emerging (Bhagat 2020;Camminga 2019), the various landscapes of queer refugee life remain muted in urban and economic geography. As such, this article seeks to cover some more empirical ground by exploring queer refugee survival in three cities in hopes to further the contributions of scholars in queer geography.…”