Discourses on LGBT asylum in the UK: Constructing a queer haven 9781526108142

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This book examines the way asylum is conceptualised at the crossroads of nationhood, post-colonialism and sexual citizenship through analyses of fifteen years of debate, activism and media narrative. Asylum has become a key site for the formulation and critique of LGBT human rights, reshaping forms of sexual belonging to the nation. This study intervenes in the ongoing discussion of homonationalism, sheds new light on the limitations of queer liberalism as a political strategy and questions the prevailing modes of solidarity among queer migrants in the UK. Raboin employs discourse analysis to study a large corpus encompassing media narratives, policy documents, debates with activists and NGOs as well as counter-discourses emerging from art practice. This study illuminates the construction of the social problem of LGBT asylum and, in doing so, shows how our understanding of asylum is firmly rooted in the individual stories of migration circulated in the media. The book also critiques the exclusionary management of cases by the state, especially in the way the state manufactures the authenticity of queer refugees. Finally, it investigates the affective economy of asylum, assessing critically the role of sympathy and challenging the happy goals of queer liberalism. Discourses on LGBT asylum in the UK will be essential for researchers and students specialising in refugee studies and queer studies.

Title font: © Multicolore Vector by Ivan Filipov

Raboin

Thibaut Raboin is Teaching Fellow in French at University College London

Constructing a queer haven

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

ISBN 978-0-7190-9963-2

9 780719 099632

Thibaut Raboin

Discourses on LGBT asylum in the UK

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Discourses on LGBT asylum in the UK Constructing a queer haven THIBAUT RABOIN

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Thibaut Raboin 2017 The right of Thibaut Raboin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 0 7190 9963 2 hardback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or thirdparty internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Minion with Rotis Sans display by Koinonia, Manchester

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Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

page vii 1

1 Narrating LGBT asylum

16

2 Imagining a queer haven

40

3 The biopolitics of recognition

70

4 Feelings of sympathy

97

5 The queer optimism of asylum

126

Afterword

150

References Index

154 166

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mairéad Hanrahan for her supervision during the research process that led to this book. I would also like to gratefully thank Richard Mole and Denis Provencher for their comments and insight, which significantly shaped its argument. I am also indebted to my colleagues at UCL’s Department of French for their support and friendship. I also thank the team working at Manchester University Press for their input and guidance. Finally, I wish to express my immense gratitude to James Weddup for all his care and for his astute reading of the manuscript.

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Introduction

In March 2014, Home Secretary Theresa May ordered a review of the way lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) asylum claims are handled in the United Kingdom (UK), after much criticism of the way claimants are treated and decisions are made. This step came fifteen years after the extension of asylum rights to claimants on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in 1999. Between 1999 and 2014, the social problem of LGBT asylum did not cease to evolve and be present in public arenas, through a stream of cases arising in the news, and reports and court decisions aimed at changing administrative practice and improving decision outcomes. Since the start of the research leading to this book in 2010, the proliferation of discourses on LGBT asylum has increased even further, and the field is changing fast. Many of these discourses and decisions are motivated by ethical imperatives, pushing for the UK to treat LGBT asylum seekers fairly and humanely, and rely often on British traditions of liberalism. For example, in 2010 Ben Summerskill, then CEO of LGBT charity Stonewall, called for more to be done: ‘Failure to rectify this situation raises deeply uncomfortable questions about our own society and proud national culture [...] Britain has a history of compassion to those in grievous and genuine need who seek shelter on our shores. In future we hope that compassion will be extended to all’ (Stonewall, 2010: 4). The discomfort he mentions, as well as the invocation of a national culture of openness and compassion, are typical of the larger discursive environment within which LGBT asylum discourses are deployed, with a gradual increase in the quantity of discourses and political contentions about LGBT human rights on the international stage. Whether concerned with the hangings of gay men in Iran in 2005, the ‘anti-gay’ bill in Uganda between 2009 and 2014 or LGBT rights in Russia, to mention but a few, interested individuals are routinely asked for their signatures, lobbying power or mere compassion for persecuted and discriminated queers around the world. All these campaigns question the multifaceted ways in which the UK (the state, civil society) should act for LGBT rights on the international stage. This potential for action and responsibility is a source of profound political dissensus, that is of disagreement over what LGBT rights are, and for whom 1

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(Rancière, 2004a). Among the floats of San Francisco’s Pride parade in 2011, one could see a giant puppet of Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being whipped by man dressed in leather and with a nuclear bomb for a penis. A first version of the poster for Paris Pride in 2011 showed the French national animal, the Gallic Rooster, wearing a red feather boa, creating controversy among some LGBT groups since the symbol is typically identified with rightwing nationalism. Stockholm’s 2012 Pride included a mock scene of hanging with an executioner and a gay victim with the word ‘Iran’ written on him. Each of these events has sparked controversy and disagreement over the relationship between queerness and nationhood, in particular the association of queer-positiveness to Western states and the ascription of queer-negativity to so-called ‘Muslim countries’. These are just examples of a rising number of discourses taking place on an international scale about queerness and nationhood that either affirm that sexuality has become a divide between more and less advanced countries, or criticise such claims. This book focuses on LGBT asylum rights in the UK, not only because they hold a central place in the wider discourses, but also because they articulate the questions of queerness, nationhood and rights in a configuration that is particularly illuminating. Indeed, asylum rights are about LGBT global rights and how people are treated around the world. However, as asylum seekers are located in the UK, asking for hospitality, they are also a domestic problem, drawing from international legal provisions, which gives a sense of urgency to these global rights. This book therefore investigates discourses on LGBT asylum not simply as a legal question of equality and fairness, but from the vantage point of these larger discursive trends. This is an illuminating object because many social actors are involved: the state needs to solve the problems of fairness and population management that this (relatively new) category of asylum seeker puts forth; civil society is mobilised through advocacy networks and practical help; and asylum and forced migration, before even the 1999 decision to protect LGBT claimants, are already a heavily configured and rich discursive space. Asylum is therefore an object of choice to investigate the role of the state in relation to LGBT people, the production of nationhood and the rights and citizenship of LGBT subjects. The starting question of this investigation therefore follows Sara Ahmed’s intuition concerning multiculturalism: ‘How does the act of “welcoming the stranger” serve to constitute the nation?’ (2000: 95) Starting from the premise that nationhood is a cultural artefact, produced to a great extent in discourse, the 1999 decision – by making it possible to grant asylum to LGBT claimants – opened up the question of potentially welcoming queers into the nation: what does this tell us about the way the nation represents itself in relation to sexuality and queerness? How does the state fashion itself in this act of hospitality?

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How to claim asylum After years of refusing to consider LGBT people as eligible for asylum, since 1999 in the UK it has been possible to claim asylum on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity, a recognition that happened slightly later than in other countries (Millbank, 2005: 116). In their present configuration, asylum rights are framed by the provisions of the Geneva Convention of 1951 – the 1999 Islam v Home Secretary Lords’ decision made it possible for LGBT people to claim asylum on the basis of the Convention. A Convention refugee is a person who: owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country. (Stevens, 2004: 127)

The 1999 decision introduced the notion that LGBT people could be considered as a particular social group. Consequently, the Home Office has developed procedures to deal with these asylum claims and, over the past ten years, LGBT claimants have gradually become a specific category of refugees for the state, with their own characteristics, needs and particular challenges. At first, the Home Office and the courts insisted strongly that asylum seekers have a duty to protect themselves by hiding their sexuality. This ‘discretion requirement’ allowed the state to refuse many claimants; according to the UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group (UKLGIG), ten years after the 1999 decision LGBT claimants were more likely to be denied asylum than other claimants. While 73% of all types of asylum claim made in the UK were denied at the initial decision stage, 98–99% of claims made by lesbians and gay men monitored by the UKLGIG were rejected (UKLGIG, 2010: 2). Some of these decisions were overturned by immigration courts after appeal against the Home Office’s decisions, but these statistics serve to show the virtual impossibility at this point for LGBT claimants to be granted asylum. By 2010, the discretion requirement had been used for over a decade to tell claimants that even though the state recognised that they were LGBT, and that their country of origin persecuted people on the basis of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity, they should go back and live discreetly, relocated in another part of the country where they could start a new life. In July 2010, the HJ and HT v Secretary of State for the Home Department Supreme Court decision overturned this requirement and declared that it was not reasonable to expect people to hide their sexuality, as it is a fundamental aspect of their identity. This decision meant that rather than ask claimants to live discreetly, the state shifted emphasis to discrediting the applicants’ claims to be gay or lesbian (Millbank, 2009). The process of asylum application is long and complex. The following explanation describes its main characteristics in order to provide a general, rather 3

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than exhaustive, outline of the stages involved. Asylum application can be made at the point of entry into the UK, or later in an asylum screening unit. In the cases where the claimant has been arrested or is being detained, the application can also be made to an immigration officer. ‘Screening’ then occurs: the Home Office gathers basic information about the claimants’ situation and their claim, and subsequently places claimants in one of three categories: (1) claimants can be asked to come at a later date to give the information needed for the decision; (2) they can be placed in the ‘fast-track’ process, which means detention and a decision on the case in six days; or (3) ‘super fast track’, with a decision taken in two days. In 2015, the use of such fast-track detention was suspended, pending review: following widespread criticism about its unfairness and court decisions made against it, the Home Office accepted that there was ‘an unacceptable risk of unfairness to certain vulnerable applicants’ (2015: 2). This subsequent asylum decision is taken on the basis of substantial information given by the claimants about the reasons why they should be granted asylum in the UK: for LGBT claimants, the most important document to provide is a long statement (sometimes more than twenty pages) about their lives and what brought them to claim asylum in the UK. Other types of evidence can be provided, such as medical evidence (in the case of violence, torture or rape), testimonies from third parties (for example, corroborating evidence from a partner), information about the country of origin, etc. This information is assessed by a case-worker (also called case-owner), during an interview at the Home Office centre. Claimants have the right to have legal representation to help them, and most LGBT asylum seekers rely on the availability of free representation from the Legal Aid scheme. The scheme’s limited resources means that there are often waiting lists to get the most specialised lawyers through support groups such as the UKLGIG. If their claim is accepted, claimants are granted refugee status for five years. They can also obtain other forms of protection, such as humanitarian protection (for five years) or discretionary leave (three plus three years). If claims are rejected, an appeal to the Immigration Courts is usually possible: a judge will hear the claimants presenting their evidence – which can be augmented from that offered to the Home Office. If unsuccessful, the Immigration Court’s decision can then only be appealed in higher courts on a material point of law and not on the substance of the claim. Finally, if substantial new information emerges about a claimant’s case, they might be able to start the process anew with the added material evidence. Methods: discourse analysis and the social problem of asylum This book proposes looking at the social problem of LGBT asylum from a discursive perspective: it starts from the premise that public arenas1 are a site for the production, repetition and confrontation of differing discourses and 4

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world views concerning what is problematic about LGBT asylum and how these problems should be solved (Quéré, 1991). The method used in this book will therefore be that of discourse analysis (DA), in order to look critically at the way political responses to LGBT asylum are elaborated in relation to how the problem is framed, understood and discussed. The first identifiable problem in DA is its object and the designation of its boundaries: what can be considered as discourse and what kind of discourse does DA aim to look at? Being at the same time a very abstract and also widely used concept, discourse is a term with many different and sometimes conflicting definitions within DA. This research follows Norman Fairclough’s distinction between two widely accepted meanings of the term (1992: 2–4). The first is the use of discourse as a general term referring to means of making sense of the world, be it in books, oral speech or non-verbal communication. This first meaning can be called semiosis. The second use of discourse would refer more specifically to a text or a group of texts which have something in common, whether it is an origin (such as political discourse, academic discourse), a genre (scientific discourse, political satire), a mode (narrative discourse) or a particular enunciative situation (media discourse, interview, counselling). This commonality relies on shared rules or criteria being respected in order to recognise what kind of discourse one is looking at; a particular text can overlap several genres, origins or enunciative situations at the same time. In both meanings of the term discourse, it is clear that discourse is a social practice: in the first case, it is a collective process that organises concepts, objects, representations, etc. in order to make sense of the world; in the second case, discourse refers to the differentiation and categorisation of different forms of semiosis, based on common rules and criteria. Therefore, in both cases, discourse is a collective practice which articulates language with social order. The delimitation of a workable set of discourses for a DA of LGBT asylum is thus crucial: what kind of discourses can be analysed? A corpus can be delimited through bearing in mind, as Dominique Maingueneau does, that ‘managing the archive is a dimension constitutive of the archive itself ’ (1991: 23), that is to say that building a corpus is not a simple act of invention, that is of finding, but rather an act of constitution insofar as finding discourses is also choosing them. This research, in managing its archive, proposes to beware and attend to the self-evidence of doxa – this study has thus a paradoxical endeavour, in the Bourdieusian sense that is a work aiming at displacing the naturalised, self-evident truth about the social world (Bourdieu, 1993: 159). With this perspective in mind, the discourses about LGBT asylum discussed in this book have been chosen in relation to the question of the power relations inherent to the processes of production and reception of political discourses. They are discourses which have a certain ‘density’ of articulations between processes of semiosis and representation in a space of communica5

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tional interaction (Maingueneau, 1991: 21–3). This position towards corpusbuilding is close to Foucault’s, who did not choose his material on the basis of a structure or a particular conception of authorship but ‘on the basis of the simple function they carry out in a general situation: for example, the rules of internment in an asylum or even a prison; disciplinary rules in the army or at school’ (Deleuze, 1988: 17). The idea is to look at the places where discourses most clearly reveal social machineries – Foucault’s prisons, schools, hospitals, medico-legal apparatuses. These machineries contain a series of power nexuses that this book identifies, where competing strategies are deployed and resistance is exerted: human rights discourses and teleologies of modernity; homonationalism; biopolitics of recognition; and affective economies of pity and optimism. In order to inspect these four nexuses, the archives constituted and considered in this book are characterised by their heterogeneity – they account for the diversity of rules and constraints on enunciation, as well as the multiplicity of strategies deployed within these constraints. There is a diversity of enunciators, strategies and enunciative environments in the archives considered here. Looking at a variety of enunciative environments requires attention to the way each one, by having its own enunciative rules, limits what can be said and how it can be said. For example, LGBT refugees’ self-narratives, when enunciated in the media, often rely on the use of the narrative mode to be intelligible (e.g. they have a beginning and an end, peripeteia ...). However, the same self-narratives, when they are used by the Home Office as a means to assess a claimant’s right to be granted refugee status, must follow yet another set of rules, including – but not limited to – the ability to document one’s story, the consistency of one’s narration or the ability to prove one’s sexuality. This book will be attentive to the way truthfulness is produced and assessed in public arenas, following Foucault’s concept of veridiction, giving attention to the processes of production of truthfulness. It observes the relationship between objects and subjects: the conditions, status and positions they need to have in order to become legitimate objects of knowledge (Foucault, 1994a: 1451). Foucault articulates games of truth in three ways: (1) as a relationship between truth and discourse – truth being produced in the interdiscourse of different situations of enunciation; (2) as a relationship between truth and power – truth being at the meeting point of competitive strategies and the rational exercise of power; and (3) as a relationship between truth and the subject – the truth of the subject being the socially and historically formed basis of the possible experience of subjectivity (1984: 2–4). If enunciative environments concern sets of rules regulating enunciation in a particular field, enunciative positions refer to the respective positions of enunciators within the diagrammatic space of power relations. These power relations are constantly shifting: some enunciative positions exert power over other positions, which in turn find ways to resist this power. This research assumes that the discursive spaces it investigates are populated by such 6

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positions, which are at the junction of discursive and non-discursive fields. The power effects of enunciative positions and enunciative environments interact, and some enunciators may bear more legitimacy to speak in some environments, having, in other words, the right to speak truthfully. One can thus wonder how such a legitimacy or right is distributed among enunciators and social actors in asylum discourses. Likewise, are LGBT asylum seekers more legitimate to speak in certain environments than other people? Do they have a heterogeneous capacity to build their own strategic positions, especially of resistance, depending on the enunciative environment they occupy? The intensive use of self-narratives by the border agencies as a means to assess asylum cases puts the different social agents involved in the assessment process in particular positions. It puts asylum seekers in a position where their selfnarratives must be strategically deployed in a disciplined fashion, producing the narrative of the good refugee; it puts the administration’s officers in a position where assessing the truthfulness of these narratives is crucial; and it also puts campaigners in a position where they must deploy their strategy in relation to self-narratives. In order to build archives that are attentive to these questions, great emphasis must be placed on the idea of interdiscursivity (Authier-Revuz, 1984: 98; Maingueneau, 2004: 127–43). The interdiscourse is a web of discourses: [it] involves the complex interdependent configuration of discursive formations, giving it primacy over its constituent parts, and revealing properties which are not predictable from a consideration of its parts. (Williams, 1999: 190)

This work will not look at separate homogeneous texts, but will insist on their interrelation: heterogeneity is inscribed within the texts in that they are part of an interdiscourse. In order to investigate the power relations at work within the interdiscourse, one must look at both what makes a statement repeatable and how repetition transforms this statement, thereby interrogating the conditions and effects of enunciative repetition in the case of LGBT asylum rights.2 This book focuses on public discourses – it looks at the way public speech is organised in public arenas, how it produces a semiosis of the social world and the way it organises political action. Before giving more details about each category, a caveat is necessary, which is to acknowledge that differentiating a few major sources is necessarily a simplifying generalisation of the ongoing configuration of the different discursive formations about LGBT asylum (Fairclough, 2006: 6). The categories are not independent, but rather they are involved in strategies and power relations. This book will consider the following set of enunciative environments in order to observe and map competing enunciative strategies and positions:

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News media One of the most important enunciative environments for public discourses is news media and newspapers in particular. Newspapers may not be read by the same number of people that overall consult other types of news media, especially television, but their institutional position means they remain a crucial environment: they are a place of choice for detachable statements – especially as many social actors (politicians, activists), considering them to be the best place for detachable statements, tend to treat them as such, thus reinforcing this position. News media are understood in this research as the main social field for the social dissemination of discourses, narratives, ideas, practices, values and so forth, upon their legitimization, upon the positioning and mobilization of publics in relation to them, and upon the generation of consent to or at least acquiescence with change. (Fairclough, 2006: 97)

The media is a social field – that is to say, it is not only a group of agents (journalists, media corporations, etc.) who use the media as a space of enunciation. It is a space of mediation, which has a major role in the functioning of public arenas as spaces of public debate. Many debates about LGBT asylum rights are mediated via different mass media. The media is commonly perceived as a space of debate that makes the democratic process happen by providing a structure for a possible public sphere; however, one can also see it as a field of production, distribution and dissemination of varied forms of discourses. These discourses include debates involving politicians and actors from civil society, but also encompass reports, characterisations, narratives, etc. Nonetheless, the media must not be equated with a neutral space where discourses happen to meet and confront each other. It is an enunciative environment that is ruled by many conditions, values and practices, which make it a configurative space. It configures discourses in the Ricoeurian sense, in that it homogenises a diversity of conflicting and scattered discourses within a coherent and congruent narrative (Ricoeur, 1984). The enunciative rules used in newspapers are constantly negotiated, reproduced and reinforced through practice, including through journalistic professionalism. These rules are not homogeneous for all newspapers, or even within a single newspaper: the corpus considered here will include broadsheets and tabloids, national and regional newspapers, etc. Some newspapers, for a limited period of time, take a particularly strong stance on certain cases (as exemplified by the Independent during the case of Mehdi in 2008 that is discussed in Chapter 2) but sometimes entirely ignore others. News reports may often follow the paper’s editorial position on a topic, but there are sometimes cases of dissonance in the reports – providing interesting points where controversy and conceptualisation of the social problem deviate from established positions. Finally, the role of the media in public arenas is seen 8

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as generating consent regarding social problems. However, the generation of consent must be understood as a complex processes of enunciation, deliberation and agency from different social agents within public arenas. Non-institutional online media This research also considers less institutionalised news media sources, in particular online platforms with heterogeneous modes of engagement and intents. Most of the caveats about heterogeneity concerning newspapers are true of these enunciative environments. Enunciation depends on the type of environment considered: online advocacy, web journalism, etc. Online campaigners such as AllOut (a campaigning group concerned with LGBT human rights that keeps subscribers aware of issues around the world and asks them to sign petitions, to write to their MPs, etc.), or 38 degrees and Avaaz (similar platforms with wider remits) propose a very specific type of discourse, subject to rules that have to do with their mission: campaigning, raising awareness, lobbying, etc. (Kavada, 2012). The corpus considered here also includes blogs, such as LGBT Asylum News which compiles information about ongoing asylum cases from a variety of sources in order to raise awareness about them – such a platform bases its enunciation on the two modes of news writing and campaigning as ‘engaged’ journalism. Governmental discourse At the other end of the institutional spectrum, this book considers the enunciation of national governments and their representatives, political leaders, governmental agencies, but also local government and finally transnational government, together with international institutions such as the United Nations (Fairclough, 2006: 6). All these institutions have in common that they are the policy-makers in relation to asylum – at an international level with treaties and the global management of refugee populations, at a national level with the integration of asylum within the problematic of immigration and at a local level with the management of LGBT asylum seeker and refugee populations (especially in terms of access to welfare). In other words, governmental discourses, especially official documents, have the characteristic of having a more performative value than any other: this is especially the case for Home Office guidelines for claim management (for example about assessing the credibility of LGBT claimants), or for reports from the Country of Origin Information Service (COIS). This set of social actors is rich in interdiscursivity: first, between the different actors themselves across different levels of governance), but also between governmental actors and non-governmental ones (such as academics, charities, think-tanks, media agents or LGBT refugees). The core claims of this set of agents are situated at the meeting points of different discursive formations – among them, one can identify discourses on the culture of results and efficiency (Bezes, 2009; Krieg-Planque, 2010: 7); discourses on 9

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the management of migrants (for example, managing refugees with no legal means of subsistence apart from claiming benefits);3 and discourses on human rights for LGBT people. Advocacy and NGO literature Reports, websites and press statements coming from advocates have a clear aim which conditions their enunciation: this aim can vary from influencing decision makers to raising awareness or producing research, etc. Such literature oscillates between trying to set the agenda, and positioning its discourse vis à vis the dominant discourse provided by governmental agents, either to offer new interpretative frames (breach in the discursive order), or to add their voice to existing ones. For example, certain organisations deploy resistance strategies according to their perception of (1) what is the most urgent and contentious point, (2) what will result in a sustainable political response (that is, audible in public arenas), and (3) what means (political, financial, human, etc.) are at their disposal. Marginal spaces These are enunciative environments that exist at the margins of public discourses on LGBT asylum rights; their main characteristic is that they offer opportunities for asylum seekers to talk for and about themselves in conditions that allow for them to re-appropriate their voices, often objectified in the discursive environments described so far. The book will focus on art practices involving LGBT asylum seekers: projects such as Staying in which lesbian asylum seekers created characters that echoed their own experiences, feelings, ideas. These environments are marginal in the sense that bell hooks politically gives to the way that experiences of women at the margins should inform the direction of the feminist movement (1984: 1–15). This book gives a strong emphasis to such discourses because they open up spaces in public arenas for the experiences of queer migrants and refugees, and enable the production and dissemination of experiences, narratives and self-representations that subvert the processes of conceptualisation, objectivation and subjectivation at play in discourses on LGBT asylum. A note on terms: queerness, sexual citizenship and LGBT A few clarifications on the terminology used here must be made for the sake of precision. First, concerning the names of governmental agencies in charge of asylum, the years between 1999 and 2015 have seen a great number of changes, transformations and re-distributions of the administrative duties relating to immigration and visas. This means that asylum cases over that period of time, when referring to the administration in charge of decision making, use a variety of names and acronyms. The most common one is that of UK Border 10

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Agency (UKBA), launched in 2008 and scrapped in 2013 – many asylum cases discussed in this book are from that era. Another term often used is that of the Home Office, which is the administration in charge of immigration and asylum; because of the way agency names change, for ease of reference, this book will often cite the Home Office. Second, concerning the use of the terms LGBT, LGB, homosexual and queer. This book will use ‘LGBT asylum’ and ‘LGBT asylum seekers and refugees’ when talking about the asylum process and the subjects it posits. ‘Queer’ and ‘queerness’ will sometimes be used to emphasise the production of subjects that are marked as deviant from heteronormativity and will refer mainly to queer refugees and asylum seekers and queer liberal subjects. The distinction between LGBT refugee and queer refugee will mainly lie in the emphasis placed on the subjective production of the asylum system in the former, and the deviance from heteronormativity in the latter. Because LGBT is the operative category used in many discourses about asylum, my analysis of these discourses will use the same term. In certain cases, in particular around the issue of recognition in Chapter 3, the terms used are more precise and only concern LGB claimants. The use of the term LGBT in this research does not imply that it is necessarily the best term to describe the people it aims at naming, and this work acknowledges the fact that the term LGBT refers to a specific sexual ontology, which is situated temporally and spatially and may exclude many types of non-cisgender and non-heteronormative experiences. However, analysing a discourse means working within its frame of reference and discussing it critically, precisely because of what it implicitly assumes in its sexual ontology. The basis of this book being public discourse, it is important to note here that the marginalisation of trans issues in public discourses about asylum has clear effects: although the umbrella term LGBT asylum is most often used, the majority of discourses concern themselves with the situation of LGB people, and the issues and challenges encountered by gay and lesbian people and trans people in relation to asylum in Britain are very different: in particular, trans claimants face a further lack of training and knowledge from the Home Office, a common refusal to acknowledge their gender identities and acute distress in cases of detention relating to this lack of gender recognition. Discourses on asylum for most of the 2000s have tended to leave aside the situation of trans claimants, which is reflected in the corpus considered here. In addition, the specificity of the experience of trans claimants would necessitate a separate comprehensive analysis. Since 2014, a greater acknowledgement of the under-discussion of trans issues in relation to asylum and forced migration has occurred, both among advocates and intergovernmental organisations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); the latter, for example, calling in its 2015 report for more research and knowledge to be accrued on the situation of trans claimants (Nathwani, 2015: 33). 11

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However, the UK state remains reticent in taking the specific issues of trans claimants into account. This is exemplified by the omission of the situation of trans asylum seekers from the report of the Transgender Equality inquiry by the House of Commons’ Women and Equalities committee, despite evidence having been presented by two civil society organisations (Women and Equalities Committee, 2016). The use of the term queer is ambiguous and requires a few caveats. One use of the term can be described as an umbrella aimed precisely at remaining open to types of experiences and subjectivities excluded from more closed ontologies, such as LGBT. This use runs the risk of obfuscating the discursive economy (in academia, in activism, etc.) in which the term queer is inscribed. Sexuality is understood here within the larger theoretical framework of intersectionality as racialised, classed, nationalised and gendered (Crenshaw, 1990; McClintock et al., 1997; Nagel, 2003; Pryke, 1998). This research will be attentive to both intersectional positions and the production of homonormative subjectivities. In particular, it will examine the consequences of this production for the potential hospitality given to LGBT asylum seekers. This research will question the assumption that ‘queer’ necessarily indicates a radical position, and explore its potential relationship in contemporary public discourse with normativity and liberalism (Eng, 2010; Eng et al., 2005; Halperin, 2003; Puar, 2007). Such putative queer liberalism can be characterised by collusions between queerness, imperialism and white privilege. The main effect of this queer liberalism is the production of a queer liberal subject, characterised by a complex set of moral positions, sexual ontologies, relationships to the nation, etc. This book looks at LGBT asylum discourses as a discursive space in public arenas where heterogeneous forms of the notion of ‘sexual citizenship’ are discussed, the concept designating here the relationship between the state and sexualised citizens (Binnie, 1997: 238). This book will examine the way asylum is conceived as a social problem around a liberal conception of sexual citizenship, placing it as a benchmark of what ought to be achieved by the state and civil society actors alike when it comes to solving the problem of LGBT asylum seekers. For example, Eithne Luibhéid argues, mainstream LGBT organisations have taken up the issues of asylum in sometimes problematic ways, reinforcing their own claims based within liberal and homonormative frameworks. As she notes: ‘queer migrants provide the material ground for dialogue among others, while becoming silenced’ (2008: 180). This book will thus propose that asylum not only produces LGBT refugee subjectivities, but also queer liberal subjects who come to exist in relation to non-liberal queer subjects. This project will thus ask: to what extent does the asylum system produce subjectivities, not only for asylum seekers, but also for British liberal queers, non-queer subjects, racialised subjects, etc.? Political discourses, media narratives, biopolitical practices and technologies of the self do not 12

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merely produce excluded subjects, but rather draw lines of subjectivation for several types of queer subjectivities: in particular the queer victim that is a moral burden on the liberal state, and the protected liberal queer subject who offers help. Book thesis and chapter presentation This book proposes that UK discourses on asylum are not solely organised around questions of rights, but are in fact central to contemporary discourses of queer optimism in a political environment where inclusiveness has normative effects. It interrogates the bases for this discursive construction, the forms of such optimism and its blind spots, identifying the exclusions it obfuscates. Public discourses on LGBT asylum are organised around the relationship of the state and liberal queers with refugees – in particular, the understanding and representation of sexual citizenship and the value of LGBT-inclusive politics in the UK relies on how liberal queers feel towards refugees and how they are represented in public arenas. This work offers a multifaceted argument around queerness, hospitality, nationhood and liberalism. First, a central function of LGBT asylum in public arenas is to (re)produce the political and affective forms of queer liberalism in the UK. It provides scenes of a geopolitics of sexual rights where hospitality for refugees has a performative value in relation to the representation of a racialised queer-positive liberal state. Public discourses about LGBT asylum are not just about the refugees concerned but also, even mainly, about a liberal ‘us’: from the discussions of rights, to the political emotions involved in the spectacle of refugee suffering, most discourses produce representations of the UK as a queer haven, and of liberal queers as rights-bearing political subjects and sexual citizens. Second, such discourses on asylum are based on the enshrinement of certain forms of queer optimism that shape asylum seekers’ (putative) longings. There is irony in this process for it obfuscates the ways in which refugees are economically, culturally and racially excluded from the gay happiness promised by lesbian and gay neoliberalism, and even prevents their recognition by the Home Office in some respects. This book therefore argues that asylum discourses are organised around a cruel queer optimism that promises happiness and yet assigns refugees to subaltern positions that make this goal unreachable. From this proposition, a question arises: can asylum counter-discourses (such as the art practice investigated in Chapter 5) disrupt the normative forms of neoliberal gay and lesbian longings? Finally, the way liberal queers feel about refugees allows for their reconstruction as potentially wounded subjects that have a claim before the liberal state, in a process where solidarity is both an act of welcoming queer refugees and one of appropriating their pain and the injustice they face. In order to deploy this argument, the book is divided into five chapters. 13

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Chapter 1 concentrates on the way LGBT asylum is narrated in public arenas, and examines the regimes of justification that form the basis for the way asylum is discussed, framed and understood as a social problem in public arenas. This chapter unpacks the way narratives produce a certain temporality for LGBT asylum which articulates past homophobia in countries of origin with the possibility of happier futures in the UK. These narratives thus allow for the deployment of colonial imaginaries of sexuality and migration, as well as expressions of the inherent, singular position of the UK as a queer positive space. In this regard, asylum is an opportunity for the public discussion of what sexual citizenship and rights might entail: LGBT human rights thus organise asylum’s discussions of what a desirable state in relation to sexual rights might be. The articulation of homonationalism and queer optimism hinges fundamentally on these narratives which shape a shared understanding of the political problem of LGBT asylum. Chapter 2 examines critically the way asylum configures and is configured by homonationalist representations in the UK. It proposes that there are three important factors at play: (1) homonationalist discourses need victims to be actualised, and asylum produces a vast quantity of the right type of stories and images of LGBT victims. (2) Homonationalist representations, although rooted in an imaginary geopolitics of sexuality, are centred on a function of producing the UK as a happy place for queers. Activists and politicians alike use asylum to deploy different strategies in relation to sexual rights in the UK, and in doing so exploit and adapt colonial imaginaries. (3) These homonationalist formulations of asylum have effects on the possible subjectivation of asylum seekers, who are perceived as embodying a fundamental disjunction if not conflict between sexuality and race, where agency and the possibility of reinvention in more complex ways are curtailed. Chapter 3 moves to the administrative management of LGBT asylum seekers, and proposes that the biopolitics of asylum emerge out of a contradiction between the impetus for better hospitality motivated by sexual liberalism, and a larger culture of exclusion in asylum in the UK. The chapter shows that the focus on ‘recognition’ and ‘credibility’ that has sharpened since 2010, excluding claimants on the basis of a disbelief of their sexual orientation, can be understood as a clear strategic choice for the state which needs to find a way of managing claims that accommodates human rights perspectives on LGBT asylum within a largely exclusionary asylum system. The last part of this book’s analysis commences in Chapter 4, focusing on the affective and political economy of LGBT asylum. It concentrates on the spectacle of suffering that LGBT asylum offers in public arenas, and interrogates the forms of engagement that sympathy and compassion offer between liberal queers and asylum seekers. It argues that sympathy has two main effects: on the asylum seekers themselves, for whom it is disempowering and strips their agency in the use of public arenas; and on liberal queers, for whom 14

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sympathy is part of larger logic of universalising equivalence between asylum seekers and them, which allows for an appropriation of their suffering in the making of political claims before the state. The final Chapter 5 proposes that, in UK discourses, asylum relies on and reproduces queer neoliberal longings and aspirations: a staging of queer liberal optimism. From the way recognition is assessed to media representations of asylum-seekers’ aspirations, asylum discourses rely on scenes of longing for specific representations of happiness. The chapter examines a cruel optimism that relies on neoliberal forms of happiness and achievement, which excludes LGBT asylum seekers from its very promise of hospitality. It ends with an analysis of an art project offering lesbian asylum seekers other means of expressing themselves than those offered in public arenas, and in doing so offers the means of self-reinvention and subversion of the hegemonic narratives of LGBT asylum. Notes 1 This book will use the term ‘public arenas’ rather than ‘public spheres’ in order to emphasise discursive practices rather than the mere conflict or opposition of different visions and discourses. Louis Quéré (1991) proposes a praxeological model where communication is a process organising shared perspectives, without which neither action nor interaction is possible. Public arenas are therefore not spaces where different definitions of social problems are in conflict, and where the most accurate representation of the world takes over. Rather, they are the meeting points of different horizons collectively constructing a shared perspective. 2 Repetition can have several forms, such as a simple presence, coexistence, latency, distanciation, concomitance, memory or heritage. Each of these types of repetition corresponds to the way the repeated statement is articulated in relation to other statements, in relation to time, in relation to criticism, etc. (Derrida, 1993; Fairclough, 1992: 32–45; Foucault, 1969: 57–99). 3 Asylum seekers do not have the right to work in the UK, they are therefore depen­­ dent on state benefits to survive in their country of arrival (Düvell and Jordan, 2002).

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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 16

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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.

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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 18

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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: 19

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‘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 20

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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 position to become collective actors (2012: 105). Here, the identification of sufferers, of a wrong that they endure and of the fact that the state can do something about it are the first steps in the formulation of a social problem of LGBT asylum. The centrality of death is not confined to asylum for LGBT claimants in particular, and ‘the decision to award sanctuary is often one that directly concerns issues of life and death’ (Farrier, 2013: 38). The biopolitical apparatus of asylum (in particular the various technologies for the recognition and discernment of truthful claims) is necessarily augmented by a necropolitical one: the means to achieve the decision are biopolitical, and the consequences of the decision are necropolitical. The notion of necropolitics is put forward by Achille Mbembe to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead. (2003: 40)

Narratives of cases about LGBT refugees, by repeatedly presenting the impossible queer futures of asylum seekers as containing only death, propose a particular arrangement of necropolitics characterised both in terms of its loci (a death-world of homophobia that follows them as they escape their countries of origin) and its temporality (the latency of the living dead whose death is impending). The temporality of the impossible future has two contradictory effects on the production of the UK as a queer haven. On the one hand, the dyad of broken past/impossible future works in representing the UK as the place where claimants can live their lives in a more authentic and less dangerous fashion. The two also correspond to the usual function of narratives in asylum claims, providing evidence for fears of persecution in the country of origin, and illustrate the peculiarly narratively centred regimes of asylum biopolitics. On the other hand, the decisionary and potentially exclusionary functions of asylum play a role in representing the liberal state as exerting necropolitical power over LGBT asylum seekers. The temporality of asylum as it is configured in these narratives sets the structure that debates between advocates and the state subsequently take at a more abstract level. Advocates tackle the necropolitics of LGBT asylum, working with representations of the death21

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worlds of homophobia in a constantly re-imagined and re-crafted geopolitics of homophobia (see Chapter 2 for practical examples with Uganda). At the same time, they criticise asylum’s biopolitics, working to contest the practical means of exclusion enacted by the state in its management of claimants (see Chapter 3 for a discussion of credibility as a site for such controversies). Staying and deportability The necropolitics of LGBT asylum are made intelligible through the narratives of suicides: the impossible return of the asylum seekers does not only involve the country of origin as a space of persecution (or execution), but death would happen in the UK were refugee status to be denied. Likewise, the status of the living dead is a latency that has as its sole horizon the asylum decision; a horizon that can be pushed back as far as appeals can go, but that is closely linked to the biopolitical process of decision making. In the participatory art project, Staying, two participants called House and Bin thus converse: – How is life treating you living in Brixton, compared with your home country in Africa? – I am not living yet. – What do you mean? – I am not living yet in Brixton, I am staying in Brixton. – What is stopping you from living? – I have to wait for the Home Office. (Ashery, 2010b: 3)

The act of staying is not a question of settlement, but one that illuminates the intertwined mechanisms of the biopolitics and the necropolitics of LGBT asylum. As Rachel Lewis (2013) puts it, this dialogue between House and Bin relates the experience of deportability of lesbian claimants. Waiting for the Home Office involves the complex biopolitical process that engages the state’s recognition capabilities to ascertain whether claimants are deserving and rightful: are they really LGBT, are they really at risk in their country of origin, etc.? Waiting is therefore a direct consequence of the biopolitical apparatus that manages the life of claimants, tries to know the truth about them and extends power over their sexual life. Another representation of this latency can be found in Parvez Sharma’s 2007 documentary about Muslim LGBT lives around the world, A Jihad For Love, aired on Channel 4 (Sharma, 2007). The documentary features an interview with an Egyptian man who claimed asylum in France after being prosecuted as part of the Queen Boat affair in 2001,2 as well as a group of Iranian men who fled their country of origin and were staying in Turkey, awaiting a decision that would let them go to Canada in order to claim asylum there. The section about the Iranian men revolves completely around waiting, a temporality made all the more poignant in that it seems to be mirrored spatially: they are seen spending their days in a room they share, not being able to settle or start lives because of the legal and administrative process they 22

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are all engaged in. They are shown talking about the lives they had to leave behind, phoning family members, with their only horizon being the UNHCR decision that might allow them to claim asylum in Canada.3 In sharp contrast, the section on the Egyptian refugee in Paris shows a process of settling; as we follow him opening the door of his first flat, he says: ‘For three years I’ve been staying4 with friends. Now, finally, I’ve found an apartment. It’s my new home. It’s a happy day.’ Later he buys pastries and then performs as a dancer in a restaurant, talking about his use of dance as a means of self-expression. The film makes the same distinction between living and staying as is apparent in Staying, and emphasises how latency and staying are the main modes of existence produced by asylum management. Waiting has for its horizon a life or death decision, a decision that distinguishes between the deserving and the undeserving, or to use Zygmunt Bauman’s words (2003), differentiates between ‘wasted humans’ (those humans of which there are always too many, cast away to the side of infra-humanity) and those who have the potential to be ‘recycled’ in the social body as potential sexual citizens, bearers of rights in that name. The intertwined processes of bio- and necropolitics can be understood as an ‘abjectifying technology of governance’; however, as Gill et al. note, these processes are not simply about discarding subjects: ‘with each act of desubjectification comes another attempt of resubjectification by both the state and political subjects themselves’ (2014: 375). Staying and A Jihad for Love, by distinguishing between staying and living, not only describe life under the threat of deportation, but also open up the question of what life might be beyond the horizon of deportability. What can one expect when acquiring the right to settle, when one starts actually living? In this respect latency is the backdrop upon which forms of queer optimism can be imagined, if by queer optimism one means a project of resubjectification where refugees may imagine what a good life might mean, and where the state and advocates compete over what a ‘good LGBT refugee’ – a figure echoing Carl Stychin’s ‘good homosexual’ (2000) – might be. Human rights justifications Discourses on the nation and the queer haven, on the biopolitics of asylum and on queer optimism all hinge, in one way or another, on the temporality of asylum as the repeated narratives of individual cases in public arenas articulate it. However, these discourses could not be deployed without an overall regime of justification to preside over the ethical and political questions that arise in the problematisation of LGBT asylum. Such a justification regime can be found in asylum discourses in LGBT human rights – they constitute a ‘city’ that is adjusted to the concrete forms taken by the management and subjectivation of queer migrants. In Boltanski and Thévenot’s work, the concept of cities has to do with justice, and designates a type of very general conven23

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tion oriented towards a common good and a universal validity (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999: 58; Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). When disputes oppose social actors, the operations of justification and critique involved in the dispute can be analysed from the conventions upon which they are based. This section argues that the state’s justifications, as well as the state’s critics in relation to the management of LGBT asylum, are based on LGBT human rights. In particular the neoliberal mode of governance, as well homonationalist representations of asylum that will be interrogated in the following chapters, are premised on the type of universalism and on the geopolitics of sexual rights that are implied in LGBT human rights framings. This section examines the case of Jojo in 2011, a young gay man from Syria claiming asylum in Scotland, and looks at how LGBT human rights, as the regime of justification of asylum, have effects on the political subjectivation of Jojo, the position of advocates and the presumed liberal readers of the news reports, and the shape of debates and critique of the state. LGBT human rights and asylum For Chouliaraki, humanitarianism is a historically specific articulation of cosmopolitan solidarity, which acts directly on the global South through specialized institutions (IOs [international organisations] and INGOs [international non-governmental organisations]), yet seeks legitimacy in the West through a communicative structure that disseminates moral discourses of care and responsibility. It is, in particular, the communicative structure of the theatre that functions as a form of moral education in the West, by mundanely mediating the fundamental moral claim of solidarity through a variety of spectacles of suffering. (2012: 27)

The author notes three important points: humanitarianism relies on strategies for action through specific institutions; it necessitates a moral engagement of the polity in the ‘West’ through the spectacle of suffering; and this engagement is mediated in public arenas. The use and dissemination of LGBT human rights discourses is relatively new, and found its clearest expression in 2006 with two international documents: the Declaration of Montreal and the Yogyakarta Principles. These two documents attempt to set the legal bases for the development of applicable principles of LGBT human rights and are often quoted – in particular the Yogyakarta Principles – when IOs and INGOs talk about asylum rights.5 In terms of interdiscursive strategies, and the use of an LGBT human rights framework in the formulation of the LGBT asylum problem, a few questions must be addressed. The first is to recognise that LGBT human rights are above all used in enunciative strategies that have emerged in the past twenty to thirty years – it was not a conceptual framing that emerged at the same time as the social movement of gay liberation in the 1960s and 1970s. As Kelly Kollman and Matthew Waites note: 24

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Since the emergence of gay liberation movements in Western countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, LGBT organizations have often framed their demands in terms of equality and/or liberation, but human rights discourses did not become central to national and international debates over gender and sexuality until the early 1990s. The engagement with a human rights frame has proven successful in opening the doors of powerful international organizations such as the European Union (EU) [...] and more recently shows signs of becoming a vehicle for access to the UN. (2009: 2)

This engagement with human rights targets specific institutions with the will and ability to be heard and put LGBT issues higher in their political agendas. It is also linked to the institutionalisation of LGBT organisations themselves, such as the ILGA (producers of annual reports on worldwide homophobia) which, according the authors, ‘remained a loose affiliation of disparate national groups until the organization embraced human rights rhetoric and began to focus more on professional international political lobbying in the early 1990s’ (Kollman and Waites, 2009: 4). Discursive strategies of dissemination and rapport building between INGOs and international organisations are exemplified by the 2014 ILGA report on LGBT human rights violations, which was launched by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights at Geneva’s Palace of Nations – while this institution was simultaneously awarded by ILGA the title of ‘LGBT Friend of the Year 2014’. INGOs thus deploy strategies to articulate their discursive production to the powerful apparatus of intergovernmental institutions: it can be through symbolic acts such as the report’s launch, or through the appropriation of the human rights discourses as a means to tactically reuse the grammar of the EU or the UN. These phenomena of repetition and dissemination of concepts and representations between large-scale INGOs and IOs have a normative effect on how different social movements and organisations, basing their enunciation on the repertoire of LGBT human rights, can formulate their politics. As Hakan Seckinelgin shows in interviews with activists around the world, for example, the use of such terms and acronyms as ‘LGBT’ is part of a strategy to use ‘the international language’ that gives them the possibility of funding and support, even though the people these local groups work with would be unlikely to identify themselves as, or use expressions like, LGBT (2009: 104). These normative effects are all the more important when it comes to LGBT asylum claimants, as mastering the terminology and the language of identity is crucial to the recognition of claimants and the formulation of the wrongs they have endured and how these can be redressed; this will be investigated in detail in Chapter 3. Human rights as mirror Jojo’s case was reported mainly in Scotland on Sunday and the Scotsman: most articles consisted of a short recap of his experience of migration and claim and then emphasised the ongoing debates following the judicial course of the case, 25

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with occasional recourse to expert speech (a ‘leading expert in Syrian Politics’, spokespeople of refugee and LGBT organisations). The reports all insist on how Jojo’s case is a question of human rights and, in particular, how denying him justice would also deny him his humanity. Jojo, for example, says that ‘they don’t treat [him] like a human being’;6 in the same article a spokesperson of the LGBT Network explains that the then Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, ‘has blood on her hands for the people like Jojo her department has deported’ (Maddox, 2008). The foremost rhetorical effect of human rights problematisation in public discourse seems at first sight to be the reliance on strongworded addresses by spokespeople to the state about its responsibility – most of Peter Tatchell’s speeches and public interventions are also representative of this type of rhetoric, frequently invoking high principles of universal morality and justice. Looking at the narration in Jojo’s case, however, the consequences of problematising LGBT asylum as a question of human rights are more ambiguous. In the previous section, I described how the viewer of Out There can be morally mobilised on asylum through both Fry’s direct expressions of emotion and his opinion that ‘we’ would share a collective responsibility to protect claimants. Recognising the importance of human rights as a way to understand LGBT asylum entails questioning the moral responsibility of the spectator. A critical tradition of human rights is epitomised by Hannah Arendt’s paradox that the loss of human rights happens at the very moment that the person becomes only human, that is without citizenship, profession, identity, etc. (Balfour and Cadava, 2004: 281); or, as Jacques Rancière describes it, ‘the rights of Man are the rights of those who are only human beings, who have no more property left than the property of being human’ (2004b: 298). One of the ways to think about the spectatorship of suffering involved in the narrativisation of asylum claims follows this paradox, and proposes that ‘in evoking the vulnerability of the body as the moral cornerstone of solidarity, critics say, humanitarianism should not, then, be seen as a noble project of cosmopolitan morality but as a crucial mechanism of the biopolitical apparatus of modernity’ (Chouliaraki, 2012: 40). Following Giorgio Agamben’s terms, the spectacle of suffering involved in the representation and narrativisation of LGBT asylum claims – with, for example, an invocation of necropolitics when Jojo explains that ‘they’ are sending him to death (Maddox, 2008) – produces distinctions between zoe and bios, casting LGBT asylum seekers in the domain of survival (Agamben, 1998; Farrier, 2013; Mbembe, 2003; Squire, 2009). Going further, Judith Butler notes: it is not just that some humans are treated as humans, and others are dehumanized; it is rather that dehumanization becomes the condition for the production of humans to the extent that a ‘Western’ civilization defines itself over and against a population understood as definitionally illegitimate, if not dubiously human. (Chouliaraki, 2012: 278)

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Alongside this division, the affective relation to the state in the LGBT human rights framing, that of moral denunciation, is an important means of self-representation and production of the liberal, ‘enlightened’ self. However, this subject, who is touched and cares about Jojo’s situation, is not necessarily operating from a highly abstract and political level. An article called ‘Grandmother who “just wanted to help”’ (Anon., 2008d), tells the story of a woman from Edinburgh who offered Jojo a place to stay for a few weeks. The grandmother is a signifier for the affective relationship of asylum as a human rights issue: here, the universality of LGBT human rights as a mode of justice transcends legal abstraction to take root in individual affect and subsequent action. Representing the citizen helping Jojo as a ‘grandmother’ also emphasises a depoliticised, affect-based engagement: in others words, alongside strong public discourses about the state having blood on its hands, an LGBT human rights framing can also give rise to an apparently depoliticised relationship between a suffering body and a feeling subject in the theatre of pity. Human rights as regime of justification and dissensus Beyond the strong words of advocates and the affective relationship of pity, a human rights perspective can have powerful effects on the way asylum can be discussed in public arenas, insofar as it is a regime of justification for public action. The first effect comes from the highly generalisable quality of human rights, producing analogies and comparisons between individual LGBT asylum cases and other injustices. John Wilkes from the Scottish Refugee Council uses such analogies, explaining: ‘If there was a law in a country that said you cannot be Jewish or a member of the Communist Party, would the UK government send them back to that country to be prosecuted?’ (Howie, 2008a). Here, by reusing other grounds for asylum (religious and political beliefs), Wilkes reasserts the equivalence of sexual orientation as part of the same group of fundamental, universal rights. The use of preconstructed discourses from the field of human rights is also exemplified by Stephen Fry’s commentary in Out There. Regarding the hangings in Iran, he explains that if antisemitism leads to Auschwitz, the hangings in Iran are ‘the supreme expression of homophobia’. Placing homophobia within a larger scope of human rights violations, he also contextualises the fight against homophobia in the UK in relation to the Iranian hangings: Although it sounds like political correctness, moaning about playground taunting and saying that it’s important that we show respect. This is why. Because ... because if you let words and insults go by unchallenged, if you don’t allow the dignity of gay people, then slowly these [camera showing executioners on screen] will be given freer and freer rein to do what they wish. (O’Brien, 2013)

The comparison of these experiences – the Holocaust, homophobia in Britain and Iranian executions of gay people – does not propose equivalence, but 27

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a connectedness where the domestic fight for LGBT rights makes sense in relation to human rights abuse elsewhere. The other effect of having LGBT human rights as the regime of justification for the problematisation of asylum is that a disagreement emerges between civil society and the state over who deserves rights, and what these rights are. All the articles narrating Jojo’s case revolve around dialogues and debates between on the one hand the state, and on the other hand Jojo and his supporters (the Scottish Refugee Council, lawyers, the LGBT Network, the ‘grandmother’), over the asylum seeker’s right to be protected. From this perspective, human rights are not Arendt’s overly generalisable rights that only apply to those who have no other quality than their humanity, but their universality is the starting point for previously excluded subjects to claim rights. Indeed, thinking of LGBT asylum seekers as bearers of human rights can be understood with the help of Rancière’s dissensus: ‘[Political subjects] are surplus names, names that set out a question or a dispute (litige) about who is included in their count. […] Political predicates are open predicates: they open up a dispute about what they exactly entail and whom they concern in which case’ (2004b: 303). The inscription of the right that takes place in LGBT human rights discourses such as the Yogyakarta Principles opens up a question about who bears this right. The formulation of the social problem of asylum also consists, in this respect, of a dissensual stage on which the question of what hospitality entails for persecuted queers is discussed. Rancière’s position allows us to think of the possible effects of LGBT human rights discourses in the emergence of the claimant as a political subject in the social problem of LGBT asylum. There are therefore two interpretations of the political effects of the framing of asylum as an LGBT human rights issue: on the one hand there is the production of a spectacle of suffering with biopolitical effects that insists on the asylum seeker’s affinity to death. On the other hand, the biopolitical process that ascertains the possibility of hospitality relies on a human right whose ‘strength lies in the back-and-forth movement between the first inscription of the right and the dissensual stage on which it is put to test’ (2004b: 305). To summarise, the prevalence of the human rights perspective in the configuration of the social problem of LGBT asylum is based on a strong legal and political interdiscourse between local campaigners for asylum rights and international institutions and normative evolutions making sexual orientation and gender identity into criteria for the evaluation of public policy. This relationship between the local and the general underlies a type of universalism that is essential to the homonationalist representations that the next chapter will discuss. Likewise, humanitarian approaches to the social problem of LGBT asylum facilitate the emergence of a theatre of pity, creating the structure for a particular affective relationship between liberal queers and refugees (as Chapter 4 will show). And finally, the tension in the dissensus over the subjectivation of LGBT refugees between their position as rights-bearers and 28

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their relegation as passive victim figures reflects the interplay between bioand necropolitics, hospitality and mass exclusion: a tension that cannot be maintained without great discursive and rhetorical effort. The question of the claimants’ credibility can thus be understood as crucial to resolving this tension (as Chapter 3 will explore). The position of the British liberal subject in case narratives: Mehdi’s case The repeated narratives of suffering that make sense of LGBT asylum all open up the question of the moral position of the reader – that is, with slight ­variations depending on the reading contract of the story, of the UK liberal reader who is interpellated by the suffering and desires to see ‘the right thing’ done in order to right these wrongs. In a context where humanitarian discourses have multiplied, where individuals are said to suffer from compassion fatigue and where humanitarian action is increasingly subject to scepticism and criticism, Chouliaraki proposes that the contemporary spectator of distant suffering is an ironic spectator. This spectator inhabits an ambivalent position between irony as a sense of knowing detachment and a dissociation between what is said to be true and reality, and the fact that the spectacle of suffering continues to call to us as moral actors (2012: 2–6). Many asylum cases indict the UK state, and in particular the Home Office. This is a way to negotiate a sense of collective responsibility that is also part of the configuration of the social problem, insofar as it calls on the state to solve the moral problem elicited by the way asylum narratives transform a spectacle of distant suffering into a domestic urgency. Looking at a prominent case helps us to see how the relationship between the state, the spectator and the moral dilemma is configured. This section examines how the narration of LGBT asylum cases organises a set of social actors who represent themselves in relation to the plight of a particular asylum seeker. Analysing the reports on the case of Mehdi in 2008, in particular in the Independent, this section argues that: (1) individual cases are the opportunity to produce rescue narratives with a focus on the saviours; (2) emphasis on individual cases allows for a case-by-case approach that excludes claimants; (3) the main acting characters in narratives are the British people helping Medhi, rather than himself, and he is denied many forms of narrative autonomy and agency; and (4) individual cases such as Mehdi’s are iterations of a controversy around what defines queer-positiveness in the UK, via a social problem that engages with fundamentally different issues than those pertaining to the recognition of sexual citizens (as in discourses on equality and marriage, for example).

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Rescue narratives The case of Mehdi was one of the most prominent in the media in the late 2000s: it emerged in March 2008 after the asylum claim filed by an Iranian student in Britain was denied by the UKBA and protest arose from activists as well as from MPs and Lords. This case shows how LGBT human rights are simultaneously used to explain asylum and actualised by individual asylum cases. The news reporting of Mehdi’s case is significant not only in terms of the quantity of articles published in various newspapers, but also because of its very rich interdiscourse with other related LGBT human rights issues and news stories. Mehdi was an Iranian student in the UK who claimed asylum on the grounds of sexual orientation; it was revealed that his decision followed news that his boyfriend had been hung in Iran. His claim was rejected at first, and he fled to the Netherlands and attempted to claim asylum there – although he could not because of the Dublin II Regulation and was sent back to the UK. By this point, his case had been picked up by a few social actors with potent access to public arenas, such as MP Simon Hughes, Lord Roberts of Llandudno, MEP Michael Cashman and activist Peter Tatchell. The case was reconsidered by the then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, and Mehdi was granted leave to remain a few months later in May 2008. This narrative makes for a good object of study as it involves a variety of enunciators, enunciative positions and a series of interdiscursive relations around LGBT human rights. The nodal quality of the human rights perspective relies on the repeatability of its claims in the asylum cases that arise in public arenas. In the case of Mehdi, this repetition is due to a series of recurrent events: first, the long-term production of Iran as a space for the violation of human rights (since 1979 and more importantly since 2001); second, the short-term influence of the nuclear crisis in Iran, and of the focus on Iran as an enemy of the US; third, the growing importance, since 2001, of the discourses on so-called ‘Muslim countries’ centred around gender and sexuality (Denike, 2010); and finally the interdiscursive memory of the hanging of two presumed gay young men in Iran in 2005. Each of these events and discursive trends has been covered over time in newspapers and has seen the inscription of several themes. The most notable one in Mehdi’s case is the 2005 hangings, which were widely reported in UK media. These hangings saw the establishment of what Rahul Rao calls rescue narratives (2010: 180). Rao, in his discussion of the hangings, compares these narratives to Spivak’s discussion of the British abolition of Sati in India as white men saving brown women from brown men, and states: ‘something similar seems to be at work in the contemporary eagerness of white gays to save brown gays from brown homophobes’ (2010: 182). The repetition of these rescue narratives for Mehdi’s case is the result of an interdiscursive memory that was triggered by the narrative structure itself. Indeed, before claiming asylum, Mehdi was described as being a student in the UK; it was the arrest, questioning and execution of his boyfriend in Iran 30

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that prompted him to claim asylum. The asylum narrative thereby had a direct link to the hangings, which allowed for an easy transposition of the rescue narrative. Asylum narratives already rely on the trope of rescue: the typical asylum narrative is about giving a safe haven to persecuted people – and the potential abuse of this gift. The consequence of the conflation of the asylum narrative with the rescue narrative is that none of the articles in the corpus studied for this case question the legitimacy of Mehdi’s claim. It is unanimously agreed that persecuted gay men should want to escape Iran, and that the UK is a safe place for them to stay. This consensus about the intolerability of Iran for gay men materialises in the widespread insistence that ‘we’ must not let people from Iran be deported back – as the titling of articles covering Mehdi’s case shows.7 Likewise, the same effect is achieved by the inclusion in some articles of an anecdote involving President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being laughed at by an audience of students during a speech at Columbia University in New York when he asserted that there were no gay people in Iran. This consensus is made all the more complex when considered in the context of the frequent problematisation of asylum as a continual threat of flooding. In this regard, Mehdi’s case owes as much to the aporia typical of asylum discourse (the impossible reconciliation of the abstract principles of hospitality with their conditioned practice) as it owes to the inscription of LGBT human rights as criteria to evaluate public policy. The case thus offers the opportunity for the opening of the gap between the problems of hospitality and those of LGBT human rights. In this regard, the case illustrates well the need for the actualisation of the principles of LGBT human rights into real cases, and in particular into easily disseminated tales of suffering. The emergence of rescue narratives exemplifies a removal of agency from the claimant: narratives do not focus on the difficulties and the efforts that asylum seekers have to go through, but rather on an act of saving that underlies the imagining of hospitality. This begs two questions: first, what is the impact of this moral configuration on the state’s obligation to help Mehdi; and second, what is the place of Mehdi’s helpers and supporters in the narrative configuration of the case? The contradictory effects of politicising individual stories: the case-by-case  approach Mehdi’s case is a narrative where state morality is at stake, and where two levels of objectivation can be observed: at a micro-narrative level, Mehdi is a victim produced as an object of sympathy in the reader’s gaze; and at a macronarrative level, he is objectified as the object of the quest (that is to say the narrative goal) for liberal subjects. Examining the case’s narrative conclusion (in particular the political solution chosen by the Home Office) illuminates the mode of politicisation offered by this type of narrativisation: the repetition of singular tales of woe in public arenas allows the state to offer a case-by-case 31

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approach instead of a more general solution to the moral conundrum created by LGBT asylum. Outrage gradually builds up in Mehdi’s macro-narrative, making the case a moral one – the culmination of this problematisation of his asylum as an ethical issue came when eighty members from the House of Lords wrote a letter to the government on 13 March 2008 asking for a moratorium on sending back LGBT claimants to Iran. Subsequently, Lord Roberts of Llandudno published a short article in the Independent, the newspaper covering the story most extensively, titled ‘There is only one ethical course for the British Government’ (Lord Roberts of Llanduno, 2008). This article begins by asking then Home Office secretary Jacqui Smith to block Mehdi’s deportation, and then rises in generality to review the situation of LGBT people in Iran and concludes on the need for a moratorium on deportations to Iran. In this instance, the political response to the individual story is a general action, one designed to save Mehdi himself, but more generally all Iranian queers. The argument for a moratorium is repeated in another article on the same issue called ‘Asylum: The Peers’ revolt; Their Lordships speak out: deportation to Iran must end’ (Verkaik, 2008a). Both articles characterise the Lords as moral subjects rebelling against the state, feeling the need to speak out. The episode of the Peers’ revolt is indicative of an individual story’s capacity to problematise LGBT asylum through the depiction of suffering. Two main elements can be noted in the trajectory of the storyline towards its culmination of sparking the revolt: the role of spokespersons, in particular Bermondsey MP Simon Hughes, Peter Tatchell, Lord Ali and the Lords authoring the letter. And finally, the shape of the event itself, which suited the episodic narrative structure of long-term news writing. This rise in generality from a particular case follows the idea that ‘empathy is a mode of understanding that includes both affect and cognition and “reveals moral problems” occluded by a reductionist legal rationality’ (Woodward, 2004: 64). Individual stories are thus able to reconcile the affect induced by the narrative repetition of suffering with the cold legality of the asylum process. Indeed, the Lords started their moral revolt precisely when the Dutch courts (where Mehdi had fled after his first claim had been refused) ruled that he be sent back to the UK following Dublin II regulations.8 The conjunction of these events emphasises the competition between an unfair legal rationality and a moral and emotional impetus. The Lords’ compassion is thus based on the ability to confront political rationality with affect. This confrontation gives birth to a general political solution in the form of a moratorium for refugees from Iran – a proposition that is equated in the Independent as ‘rethinking asylum policy’ (Verkaik, 2008d). However, the political response chosen by the government illuminates the potential faults of a case-based approach to political change in social problems. Indeed, Jacqui Smith and the Home Office, as well as the Foreign Office, reasserted several times how the only response possible was an approach on a case-by-case basis. 32

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The Foreign Office minister, Lord Malloch-Brown, thus explained: ‘We must reserve the right to deal with these cases on a case-by-case basis. That is at the heart of our whole approach to asylum’ (Anon., 2008e). Likewise, Smith replied to the Lords’ proposition of a moratorium by saying: We recognise that the conditions of gay and lesbian people in Iran – and many other countries – are such that some individuals are able to demonstrate a need for international protection [...] We do not, however, accept that we should make the presumption that each and every asylum-seeker who presents themselves as being of a particular nationality or sexuality, regardless of their particular circumstances, should automatically be allowed to remain in the UK. (Verkaik, 2008b)

This position shows how politicising asylum by emphasising individual stories calls for a case-by-case response from the government. Indeed, there is an interaction between individual stories on the one hand as the only possible emergence of the problem in public arenas, and on the other hand the solving of the aporia of hospitality: the state can practise human rights and exclusion at the same time, by showing concern in salient cases and by keeping the right to grant asylum as an exception. Singular cases such as Mehdi’s, configured in the media around narratives of suffering, therefore have two potential outcomes: a generalised one (a moratorium) or a particularised one (a case-by-case approach). The conjunction of the individualised representation of suffering as a personal journey, along with the mode of mediation of LGBT asylum as cases in public arenas, paved the way for the success of an approach based on what a UKBA spokesman called ‘individual merit’ (Verkaik, 2009). Mehdi’s case thus suggests that the insistence on individual stories as the main mode of intelligibility of LGBT asylum offers a way out of the contradiction of hospitality. Indeed, by making asylum a repetition of one-off offers each designed to solve a particular narrative of suffering, the state reserves itself a space within legality where it can negotiate its sovereignty over who can and who cannot stay. By granting the status to meriting cases, the state can keep the high moral ground necessary for the perpetuation of the homonationalist narrative, while never addressing the (impossible) universalist scope of its self-serving civilisational discourse. To sum up, tales of woe and individual stories of suffering are not merely specific types of intelligence that make sense of LGBT refugees through testimonies. They also offer a solution for a state that is embarrassed by the contradiction between its immigration policy and its claim to sexual modernity. Acting subjects and agency The Independent followed Mehdi’s case over a long period, offering a series of articles between early March and late June 2008. As a consequence of this, the narrativisation of the case is divided into two strands: the first one can 33

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be read in each article, self-contained within the piece, and tells the story of Mehdi’s fear of persecution and the progress of his asylum claim; the second strand can be read as it unravels across the series of articles, and tells the story of the whole case, from the failure of his original claim to his fleeing to the Netherlands to his final success after a reconsideration of his case by the Home Office. This second strand is grafted onto the first, in order to conceptualise the moral duty of granting asylum to Mehdi as a response to his tale of woe. In the following section I call the first narrative the micro-narrative, and the second the macro-narrative. Narrative analysis of the Independent will demonstrate how the morality of granting asylum to a gay Iranian is negotiated by a newspaper advocating this right. This section argues that the narrative configuration shows a double displacement: first from Mehdi as the acting subject of the story to a series of concerned social actors (politicians, activists, lawyers), who represent themselves in discussing and responding to the social problem of asylum. Second, the readers move from being indignant to denunciative: the individual case allows for a rise in generality whereby the personal issues and tribulations of a persecuted person in Iran become a potential moral failing on the part of the state. This movement is echoed in the Independent in the difference between the micro-narratives, which tell Mehdi’s personal story, and the macro-narrative, which tells the story of the claim itself. The two narrative strands interact with each other in the semiosis of the case, but do not focus on the same agents. Following an actantial narrative model,9 one can notice a stark difference in their narrative configuration, in particular in terms of their main acting subjects, as well as in their quest object (see Table 1.1). In the micro-narrative, Mehdi seeks refugee status in order to avoid persecution in Iran. This narrative, repeated in every article from the Independent, focuses on Mehdi’s plight, and is more often than not accompanied with descriptions of the persecution that would await him were he sent back to Iran. In the macro-narrative, the Independent represents itself as a supporter, and this possibly explains the way the macro-narrative – that is, the long-run narrative configuration of the case – does not position Mehdi as the acting subject, but rather a constellation of his supporters, including his local MP (Simon Hughes), MPs putting his case forward at the House of Commons, Peers doing the same at the House of Lords, or his lawyer. The temporality of these two levels of narrativisation shows an interaction between them: the micro-narrative that insists on the personal experience of Mehdi’s suffering is – narratively speaking – short term and consists of a brief story that is repeated in one or two paragraphs in every article. The macronarrative that focuses on the action of Mehdi’s support is a long-term story, and despite only being readable over weeks, the keys to its intelligibility are provided in the micro-narrative. In other words, micro- and macro-narratives are in a relationship where the object of the macro-narrative’s quest is ­justified by the 34

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Table 1.1 Actantial analysis of Mehdi’s case Micro-narrative

Macro-narrative (serial)

Acting subject

Mehdi

Mehdi’s supporters, i.e. Simon Hughes MP; MPs at the House of Commons; Peter Tatchell; the Peers at the House of Lords; the Independent

Sender of the acting subject

Living free as a gay man; fleeing persecution

Taking the right moral action, and forcing the state to recognise its moral duty as a queer-positive democracy

Object of the quest

Being granted refugee status

Mehdi being granted refugee status

Acting antisubject

The Iranian authorities

The Iranian authorities; the UKBA; Home Office Minister Jacqui Smith

Facilitator

Supporters (largely unnamed): activists and friends

Anti-facilitator

The UKBA; the Dublin II agreement; the Dutch Courts

Receiver of the The indignant spectator media narrative

The moral, denunciative reader

configuration of the micro-narrative. The shifting of the positions of acting subject and facilitators from the micro- to the macro-narrative illustrates the nature of the interaction between the narrative levels: Mehdi’s supporters, who are his facilitators when he is the acting subject, see his object of the quest as the grounds for their own object of the quest at the macro-level, when they have become the acting subjects themselves. In this regard, the object of the quest sees a rise in generality in the passage from micro- to macro-narrative: it extracts itself from its factuality (a gay man is afraid to return to Iran) to reach a political message (British people, including politicians and newspapers, must adopt a moral position and save gay people from enduring persecution in Iran). The repetition of the micro-narrative allows for the formulation of the ethical conundrum of LGBT asylum and for its ­resolution. Additionally, the interaction between micro- and macro-narratives leads to an interaction between their intended audiences. At first sight, the intended audience is the same for both levels, that is to say the Independent’s readership. However, in the storytelling of Mehdi’s suffering, the intended reader is addressed following what Boltanski calls ‘the topic of denunciation’ (1999: 57). For Boltanski, the mediation of the suffering of distant others can lead 35

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to several modes of relationship between the spectator and its object – ­denunciation being one of them. One of the first responses that the spectacle of distant suffering can elicit is indignation. Becoming indignant is the first step towards the elaboration of a response to the suffering other than inaction or ­indifference: Becoming indignant passes through pity, for if one does not feel pity why would one become indignant [...] But pity is transformed by indignation. It is no longer disarmed and powerless, but acquires the weapons of anger. It is in this sense that we can say that it points toward action since anger, which is an emotion of actors, prepares or – as might be said in Sartrean terms of a denunciation of emotional bad faith – simulates commitment in a situation in which it could be realised in actions. (1999: 57)

The articles’ micro-narratives seek to produce indignation: that is why they configure the tale of Mehdi (the unfortunate) in a way that makes him the acting subject. The intended audience is therefore the reader as a spectator of his plight. Conversely, in the macro-narrative the acting subject is not Mehdi, but a series of supporters of his case – the reader moves from being a witness of his plight, to an understanding of the forces that either persecute him or help overcome his misfortune. For Boltanski, the transformation of pity occasioned by indignation leads to a search for a persecutor. One of the characteristics of this search is that it is equivocal, in that the identification of a persecutor is not as clear-cut as the recognition of a victim. In narrative terms, the figure of the persecutor is harder to find, which in the case of a heterogeneous serial narrative like Mehdi’s means that it will change depending on the articles. Sometimes the persecutor is the Iranian state, and at other times it is the UKBA or the then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. Each presentation of a persecutor acts as a proposal of commitment from the newspaper, that is the binding of the newspaper with its readership in the potential denunciation of a culprit (Boltanski, 1999: 58). In this case, the macro-narrative offers several culprits to select from. However, all the persecutors in the macro-narrative offer a reading of events where Mehdi is not only a victim of the Iranian regime, but also of the British authorities who refuse to grant him refugee status. In this regard, the newspaper’s intended audience is a moral reader whose denunciation follows the ethical assumption that the UK has the moral duty to offer shelter to persecuted LGBT people. The positioning of the reader as a moral one is crucial to understand the use of the LGBT human rights perspective in the semiosis of an asylum case such as Mehdi’s. The two narrative levels of Mehdi’s case in the Independent illustrate a double use of victimised subjectivations. Indeed the micro-narrative makes him the acting subject, but nonetheless does not give him a voice. This type of narrativisation is depoliticising, in that it does not offer any other 36

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position for the reader than being the spectator of an injustice. In the macronarrative, Mehdi’s victimised subjectivation becomes the object of the political struggle for LGBT asylum. There are therefore two different types of objectivation of the victim: at the micro-level, the victim, despite being the acting subject of the narrative, is the object of the gaze of the reader – the unfortunate deserving pity; at the macro-level, the victim becomes part of the object of the quest and is objectified as part of the goal of LGBT asylum politics. The formulation of a debate around the social problem of LGBT asylum, articulating impossible futures and LGBT human rights rhetoric, is clearly expressed in an opinion-based piece published in the Independent that concludes the following way: […] are [the British authorities] merely worried that [Mehdi]’s case, even if completely genuine, even if refusal might lead to his brutal execution, would incite a great flood of genuine and bogus homosexual asylum seekers from every corner of the world which the country could not cope with? Is it entirely impossible that [Mehdi]’s case has been dealt with by officials who regard a 19-year-old homosexual, and the state of homosexuality itself, with frank distaste? It seems more than likely.   The trouble is that [Mehdi] is not, by now, a case or a precedent. He is a human being in a situation that we can thank God few of us will ever face. If the Home Office decide to send him back to Iran, they can congratulate themselves on having maintained their arbitrary rule about who does or does not qualify for asylum. Few of us, however, will congratulate ourselves on living, we discover, in a country whose officials hardly seem to notice any more when they have blood on their hands. (Hensher, 2008)

The article’s conclusion looks at the usual suspects of anti-asylum discourses, it acknowledges the specificity of LGBT claimants through the conception of intersectionality as multiple discrimination, and finally it solves the problem outlined via recourse to the notion of LGBT human rights. More importantly, the form of the denunciation here highlights the moral dilemma in which the British authorities appear to place the whole nation. Reading about suffering and calling on the British state to grant asylum is a way to appeal to a metaphysics of justice and a process of reparation. The potential failure of a rescue narrative opens up the possibility that the would-be saviour is aligned with the savage, especially when failure is the result of unwillingness. To sum up the narrativisation of Mehdi’s case, the main acting subjects are his supporters, and solving the social problem involves the resubjectivation of liberal subjects in their fight against the failings of the liberal state. Homophobia plays a double role: in its LGBT human rights dimension, homophobia is a worldwide phenomenon against which the UK ought to be a champion by becoming a queer haven. On the other hand, British homophobia is also identified in these narratives as a force that prevents this queer haven materialising. Asylum plays an interesting role in LGBT discourses as a 37

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counterpoint to the teleology of queer inclusion in the state: it poses different issues and problems than those tackled in the recognition-based politics of sexual citizenship, organised around concepts such as ‘equality’ or ‘love’ in the marriage debates. In asylum, homophobia comes back as a central concept but becomes a complex object that is inherently tied to imagining the nation, the legitimacy of the state and the political position of sexual citizens in a liberal state. The following chapters will investigate in detail the three ­categories emerging out of the narrativisation of asylum: temporality, which has implications for colonial imaginaries (Chapter 2) and for conceptions of queer optimism (Chapter 5); human rights, which is the basis for the various forms of universalism that permeate debates both in terms of political rationality (Chapter 3) and the affective relationship between liberal queers and asylum seekers (Chapter 4); and the position of liberal queers, which is constantly at work in asylum discourses, as a counterpoint to the position of asylum seekers. The narrativisation of asylum cases, through these three important features, circumscribes the limits within which debates are framed and thereby solutions chosen. These solutions will be explored in the following two chapters, around questions of tolerance and nationhood and the biopolitics of credibility. Notes 1 For example, there was much uncertainty about the events and facts around the 2005 hangings of two men in Iran – in particular around the reasons for their execution (Rao, 2010). 2 On 11 May 2001, three dozen men were arrested on the Queen Boat, a discotheque moored in the Nile. Human Rights Watch notes: ‘Over six months, the men’s names made headlines while their faces stared from newsstands. Homosexual conduct drew unprecedented, censorious, and salacious attention. Fifty-two men were tried before an Emergency State Security Court, one boy before a juvenile court. All were charged with the “habitual practice of debauchery”, and nearly half convicted’ (Human Rights Watch, 2004). 3 For information on the situation of claimants in Turkey, see Shakksari’s work (2014). 4 These words are based on the film’s subtitles. The sentence heard on screen is the French ‘j’habitais chez des amis’. It should be noted that the word ‘habiter’ denotes the idea of ‘staying somewhere/at someone’s’ as well as ‘living somewhere’. 5 For example, in the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) guidelines on international protection for claims based on sexual orientation and gender identity, the use of terminology is based on the definitions given in the Yogyakarta principles (UNHCR, 2008). 6 Other examples of the same register of speech include: ‘I don’t ask for anything – just safety. The government here does not want to protect me’ and ‘I came to the UK to have freedom, but unfortunately they don’t want me to be here’ (Howie, 2008b).

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7 The narrative configuration of the events of Mehdi’s case illustrates clearly the features of the LGBT Human Rights approach, and shows how the social problem of LGBT asylum is inseparable from discourses and representations of LGBT human rights. For example, the titling of the stories can be separated into different categories: titles describing the development of the macro-narrative (e.g. ‘Gay teen faces new battle to stay in the UK’); and titles describing why Mehdi’s case is a human rights one. The articles thus have titles such as: ‘Hang fear of asylum plea gay’; ‘No gay person should be sent back to Iran’; ‘Gay teenager is facing gallows as his asylum bid is rejected’; ‘Teenager pleads with government: “If I return to Iran, I will be executed”’; ‘A life or death decision’; ‘Disgraceful sexual persecution’; or ‘Iranian asylum seeker says he was “one step from death”’ (Anon., 2008a, 2008b, 2008c; Hughes, 2008; Syal, 2008; Verkaik, 2008c, 2008f; West, 2008). Titles are peritextual framings, and these give an entry point to the articles that insists on the humanitarian nature of Mehdi’s situation. In this regard, the constant iteration of his story at the beginning of almost all articles (fear of persecution and asylum claim) acts not only as a reminder of the story’s background for the reader, but also as the justification for the human rights reading of the narrative. 8 The agreement states that asylum seekers must claim asylum in the first country they have set foot in within the EU; in this case, it was the UK. 9 This model is based on A.J. Greimas’ structural narrative semiotics. His approach is based on the premise of the observation of regularities in narrative structures. Actantial analysis revolves around the notion of actant (that which accomplishes an act), whereby the actants of narration are subject/object, sender/receiver (Greimas and Courtés, 1983: 5). In the case of the analysis of media narratives: • The acting subject replaces the notion of character, and designates an actant with an object of value, a quest, motives, etc. • The quest ‘is the figurative term which designates both the tension between the subject and the object of value sought, and the displacement of the former towards the latter’. The quest is therefore the actualisation of the narrative in movement and duration. In this respect this analysis will consider the object of the quest as the goal of the acting subject (1983: 253). • The Sender of the acting subject [destinateur] corresponds to that which motivates the acting subjects to act. • The Receiver [destinataire], in this analysis, will not correspond to the Sender of the acting subject, but will be the Receiver of the media narrative, that is, the reader.

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2

Imagining a queer haven

In case narratives, asylum enables the righting, here and now, of a wrong committed there and then. The narratives thus link homophobia as a global problem with hospitality as a domestic quandary. The problem of asylum shifts from being understood within the conceptual apparatus of human rights to being conceived of within the question of the hospitality of the state, and in particular of its asylum legislation. LGBT human rights perspectives used in asylum narratives rely in some respects on equivalence: forms of homophobia can be compared or placed on a continuum of severity, and wrongs committed elsewhere can be righted in the UK. Asylum narratives articulate time and space into a world of the sexually modern or backward, erasing histories of attitudes towards homosexuality both in the UK and in the countries of origin and thus obfuscating the localised complexity of homophobia. In other words, asylum is a site for the production of a homogeneous history of homophobia: it is a process that simultaneously ontologises the social problem of homophobia and places LGBT refugees as the human means for the enactment of political teleologies about sexual modernity. Stephen Fry’s Out There, with its world tour of homophobia (a format that can also be found in several features in the Guardian, as well as in ILGA’s diverse publications and on their website) draws an implicit link between all forms of homophobia, and an explicit one during his interview with the asylum seeker from Iran. These discourses make homophobia into an object that can be grasped politically, that has clear victims and culprits and that has an apprehensible form. Asylum narratives are often articulated in relation to the question of history, in particular the UK’s imperial history, with the retention of British sodomy laws being regularly mentioned by news and human rights organisations alike, such as Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) report This Alien Legacy: the Origins of ‘Sodomy’ Laws in British Colonialism (2007). Likewise, in Out There, a ­discussion of asylum based on an interview with an Iranian claimant is preceded by an interview with a man from Sri Lanka at London World Pride who reminds both Fry and the viewer that Sri Lanka’s anti-sodomy laws are a remnant from colonial times. Asylum is partly conceived of in relation to colonial legacies: in the case of Out There, the passage on the sodomy laws 40

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precedes the one on asylum, and even though the two situations (Sri Lanka and Iran) are different, the link with the issue of the imposition of colonial heterosexist morality opens the question of the UK’s responsibility, and therefore of righting these wrongs through the issue of asylum. These reminders of colonial history insist on the way sexual teleologies change over time: sexual modernities are oriented towards very different futures in the colony and in the post-colony. Out There, just like This Alien Legacy, thus indicates the difficult formulation of the LGBT human rights discourse as a normative discourse that takes sexuality as its object. These rights sit precariously between the global pursuit of LGBT equality and an on-going civilising mission. Indeed, the sodomy laws that now brush up against LGBT human rights discourses act as a reminder that sexuality still constitutes a standard of distinction between the civilised and the barbaric. In other words, the structure of the civilising mission remains in place, yet it now focuses not on sexual propriety but on sexual tolerance and LGBT human rights. This historicised temporality goes against another temporality produced in these narratives, which results from the centrality of the theme of culture. In most stories, the cause of persecution in the country of origin is ascribed to culture: whether it be in descriptions of Islam as informing homo- and trans-phobia in the cases of Iranian claimants such as Babi, Mehdi, Hussein or Kiana, or from other countries such as Malaysia in the case of Fatine; or in descriptions of the homophobia of ‘the mob’, partly explained by Christian religion, in cases of claimants from Uganda such as Brenda or John. In most narratives, asylum is conceived through a combination of a culture of homophobia with international legal provisions, and focuses thus on the state’s unwillingness or incapacity to prevent persecution.1 Narratives usually allocate an important place to the state and its agents (with numerous stories of the police persecuting the claimants, for example); in certain cases, like Iran, the narratives give the state an originary responsibility in persecution, albeit one that is rooted in cultural reasoning as is the emphasis on the application of religious law in Iran. In other cases, like Uganda, the originary responsibility of homophobic persecution is more clearly ascribed to a culture of homophobia, and the state and its representatives are given the role of facilitators of persecution – the way, for example, President Yoweri Museveni or MP David Bahati see political gains to be made in making homophobic statements, or the way the police are characterised along similar lines as the mob, that is as opportunistic homophobes acting with the knowledge that they will not be punished for their actions. In either case, a culture of homophobia is closely intertwined with the actions of the state and of the mob as an explanation for homophobia in countries of origin. The widespread use of culture in the explanation of homophobia in countries of origin poses two related problems: first, the culturalisation of conflict and its attendant racialised representations of difference; second, the temporality of culture which displaces homophobia 41

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as a social and political problem linked to specific and localised conditions to a more ahistorical pattern, resorting to a certain fatalism in its representation. All these temporalities, that of the historicised post-colonial interpretation and that of the de-historicised cultural interpretation, coexist in tension in narratives of asylum cases. The relationship between nation and sexuality has been the object of study in a variety of disciplines, from history to cultural studies. They range from the critical investigation of bourgeois respectability and masculinity in the formulation of nationhood in George Mosse’s defining work, to heterogeneous accounts of the relationships between sexuality and nationalist discourses and projects (Kuntsman and Miyake, 2008; Mosse, 1985; Nagel, 1998; Parker et al., 1992; Pryke, 1998). The concept of homonationalism has attracted particular attention both in and outside of academia, concerning discourses on LGBT rights in the US and in Europe. With the concept of homonationalism, Jasbir Puar proposes that ‘the ascendancy of queer is not just coincidentally occurring in relation to certain racial politics but is contingent upon them’ (2008). A critique of homonationalism has been crucial in the formulation of unease about the deployment of LGBT human rights politics. The concept of homonationalism, as a specific form of queer complicity whereby ‘heteronormative ideals pivotal to nation state formation are now supplemented by homonormativities’, can be used in discourse analysis to describe the way asylum is problematised by various social actors, in particular in the political narratives found in the news and in advocacy. Following Puar, this book contends that the discursive interface between nationhood and queerness is not restricted to homonormativities, but encompasses a variety of positions: homonormative, queer liberal or queer diasporic. While the criticism of these complicities is important, the necessity for LGBT asylum seekers to become, or at least be recognised as, an acceptable and assimilable subject remains essential for their survival, hospitality being conditional on the ability of the guest to speak the host’s political language of identity (Derrida, 2000). This chapter examines the heterogeneous production of nationhood and sexuality around asylum. In order to understand some of these processes, I will follow Sara Ahmed in thinking about the nation, not through inclusion and exclusion, but rather through the question of distance: some strangers can be closer to the nation and some further away. This idea of closeness is particularly apt in the context of a multicultural state, where the nation is redefined through, and in, its integration of the stranger. Ahmed thus remarks: what happens to the nation when ‘strange cultures’ are not only let in, but are redefined as integral to the nation itself? […] in the multicultural nation, the strangers would come to have a place in the nation: this in-place-ness would be made possible given that the strangers, as in the case of immigrants, have already arrived from-another-place […] My analysis will examine how multiculturalism involves stranger fetishism: the act of welcoming ‘the stranger’ as the origin of

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difference produces the very figure of the ‘the stranger’ as the one who can be taken in. (Ahmed, 2000: 97)

LGBT asylum, I argue, must be understood from such a spectrum of discourses on multiculturalism and the stranger that simultaneously purports to be a type of absolute hospitality, welcoming non-Western queers, and produces LGBT asylum seekers as strangers that can be taken in, through a series of discourses on claimants, their sexuality and their countries of origin. Discussing queer migration, Luibhéid notes that the nation state is a site for reproducing and contesting regional, transnational and neo-imperial hierarchies (2008: 174). This chapter will look at how the social problem of LGBT asylum is configured within the scope of the nation state, and aims to unpack in detail the asylum discourses that conceptualise homophobia and attitudes towards non-heteronormative sexualities in relation to history, teleologies of progress and nationhood. I argue here that reimagining the nation around queer hospitality is based on erasing dissensus over what the content of the queer promise of hospitality really is: what does it mean to become authentic, live freely and find happiness in the UK? Towards what type of existence do the goals of queer happiness orient subjects? Looking at how the UK is imagined as a queer haven, this chapter contends that (1) homonationalist discourses need victims to actualise their narrative opposing barbarity abroad to modernity at home, and asylum is easily interpretable through this lens as it provides the victims of this barbarism. Consequently, victimised subjectivities are more likely than any other to be imposed upon asylum seekers by both the state and their supporters. In particular this impacts on what it is possible for asylum seekers to say, and the confinement of this to tales of woe. It also means that (2) LGBT asylum becomes an important strategic space for social actors to invest in, as it allows for the deployment of axiological discourses using sexual modernity as a criterion: political credit can be won by claiming to save those queers that are persecuted in their home countries. Likewise, being on the side of LGBT asylum may also allow some enunciators to appear advanced through defending a cause that is relatively uncontroversial (as a matter of fundamental human rights focusing on victims) and yet reproduces imperialist temporalities and projects. Finally and most importantly, (3) homonationalist discourse works on the assumption that queerness and race are fragmented, where one is the enemy of the other, and where queer migrants and queers of colour are either exceptions or victims. In the case of the social problem of asylum, this fragmenting has implications for the subjectivation of asylum seekers, where they are not just victims, but the victims of homophobia as racialised objects. Finally, this fragmenting also has an impact on the enunciative strategies that can be deployed by asylum advocates. In order to advance this argument, I will first show that, in LGBT asylum discourses, homophobia is differentially conceptualised depending on where 43

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it happens (in the UK or in countries of origin) and the British city is produced as the stage enabling queer lives that are represented as the more ‘authentic’ sides of racialised asylum seekers. Second, the case of Brenda from Uganda will be analysed in detail, looking at how asylum discourses formulate the culturalised geopolitics of sexual rights underlying homonationalist discourse formations. The chapter will conclude by looking at how homonationalist discourses, understood as a regime of justification for public action, are used strategically by advocacy groups to call the state to account. Homophobia between discrimination and persecution Examining the process by which homophobia is conceived of in asylum discourses enables us to question the apparent tautology behind Fry’s contention in Chapter 1 concerning playground taunting and hangings in Iran that, albeit placeable on a spectrum of gravity, homophobia is homophobia. What are the discriminating traits that identify homophobia as a wrong that must be righted? For most organisations supporting LGBT asylum seekers, the main problem is the discrimination this population encounters, in particular compared to non-LGBT asylum seekers. Indeed, part of these organisations’ work is to report in the public sphere the multiple ways in which most LGBT asylum seekers are dominated, especially in terms of sexual orientation, gender, race, ethnicity and economic opportunities. The main interpretative frame used by NGOs is that asylum seekers, after facing persecution in their countries of origin, now face discrimination in the UK. For example, Ben Summerskill introduces Stonewall’s report No Going Back with the following: ‘This report provides stark evidence that the treatment of one group of asylum seekers is materially less fair than that of others simply on the grounds of their sexual orientation’ (Stonewall, 2010: 2). The UKLGIG also explains, ‘lesbian and gay asylum seekers who are already experiencing persecution may also face discrimination in our own country’ (UKLGIG, 2010: 1). Descriptions of such discrimination are present in many reports, insisting on the difficulty for LGBT asylum seekers to integrate in the UK because of the homophobia they meet from the diasporic community from their country of origin – in particular in detention, in their relations with translators or in accommodation for asylum seekers. A good example of this coexistence is a 2009 report from Refugee Support and Metropolitan Support Trust, called Over Not Out, partly composed of interviews with asylum seekers about housing. In this report, perpetrators of discriminatory and persecutory acts are not the same people – the persecutors tend to be from the asylum seekers’ country of origin (or, at least, not from the UK), whereas the discriminators are usually the state’s services (in particular the Home Office).2 Over Not Out distinguishes between two types of discrimination: ‘The occurrence of anti-LGBT discrimination in UKBA asylum support accommodation can be divided roughly into 44

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discrimination from housemates (other asylum seekers) and discrimination from Home Office and property management staff.’ This statement qualifies both actions as discrimination; however, they refer to different behaviours. In the case of the bad treatment perpetrated by other asylum seekers, the reported acts are close to the descriptions of persecution in the countries of origin: attempted rape, violence, harassment, etc. The report contains multiple testimonies from asylum seekers: I was placed in Leeds [in UKBA accommodation] but felt isolated and two guys tried to rape me so I ran away and came back to London. Because I did not report it I was not offered any more accommodation again by NASS [National Asylum Support Service, a section of the UKBA destined at providing support to asylum seekers, including housing help]. PAKISTANI LESBIAN, 30–44 YEARS OLD While living in the NASS accommodation I have been called a bloody lesbian by one of the French girls; I just had to live with it [...] GAMBIAN LESBIAN, 30–44 YEARS OLD […] When I was in prison recently within the last 12 months I was working in the detention centre dining area and I was verbally abused by another Jamaican that I am not Jamaican but a batty boy (gay man) and this was done in the presence of 4 detention officers who reported the matter [...] JAMAICAN GAY MAN, 30–44 YEARS OLD. (Refugee Support and Metropolitan Trust, 2009: 20–4)

These are three quotes out of fifteen in the report recounting stories of abuse in emergency accommodation and detention centres. The most common narrative features other asylum seekers as the perpetrators of the persecution. Harassment enacted by other asylum seekers recreates the space of the homophobia of the country of origin in the UK. A consequence of the narrative is thus the implicit instantiation of homophobic persecution as something alien to the UK, something brought by migrants. In this respect, the state’s failure to protect LGBT claimants from persecution can be read not as active homophobia on its part, but as the inability to alleviate efficiently the effects of this imported homophobia. It is therefore clear that in the configuration of the social problem of asylum, homophobia is not a homogeneous concept that can be evaluated depending on its gravity. In fact, the heterogeneous definition of homophobia, which depends on space and origin, reproduces distinctions between spaces, cultures and political regimes. The rest of the chapter will delve deeper into such distinctions, and will argue that the social problem of asylum is largely configured following what could be called homonationalist regimes of justification based on a clear binary distinction between the tolerance and queer happiness that can be afforded by liberalism, and the death-worlds to which queers in the rest of the world are confined.

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The contradictions in representing the UK as a neoliberal haven An important part of the narrativisation of asylum cases lies in the description and representation of the UK, and in particular of London, as a space for the freer expression of asylum seekers’ sexuality. This process is extremely clear in a murder case that included a discussion of asylum from 2010, and shows two important things: the first is that the asylum seeker is divided between their race and their sexuality, whereby sexuality is deemed a more authentic side of their subjectivity. The second is that London, conceived of as the space for the liberation of the asylum seeker and for the cosmopolitan consumption of sexual difference, highlights an important contradiction in the promise of asylum: the neoliberal city – which is de facto based on the exclusion of those who cannot partake in the consumption and social practices it offers as ways to be gay – is also offered as the space for both the liberation and recognition of LGBT asylum seekers. The 2010 case featured a Saudi prince, Saud Abdulaziz bin Saud, who was convicted of the murder of his aide Bandar Abdulaziz in a London hotel. The prince is described in most reports as a gay sadist who killed his lover, and testimonies from people who met them in London (such as the staff in the hotel where they stayed) are used to prove that he is indeed gay. Murder stories in the media tend to be highly formulaic; therefore, identifying points where the narrative analysed diverges from the standard narrative can indicate discourses that are strong enough to disrupt well-established news-writing patterns. These articles follow the rules of the genre of murder reporting, which relies heavily on a narrativisation of events and on the characterisation of the different parties in the trial (in particular around the opposition of killer/monster versus innocent/victim) (Ambroise-Rendu, 2004; Dubied, 2004; Garcin-Marrou and Jamet, 2008). Many newspapers reporting on the trial, and when the prince was sentenced to jail, offered what might seem at first a surprising denouement: they considered the idea that the prince might have to ask for asylum in the UK, after his sentence is served, on the grounds of his sexual orientation. What is surprising here is not the idea that such asylum should be asked or granted, but the fact that no newspaper questions this possibility. The inclusion of his potential asylum claim in the narrative has variable outcomes depending on the publication’s reading contract. In the case of tabloid newspapers, the possibility of asylum builds up the case’s outrage, insisting on the incongruity of the situation in titles such as the Sun’s ‘Murderer prince to claim asylum; Bid to stay in the UK to beat Saudi’s gay death penalty’ (Wheeler, 2010). In this example, although the title insists on asylum, the article is about the murder and does not develop the asylum story along any explicit axiological lines. This indicates that asylum is seen here more as added value for the outrageous quality of the narrative. In the cases of other newspapers such as the Independent, which prizes itself in defending 46

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LGBT asylum, the inclusion of asylum in the narrative is not developed either. This indicates that the production of the prince’s identity as gay and of the UK as a safe haven makes the possibility of asylum more or less unproblematic on that account.3 In any case, regardless of varying editorial positions, this murder story is notable in that the genre of murder reporting typically leaves little room for ambiguity over who is the culprit and who is the victim. Here, the murderer, although obviously a culprit in the murder narrative, is also the victim of Muslim homophobia – an important part of culturalised discourses on sexuality, civilisation and religion.4 This characterisation of the killer as a potential victim of homophobia in his country goes against very strong narrative expectations, and indicates that the position of LGBT human rights, especially where it can be part of culturalised conflicts between ‘our’ values of tolerance and ‘their’ traditional values, has an almost doxical value. The main effect in the narrativisation of the murder concerns the characterisation of the prince, which is split between his race and his sexuality. The reports display complex narrative structures in order to reconcile queerness and religion in the ‘split’ subjectivity of the gay Muslim. The characterisation of the prince’s deviousness and perversity5 can be analysed as the consequence of the narrative structure of the murder story, which relies on the preconstructed tropes of the monster and the victim. Aside from these tropes, he is described as a somewhat typical Western gay man. Bin Saud is described as leading a homonormative gay lifestyle in London: it is narratively signified by reference to the prince possessing a gay travel guide, using the services of a gay masseur and male escorts, and direct reported speech from the masseur detailing the type of massage he had provided (Jones, 2010; Mathews, 2010). Likewise, the prince’s gayness is assessed and explained through a variety of sources, such as: ‘Hotel staff thought that al-Saud was gay because he colour-coordinated his clothing when placing it on hangers’ (Brown, 2010). Bin Saud’s gayness is thus easily identifiable according to homonormative representations. This idea is heightened in some reports by their reference to the prince’s fiancée in Saudi Arabia,6 as well as his position in the Saudi royal family. For example, the Daily Telegraph writes: Ostensibly in a relationship with a woman, Prince Saud bin Abdulaziz bin Nasir al Saud portrayed himself as an upstanding member of the House of Saud. A grandson of King Abdullah, he tended to his royal duties alongside his father, Prince Abdulaziz. However, when released to go travelling for three months with his manservant Bandula Abdulaziz, Saud was free to embrace a more ‘effeminate’ way of life. (Anon., 2010c)

In this quote, the prince’s split subjectivity is mirrored spatially: moving away from Saudi Arabia is the opportunity for the prince to move away from the patriarchal and heteronormative side of his subjectivity. The narrative lexically highlights which side of his subjectivity is to be thought more authentic, in 47

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particular with the use of ‘portrayed himself ’, ‘upstanding’, ‘tending his royal duties’ as opposed to ‘free to embrace’. In other words, his gayness trumps other aspects of his identity as less authentic, as an act of self-presentation. The division between sexuality and race is well exemplified in the Sun, writing on the lead up to the potential asylum request: ‘John Kelsey-Fry QC, defending, said Al Saud had already faced abuse from Islamic fundamentalists being held alongside him at Belmarsh prison’ (Wheeler, 2010). As in the descriptions of persecution in detention centres discussed in the previous section, for homophobia to exist in the UK it has to be imported (in this case, from ‘Islamic fundamentalism’), thus proposing a culturalisation of tolerance and making it the West’s exclusivity. The murder itself provides a way to narrativise these culturalised representations of homophobia in the description of the prince’s relationship with his aide and victim. The narratives frame this relationship as perverse, following tropes of queerness as deviance, and the long-standing abuse of the victim puts their relationship outside the realm of the rule of law in an exoticised master/servant relationship whereby the victim has no recourse to law to stop the abuse. Murder stories often propose to edify their readers – as if they had something to reveal about society or human nature – and the queer murder in this story, when it becomes an asylum story by the end, takes place at the junction of two consubstantial death-worlds: that of the perverted master/ servant relationship that is construed as both sexual and political; and that of Saudi homophobia that made London the theatre for these events. In other words, the description of the murder exoticises its violence as a queer death that is peculiarly non-British in its barbarism. Alongside these descriptions of the prince as a racialised monster, the ability to recognise him as gay relies on his conformity to certain homonormative behaviours – the London he is putatively experiencing with his aide is that of the Spartacus guide he is said to own in the reports. I would like to argue here that an exceptional aspect of this case lies in the fact that it makes explicit the class and economic relations that underlie the possibility of recognition of gay subjects as such. This is most evident in reports insisting that London is a playground where, as The Sunday Times puts it, ‘super-rich Arabs’ come to the UK to engage in behaviour they could only get away with in Britain (Henderson, 2010). The prince’s split subjectivity as a gay Muslim is mirrored by a dichotomy of spaces inscribing London as a queer space of sexual permissiveness, and Saudi Arabia as a non-queer space of repression.7 In the media narrative of the murder, being in London is what enables the prince’s queerness: London is construed as the place where gay Saudi men lucky enough to be able to travel can fully experience their sexuality – the latter being understood here as a homonormative set of activities such as clubbing, getting massages, etc. London is represented as a global city with an important gay ‘scene’, and the recognition of the prince’s gayness (and of 48

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his more authentic side) is based on his ability to be included in this scene. Bobby Benedicto, in his work on the gay diaspora from the Philippines, defines the ‘scene’ as ‘a loose assemblage of transformations tethered to (localizable) neoliberal mechanisms – including fashionable bars and clubs, gym franchises, glossy publications, Internet portals – and to the individuals given privileged access to such mechanisms’ (2008: 319). As Chapter 3 will show in detail, much controversy around the recognition of gay and lesbian claimants by the Home Office revolves around their assumptions that claimants would and could be part of such scene, disregarding the reasons (economic and racial in particular) why they might be de facto excluded from the scene in the first place. In Binnie and Skeggs’ study of Manchester’s Canal Street, gay villages are branded as ‘cosmopolitan’ as a means to promote neighbourhoods whereby difference is consumed as a non-threatening commodity (2005: 239). For the authors, ‘behind and within the articulation and desire for the fluidity of identity associated with the use of the term cosmopolitan, the rigidities of class and lesbian and gay identity are reproduced’ (2005: 221). In many asylum narratives, London is produced as such a ‘cosmopolitan’ space, where difference and diversity are simultaneously produced and consumed. This image of London serves as the background for the projection of potential happier futures for asylum seekers fleeing their countries of origin. London can thus be understood as expressing the ‘gay globality’ as Benedicto conceives of it, that is ‘a spatial imagination founded on claims and hegemonic representations driven by the market and sustained by a networking of (urban) scenes’ (2008: 319). However, most asylum narratives do not question the types of practices that living a freer, gay life might entail – happy stories focus, for example, on claimants finding partners and living openly, often in cities. This murder case illuminates that these vague happy goals in fact presume a specific type of empowered subject: the prince’s access to London’s gay scene is premised on capital (economic, cultural and social) and the city is a queer haven for him insofar as he has the means to be assimilated thanks to the international mobility and acts of consumption that this capital affords him. The movement of asylum from the country of origin clearly necessitates producing the UK as a queer haven. As this case demonstrates, representing this haven in newspapers actually highlights the ambiguity of thinking of ‘the scene’ as the space for gay assimilation and implantation: it is made up of the combination of culturalised representation of tolerance as a British value, and the embodiment of such practices of tolerance into localisable (in this case, London) neoliberal practices of consumption. These represent the ‘end point’ of the forced migration journey in typical asylum narratives, and I will now turn to the origin point and propose looking at the role of homophobia as a cultural marker in the production of the countries of origin as less-advanced nations serving as a counterpoint for the self-representation of the UK. 49

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Representing homophobia in Uganda This section will look in particular at the production of Uganda in the wellpublicised case of Brenda in 2011 and see how homonationalist discourses on asylum are based on an interdiscourse with LGBT human rights. In the previous section, I argued that the prince’s subjectivity was split between his sexuality, seen as more authentic, and his race and patriarchal culture, seen as a contradiction and a barrier to the free expression of his sexuality. Looking at the production of Uganda as the showcase for a ‘typically’ African homophobia, I will show how this process happens in more detail. Asylum discourses, by relying on this imagined geopolitics of civilisation and sexual modernity, provide a much-restricted spectrum of possible modes of subjectivation for asylum seekers, whereby they are victims of their own culture and intersectional identities are never understood in terms of complex interactions, but rather mere opposition or contradiction. Brenda claimed asylum on the grounds that being lesbian would put her at risk of persecution in Uganda. Her case was at first refused by the Home Office and by an Immigration judge, and was put before a Court of Appeal in 2011 as she was about to be deported. At that point, her case became much more publicised in support groups’ communicative networks and in mainstream media sources. Importantly, it set a precedent in relation to the difference between courts ruling on ontological grounds (whether a claimant is or is not a lesbian) and on questions of perception (whether one would be perceived as a lesbian and therefore at risk of persecution) (Lewis, 2013: 175). Uganda had already made the headlines for LGBT human rights abuses a few months before her case, when the Ugandan tabloid Rolling Stone published a list of alleged LGBT people with photographs on the cover of its 9 October 2010 issue. The paper titled ‘100 Pictures of Uganda’s Top Homos Leak’, accompanied by a caption saying ‘Hang Them’, and followed by two headlines: ‘We Shall Recruit 1,000,000 Innocent Kids by 2012 – Homos’ and ‘Parents now Face Heart-breaks as Homos Raid Schools’ (BBC News, 2010). This article was not the first of its kind in Uganda – another tabloid, The Red Pepper, had already published lists of alleged gay men and lesbian women in 2006 (Human Rights Watch, 2006). One year before the article in Rolling Stone, Uganda was also in the news for the treatment of its LGBT population when MP David Bahati proposed a bill to raise the punishment for ‘aggravated homosexuality’ to the death penalty (including for repeat or HIV-positive offenders). The law, of British colonial inheritance, already condemned people who ‘[have] carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature’ to a maximum penalty of life imprisonment (Human Rights Watch, 2007; Ottoson, 2008: 41). In most British newspapers reports, Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill was described as typical of the whole continent’s attitude towards, and legislation against, homosexuality. Bahati’s proposal to toughen already existing 50

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l­egislation in Uganda was thus construed as expressing a continental trend, and some newspapers took this event as an opportunity for a rise in generality, that is to say the use of the Ugandan example as a means to give a more general interpretative frame for the issue of homophobia in Africa.8 The combination of the salience of the anti-homosexuality bill and of the rise in generality had the effect of making Uganda the showcase for homophobia in Africa – in this regard the repetition of widely reported events (the bill, the Rolling Stone, Brenda’s case) aggravated this construction. Reports on the anti-homosexuality bill quickly linked it to the responsibility of the UK in upholding LGBT human rights on the international scene, especially in the Commonwealth; at a Commonwealth conference in Trinidad and Tobago, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown reportedly admonished the Ugandan president at the conference for his country’s treatment of LGBT people (Buchanan, 2009; Porter, 2009; Watt, 2009). In other words, the entry point of the event in the news was, from the beginning, both the (post-colonial) relationship of Uganda with the UK and the position of Uganda as one country with homophobic laws among many others within the Commonwealth. Uganda’s case was therefore unlikely to be interpreted as a singular event, but was understood within a general interpretative frame including the Commonwealth countries and the UK’s relationship to them.9 Finally, the last main reason for the salience of Brenda’s case is its co-incidence with the murder of Ugandan LGBT activist David Kato on 26 January 2011. The murder drew connecting interdiscursive lines from the asylum case back to the anti-homosexuality bill and the Rolling Stone stories – indeed, not only did his murder evidence the violence perpetuated against LGBT people in Uganda (as well as the failure of the state to prevent this), but he had been directly threatened by the article in Rolling Stone as he was one of the people whose photograph was published on the tabloid’s front page – for which he successfully sued them. The stories echoed each other, and Kato’s murder in particular made Brenda’s fears of persecution more urgent and understandable. These echoes materialised in articles as cross-references – in particular the use of Kato’s murder as an illustration of the risk Brenda would run by being deported to Uganda. The interdiscursive association of Brenda with Kato in this respect prefigures the importance that he has gained in British representations of Ugandan (and worldwide) homophobia. Rao notes indeed how he has been transformed into a ‘modern martyr’: the author explains that audience reactions at London screenings of the 2012 biopic Call Me Kuchu included ‘grief, reverence, inspiration, resolve’ (Rao, 2014); an award for global LGBT activists was also named after him, the David Kato Vision and Voice award (Wright and Zouhali-Worrall, 2013). Kato’s murder, by displaying the risks Brenda would face if deported, introduced a narrative indeterminacy concerning the justice of the asylum decision. The conjunction of Kato’s murder with Brenda’s asylum decision disrupted 51

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the established narrative of the failed asylum case. Newspapers positioned themselves along one of two main narrative lines. Those sympathetic to her cause usually featured more details about Kato’s murder, thus insisting on the risks of deportation and focusing attention upon how unjust the asylum decision was (McVeigh, 2011a, 2011b). Less sympathetic newspapers barely mentioned the murder, insisting instead on the fact that the court had ‘determined’ Brenda was not a lesbian (Barrett, 2011; Wells, 2011). This conjunction of events shows first how interdiscursive memory impacts upon the way cases are understood; and second how choosing to draw from this interdiscourse or not can be part of the newspapers’ strategy. Events that precede or are contemporary with the reported story thus have an effect that is contingent, although manipulable by the newspapers. The newspaper reportage of Brenda’s case is therefore the product of a number of pre-constructed representations of African homophobia that were already circulating in the media but were activated by Kato’s murder. The wide circulation of Brenda’s asylum case has two dimensions: the first is that the pre-existence of such a narrative and conceptual framework eases the symbolic work of newspapers and their readers and makes the story all the more repeatable. The second is related to the specific position of Uganda in relation to LGBT rights in British public arenas; Tavia Nyong’o argues that Uganda has become an ‘attractor of imaginary identities gathered around a “world outcry”’ (2012: 50). In the context studied by the author, around online petitions and advocacy outlets such as Avaaz.org, this outcry is organized around what might happen or may already be happening in Uganda, that is, around temporal uncertainty, and we are urged to invest affect to the extent that we remain uncertain. How could it possibly hurt, after all, to quickly express our indignation to President Yoweri Museveni for presiding over plans to execute gays? It’s less important that we truly understand the situation and believe in the efficacy of this action than it is to believe that someone believes in it. (Nyong’o, 2012: 50)

This analysis draws a link between the fantasies sustained by the universalising trans-history of homonationalist narratives of queer liberation and a type of activist passivity where action is not based on knowledge but on a short-term (and repetitive, in the case of Uganda) affective investment that delegates the question of efficacy to an intermediary in the outrage (in Nyong’o’s analysis, the internet platform). This analysis prompts us to think about how an asylum case like Brenda’s, taking place within such a chain of events, narratives and outrage, can engage readers and subjects through the fantasies propped up by homonationalist discourses. I will thus distinguish, in the following sections, two aspects of queer hospitality: (1) the idea that in asylum discourses, homonationalism props up a gay imaginary about sexual citizenship and the relationship between LGBT people and the rights-giving 52

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state; (2) that homonationalism is a discursive strategy available to advocates, but has strong limitations in relation to the multiple issues faced by asylum seekers considering their economic and social subjection, or to deportation, for example. Advocates thus need to establish simultaneous and somewhat contradictory discourses. The culturalisation of conflict It is clear that an asylum case such as Brenda’s is constructed on top of an existing series of discourses and events producing a geopolitics of sexuality – the individual asylum case is combined with this interdiscourse and enriches it. The asylum seeker thus plays a mediating role between the distant suffering of international LGBT human rights and the domestic issue of queer hospitality. To see clearly how the international and domestic levels are discursively coextensive, one can look at the way the campaigns of internet-based advocacy platforms, such as AllOut.org, alternate between informing and mobilising around international issues (relative to homophobia around the world) and calling for action (usually donations and petitions) on local asylum cases. I would like to claim here that the principal effect of this structure on the social problem of LGBT asylum is to configure the different social actors in relation to each other: the act of hospitality creates saviours, savages and victims, and it hinges on a particular conception of tolerance as a cultural trait. The consequence of this way of formulating the social problem is that LGBT human rights and asylum are removed from the concrete and local conditions in which homophobia is produced both in the UK and the countries of origin. In this environment, the politics of solving the social problem revolve around abstract questions about culture, calling for universalising discourses of rejection and condemnation that take the place of a debate about the political means for making LGBT asylum seekers’ lives more liveable and less precarious. Whether it is in the constitution of Brenda as a powerless victim of both Ugandan homophobia and the Home Office’s bad decision making, the martyrdom of David Kato or the numerous reports about the anti-homosexuality bill, it appears that asylum narratives, in their articulation with news about instances of homophobia in the global South, configure the social actors into specific characters. The position of LGBT refugees in human rights discourses participates in what Makau Mutua (2001) calls the Savages, Victims, Saviours (SVS) metaphor of human rights. For the author, the narrative of human rights is configured around this triple metaphor which opposes the savages (perpetrators of the human right violation), the victims (persecuted people) and the saviours (the human rights activists, Western states or transnational organisations tackling the human rights issue). In this model, the LGBT refugee, embodying the victim, mediates the relationship between savages and saviours. In other words, LGBT refugees are the centre of attention 53

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in the sexual politics of human rights since they are the indispensable victims allowing for the (narrative) production of the civilisational discourse of LGBT human rights, which is based on a world opposing modernity (secularism, sexual freedom) and barbarism (fundamentalism, sexual repression). Mutua’s metaphor clarifies the notion of culturalisation of political conflict. He describes how the state is represented in what he calls the ideology of human rights: The state only becomes a vampire when ‘bad’ culture overcomes or disallows the development of ‘good’ culture. The real savage, though, is not the state but a cultural deviation from human rights [...] The state itself is a neutral, passive instrumentality – a receptacle or an empty vessel – that conveys savagery by implementing the project of the savage culture. (2001: 203)

Savagery, the normative inferiority of those who have no or the wrong culture, is understood as a deviation from human rights. In this respect, human rights shift from being a legal framework to a culture, and the SVS metaphor is a way of conceiving of discourses on human rights violations as culturalised. LGBT human rights, insofar as they are a series of ethical, political and legal injunctions associated to specific institutions, become the expression of how advanced a culture is. On the one hand, the culture of human rights espouses political and legal rationality, and a state whose legitimacy is based on its ability to uphold these rights. On the other hand, the state in the country of origin, in its inability to defend LGBT people (either because it is weak, or because it strays away from human rights), lets savagery take hold. This metaphor is apt at describing the way culturalised discourses erase and obfuscate political questions and relations of power inherent to human rights understood in their institutional exercise, in the process of claiming rights, organising civil society, protesting for and against rights, etc. In culturalised discourses of asylum, refugees who ask for hospitality enable the representation of rights as culture. Refugees asking for hospitality enable the representation of rights as culture, where culture is transmitted much like genes, ‘uncontaminated and unweakened’ (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991; Billig, 1995: 71). This culture of human rights has implications for the agency of subjects, as shown by a call for action in LGBT Asylum News, an internet-based outlet that combines advocacy with a blog that provides information on LGBT asylum cases in Britain10 (and more general information about LGBT human rights around the world). The group published a petition to Home Secretary Theresa May to halt the deportation of a Nigerian asylum seeker: As before, Uche just wants his voice to be heard. He is gay, all of his friends know him to be gay. Yet, he has been forced to live in an environment where he is afraid to admit his homosexuality and has no freedom. He would like the government to remember that he is a human being and deserves a second chance to live his life in peace, without the threat of torture or worse in Nigeria, which is the reality he faces if deported. (Canning, 2011)

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As a gay man, Uche is presented as simply being born in the wrong place: ‘forced to live’ in a place where homophobia is prevalent. In the same entry as the one presenting the petition, the website provides an example picked from an unknown online source for these ‘violent homophobic attitudes in Nigeria’: Yes he will be killed jo!... Not that I personally condone killing ... but the reality is that we still live in a culture and environment where such is GREATLY frowned at! [...] okada boys/area boys will strip him naked and put tire on his head and parade him ... and who will stop them ... NOBODY!!!! (Canning, 2011)

Beyond the evidential value conferred by the reported speech, this quote illustrates the idea that people in Nigeria are subordinate to their homophobic culture. The hope for the moral autonomy of the subject is negated in the second sentence: the enunciator does not condone killing LGBT people, but there seems to be no choice in a country where the culture is homophobic. Wendy Brown, following Mamdani, notes: the ideological culturalization of politics does not uniformly reduce all conflict or difference to culture. Rather, ‘we’ have culture while culture has ‘them’, or we have culture while they are culture. Or, we are a democracy while they are a culture. This asymmetry turns on an imagined opposition between culture and individual moral autonomy, in which the former vanquishes the latter unless culture is itself subordinated by liberalism. (2006: 150–1)

The subjectivation of LGBT refugees as victims is therefore dependent on the culturalisation of LGBT human rights as a political conflict opposing progressive cultures and barbaric ones. In this narrative, the state itself does not assume the role of an acting subject, but rather as either a facilitator or an opponent of the acting subject in her/his quest. This narrative role of the state is quite clearly illustrated by Amnesty International’s LGBT Network, which defines its role as ‘[to challenge] governments and state authorities to fulfil their responsibility to protect LGBT people from [...] abuse’ (Amnesty International, 2011: 11). In the SVS configuration of LGBT human rights, the real enemy is the barbaric culture of the country of origin, and the state is seen as a tool for social change, rather than as an acting subject in the narrative of homophobia. This emphasis on culture is not only problematic in relation to the countries of origin, but also in the discourses about homophobia being ‘imported’ into the UK by migrants. In the context of the multicultural state, David Eng astutely notes in The Feeling of Kinship that there is a certain hypocrisy in culturalist arguments demonising racialised cultures and their pathological cultural values of homophobia, excluding the so-called intolerant and uncivilised from the nation state and civil society through a language of citizenship and rights guaranteeing gay and lesbian liberty. He explains, ‘in short, the production of queer liberalism and the discourse of racialized immigrant homophobia are two sides of the same liberal coin’ (2010: 33). 55

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The culturalisation of political conflict gives a central position to the concept and the practise of tolerance. As Brown notes, When political or civil conflict is explained as a cultural clash, whether in international or domestic politics, tolerance emerges as a key term […] the culturalization of conflict makes cultural difference itself into a (if not the) salient site for the practice of tolerance or intolerance. (2006: 150)

Not only is tolerance culturalised, but this culturalisation has direct consequences on the available enunciative strategies in relation to tolerance. In other words, the questions of fighting intolerance, teaching tolerance or creating spaces for tolerance are framed as passing through culture. Homophobia is thereby first framed as a form of intolerance, and second as a problem within specific cultures. In these conditions, culture becomes the site for the deployment of strategies around the question of homophobia – where competing discourses in public arenas will be deemed either as culturally eurocentric or as cultural relativism. LGBT asylum becomes the site for the mise en scène of cultural difference, where culture is invested by race. These positions are based on different discursive formations and each imply blind spots which require critical investigation. Sexed configurations of nationalism Brenda’s case thus shows that asylum is integrated with a larger interdiscourse about sexual rights, articulating the domestic and the international through an ethics of tolerance that is strongly culturalised and understood as the marker of sexual modernity. It is from these premises that discourses on nationhood – both in Uganda and in the UK – are produced, with the consequence of framing the discussion of asylum within the confines of nation-based imaginaries. The use of tolerance as a marker of differentiation between the UK and Africa is perhaps best illustrated by the position of the Sun, which is usually rather sceptical in its reporting of domestic LGBT issues,11 using the register of obviousness in its reports about LGBT rights in Uganda. Indeed, for Brenda’s case, the newspaper focused its negative reporting on the cost generated by asylum seekers in the UK, but also reported neutrally about the dangers of being gay in Uganda (Wells, 2011). As a matter of fact, even in an article where the tabloid was denouncing LGBT asylum rights, it assumed that it was natural that LGBT people would be better off in the UK, basing its denunciation on the subsequent cost of adopting such a measure and relying on the trope of the flood of unwanted migrants: ‘62m more gays just don’t add up’ (McKenzie, 2010). Likewise, in its reporting of the anti-homosexuality bill, the tabloid’s opinion aligns with Gordon Brown’s in its use of indirect speech: ‘He told the country’s president Yoweri Museveni at the Commonwealth summit in Trinidad and Tobago the sickening plans were unacceptable’ (Anon., 2009). LGBT human rights are not questioned by the Sun here: the generic criticism 56

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of asylum (cost, bogus claims etc.) indicates the acceptance of the validity of LGBT claims. Enunciative strategies are elaborated in relation to queerness by a variety of enunciators in public arenas. Brown’s Commonwealth summit condemnation casts the UK as a champion of LGBT rights. Conversely, nationhood was also produced in discourses about sexuality in Uganda at the time. For example, the typical homophobic image of recruitment was widely used, such as by local newspaper Rolling Stone, and Europeans were said to be recruiting in Africa in President Yoweri Museveni’s speeches in particular (Rice, 2009). Similarly, MP David Bahati, the politician proposing the bill, said: ‘You can’t tell me people are born gay. It is foreign influence that is at work’ (McVeigh et al., 2009). Bahati also stated that his aim with the bill was to ‘protect the cherished culture of the people of Uganda against the attempts of sexual rights activists seeking to impose their values of sex promiscuity on the people of Uganda’. Bahati’s quote illustrates well how Ugandan official discourse was enunciated as a tactical response to LGBT rights discourses, in both the form of the address (a refutation) and the reference to widespread definitions of sexual rights adopted by transnational organisations (people are born gay). Bahati’s speech does not contest the use of queerness as a criterion of differentiation, but rather offers another axiological reading of what LGBT rights may mean. In other words, he asserts an original position towards LGBT rights (not recognising them is protecting Uganda’s ‘cherished culture’), and by doing so sanctions queerness as an issue in Uganda’s relationship with the UK. This position is best expressed by Uganda’s ethics and integrity minister, when he claimed that the bill would ‘provide leadership around the world’ (Watt, 2009). These discourses were not new at the time: they are the repetition of existing positions which have been analysed by Neville Hoad in African Intimacies. The author shows that already in 1995 Robert Mugabe, banning the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Zimbabwe from the Zimbabwe International Bookfair, attacked homosexuality as a decadent Western import (2007: 72). This rejection of claims made by LGBT local movements was also seen elsewhere in the subcontinent, with hostility being expressed along nationalist lines. Conversely, local LGBT activists are also keen to remind politicians that the ‘Africanness’ they promote could be interpreted as a relic of Victorian morality. When dealing with nationalist arguments in Uganda – those in the UK will be critiqued in detail later in this chapter – it is useful to remember Hoad’s call in his own study for avoiding both ‘the Scylla of cultural nativism (the homophobia of the Southern African state) and the Charybdis of cultural universalism (the gay white missionaries in travelling armchairs)’ (2007: 71). In Hoad’s analysis, these nationalist discourses emerge from a contradictory nexus: ‘the emergent nation must simultaneously posit itself as the vehicle of economic and cultural progress – in short, as the agent of modernity – and as the custodian of a fixed (in all senses of the word) identity confer57

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ring pre-colonial past – in short, as the repository of tradition’ (2007: 75). Modernity and tradition are reified in this process of self-representation, and the existence of same-sex desire in pre-colonial Uganda thus has great significance for the production of nationalist discourses in relation to sexuality. One event in particular, the killing of pages by the King of Buganda in 1886, the largest pre-colonial kingdom in the region, involved questions of sexuality as the pages were Christian and according to colonial history allegedly refused to have sexual liaisons with the king. Whether this story is true or not has been debated by scholars, including Neville Hoad. What is interesting in the scope of this study, though, is the way this memory is conjured today in Uganda. Rao has demonstrated how the sexual reading of the story (as opposed to a reading insisting on their faith, for example) is predominantly absent; in the rare cases where sex is mentioned, ‘it tends to be dealt with through discursive moves of displacement, containment, negation or some combination thereof ’ (2014: 15). The sexualisation of the narratives, according to Rao, coincides with the increasing salience of homophobia from the early 2000s, where both anti-homosexuality campaigners and sexual rights activists have been engaged in the production of sexualized narratives of the martyrdoms, albeit with diametrically opposed political objectives. For anti-homosexuality campaigners, the martyrdoms tell the story of brave Christians who refused to submit to the perverse demands of their Kabaka [king]. In an interesting paradox, kuchu activists have begun to explore multiple possibilities for identification in the narrative of the martyrdoms: Mwanga [the king] is evidence that same-sex desire is indigenous, while the martyrs provide an inspiring model of courage and self sacrifice in the face of tyranny. (2014: 15)

These examples show the amount of discursive work that is deployed in articulating sexuality with the nation. It is in a discursive environment displaying such strategic positions that Brenda’s case can be placed in its interdiscourse, especially in relation to the way LGBT rights are used by politicians in Uganda and the UK to assert some form of national identity. Religion and the Church are also important in the semiosis of Brenda’s case. Religious homophobia is characterised as the expression of cultural backwardness, which is signified by the direct mention of the Church as an explanatory factor for Uganda’s homophobia (the same process can be witnessed for countries with a Muslim population) or by the use of reported speech of religious leaders, which are thus indirectly represented as explanations for the whole situation (Rice, 2009). That is the case, for example, of the Interreligious Council of Uganda, who ‘demanded diplomatic ties be severed with “ungodly” donor countries, including the UK, Sweden and Canada, who are “bent on forcing homosexuality on Ugandans”’ (McVeigh et al., 2009). In this case not only is religion shown to be an explanatory factor for homophobia in Uganda, but it is also set as an actor in the use of homosexuality as what distinguishes ‘us’ from ‘them’. More importantly, the Church itself also features 58

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in the asylum case as a marker of the progressiveness of the UK. This position is illustrated by the then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ plea for LGBT asylum seekers, made in response to both Kato’s murder and Brenda’s impending deportation: No one should have to live in such fear because of the bigotry of others ... This is a moment to take very serious stock and to address those attitudes of mind which endanger the lives of men and women belonging to sexual minorities. (Butt, 2011)

Williams fights bigotry and by extension presents the English branch of the Anglican Church as progressive on the matter of sexuality. The effect of the differentiation induced by this comment is double: first, it contrasts with the religious reasons given for Uganda’s homophobia – suggesting that in the UK even the Church is queer-positive. Second, the enunciator himself also creates a form of interdiscursive continuity: the fact that Williams speaks up links Brenda’s case to the debates that took place a year before between the African and English branches of the Anglican Church on the issues of LGBT rights and the ordination of women, and marks the relevance of gender and LGBT rights as criteria of differentiation between Africa and the UK. Long before that, homosexuality was already a factor of division within the Church of England during the 1998 Lambeth Congress, when African bishops sponsored an amendment condemning homosexuality. The subsequent debates between bishops, including for example the concerns of the bishop of New York that such amendment would be ‘evangelical suicide in [her] region’, are analysed by Hoad as a visible ‘shift in the hegemonic constituents of the Anglican Church as a global church […] A metropole or centre is quite literally provincialized’ (2007: 65). This process is interestingly reversed, or annulled in the case of the interdiscourse opened by Williams’ remarks, as the asylum case becomes the opportunity for reasserting the progressive (teleologically modern) values of the Church in England. Nationhood and hospitality This final section will look in more detail at the question of hospitality and propose that the potential inclusion of LGBT asylum seekers hinges not merely on a moral obligation (that to relieve distant suffering) but also on the state’s need for the immigrant’s ‘desire for the nation’ (White, 2013). Accepting this desire as valid, the state combines an existing heteronormative governance of migrants with a homonormative one, based on the inclusion of recognisable gay and lesbian subjects. Looking at the logics of imagining the nation through the act of welcoming LGBT refugees, I also wish to reiterate the idea that, in UK public arenas, a crucial part of the symbolic and political work in the configuration of the social problem has to do with representing ‘ourselves’ 59

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and the UK. It is indeed from this work of self-representation that one can think about the way policy and biopolitics are conducted (Chapter 3) and how the respective affective and political positions of asylum seekers and liberal queers are positioned (Chapters 4 and 5). In this section I look more precisely at how homonationalist discourses function to craft an image of the UK, and more importantly form the basis for what could be called a homonationalist regime of justification for public action in the social problem of asylum. The culturalisation of the politics of tolerance, whereby liberalism is aligned with civilisation, allows for a temporalisation of the politics of sexuality where the West is the telos and where non-Western countries are deemed pre-modern (Brown, 2006: 199; Butler, 2008). This temporalisation of sexual politics is particularly interesting in the case of LGBT asylum since asylum seekers, because of their spatial and temporal journey (to the West, and towards modernity), come to embody the teleology of LGBT human rights. Time has been a recurrent concern in all the narratives and discourses examined so far. In Chapter 1, I discussed the temporality of the impossible futures: LGBT asylum seekers, inscribed in necropolitical assemblages, can only see queer futures opening to them through the hospitality offered by the rescue narratives. Conversely, this chapter has looked at the temporality of sexual modernity, a teleology that simultaneously justifies and is reinforced by LGBT human rights discourses, and where asylum provides the means for the reproduction of culturalised representations of the world divided into the civilised and the barbaric, the tolerant and the intolerant. LGBT asylum seekers themselves are the objects and the subjects that allow a mediation between the individuated12 time of the impossible future and the historical time of sexual modernity. In order to understand how discourses on nationhood can emerge out of LGBT asylum, this temporal articulation must first be clarified. Sexual modernity, with its assurance that there is a common future for everyone and that the UK (and other tolerant nations) are already there, fits neatly with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s analysis of the ‘waiting room of history’. For the author, the historical time of development and civilisation has been used in (post-)colonial discourse to respond ‘not yet’ to the demands of anti-colonial nationalisms insisting on the ‘now’: ‘that was what historicist consciousness was: a recommendation to the colonized to wait’ (2008: 8). In this political imaginary of LGBT asylum, the rescue of persecuted subjects from their countries of origin continually reasserts the distance that separates, in time, them from us; as Chakrabarty explains ‘it could always be said with reason that some people were less modern than others, and that the former needed a period of preparation and waiting before they could be recognized as full participants in political modernity’ (2008: 9). LGBT asylum is powerful in UK public arenas in that it helps configure international temporalities and geographies of sexuality: it is not alone in doing so, but asylum cases, in their political, ethical and narrative dimensions, are the perfect crucible 60

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for the re-production of neo-imperial imaginaries. Looking at Brenda’s case, it is not only the imagining of the UK as a queer haven that is significant, but also the wide interdiscourse narrating and discussing, in British news outlets, African conservative politicians and public figures using culturalised discourses about the un-Africanness of homosexuality. The social problem of asylum is not limited to distant suffering and hospitality: it configures a world where gay globality is represented as a series of places from which to flee and towards which to go. Moreover, when most stories of queer migration deemed newsworthy are of forced migration, this spatialisation of the gay imaginary becomes all the stronger. These qualities, which place asylum discourses at the centre stage of the production of homonationalist politics, are also the qualities that reduce narrative possibilities for the recognition and subjectivation of asylum seekers – as Chapter 3 will investigate. In an interview for the 2010 general elections with the LGBT online news outlet PinkNews, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown was asked questions by readers. One of them related to gay Iraqis seeking asylum in Britain: [Question:] Life in Iraq is now much worse for gay people than it was under Saddam Hussein. As architects of the political situation in Iraq do you consider your government morally obliged to extend asylum more actively and with less bureaucracy to gay Iraqis who are in danger as a direct consequence of UK intervention in their country? [Answer:] I unreservedly condemn abuses of gay rights, wherever in the world they happen, including in Iraq. But I’m sorry I can’t agree that this is a result of military intervention [...] Iraq is now an emerging democracy – definitely still with many flaws, but a strengthening democracy with the recent elections. We must continue to press the Iraqi government to improve their record on tolerance and human rights as we do with other countries in the region and the world. I believe that human rights are universal, and that it is the job of mature democracies like Britain to support the development of free societies everywhere. I think Iraq now has a better chance of becoming a free society that genuinely respects human rights than it did under Saddam. As to your question on whether there is something we could do for gay asylum seekers from Iraq as a group, it is a fundamental principle of our asylum system that each case is assessed fairly, separately, and on its merits. (PinkNews, 2010)

The question put to Brown links the worsening situation of LGBT people in Iraq after the war, the role of the UK (and of the Labour government) in the war, and an attendant responsibility towards these gay people whose life has been made significantly harder as a result. As with Mehdi’s case in Chapter 1, asylum is understood as an opportunity for righting the wrong done to LGBT people, except that here the UK is made partly responsible for facilitating persecution. Beyond the electoral context for this interview (and the rhetoric on which it relies), and beyond the (by then well-practised) work of moral justification of the war, Brown articulates the question of asylum to the 61

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promise of liberalism: when it is the ‘job of mature democracies’ to uphold human rights and tolerance and to foster ‘free societies everywhere’. These terms exemplify the teleology discussed in this chapter, where mature democracies represent the end point of how LGBT people should be integrated in the polity and vice versa. LGBT asylum is thus linked implicitly to the discourses of justification for intervention in Iraq, such as in a speech by Tony Blair in 2010, explaining that: ‘We should point out, with vigour […] [t]hat 9/11 was an utterly unprovoked attack on all who share civilised values. That in Iraq and Afghanistan, whatever you think of the original action, we enabled the people to choose their Government’ (Blair, 2010). This type of discourse, applied to LGBT human rights, has been astutely analysed by many commentators who have pointed out the inconsistencies, blind spots and contradictions in the deployment of these justifications’ liberal intents (Butler, 2008; Puar, 2007). Analyses such as Puar’s have also noted a strong discursive connection between discourses of LGBT rights in the US and the project of the war in Iraq and the war on terror; in the UK context such analyses have also been offered by some, such as Jin Haritaworn, Tasmila Tauqir and Esra Erdem (Haritaworn, 2008; Haritaworn et al., 2008). Gordon Brown’s use of the term ‘job’ implies that teleological discourses involve a responsibility: if the UK is to be understood as such a mature democracy, it must do something to spread the practice of tolerance and enforce LGBT human rights. Crucially, in this narrative, it is through the successful development of liberal democracy (and only through these means) that LGBT people could ever gain rights and protection. Looking at Gordon Brown’s statement, there is a stark contrast between the ‘job’ of creating (by force) the conditions of democracy in Iraq – conditions which, presumably, will also include better rights for LGBT people there – and the reiteration of the ‘case-by-case’ argument around asylum, which posits that there is no blanket response to be given to the social problem of asylum other than the individualisation of cases and their respective merits. The question Brown is asked calls for an acknowledgement of the UK’s responsibility in the worsening of LGBT people’s lives in Iraq, and infers a heightened responsibility of hospitality for Iraqi asylum seekers. This responsibility is inverted in Brown’s answer, following very closely the mechanisms described by Puar in her work on gay assimilation and the war on terror in the US (Puar, 2007). For Brown, the real answer to LGBT human rights conundrums is producing emerging democracies out of military intervention – the position of the social problem of asylum is no longer a potential consequence of war, but war is in fact a potential answer to the underlying cause of asylum, that is the abuse of LGBT human rights in the rest of the world. Although Gordon Brown remains evasive on putting forward any explicit policy about LGBT asylum, his discourse opens up the question of how hospitality can serve in the imagining of the UK as having achieved maturity. Examining LGBT asylum and nationhood seems to start with thinking 62

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through hospitality, that is: what does it mean to offer hospitality to certain strangers for being LGBT? Jacques Derrida, conceptualising the relationship between host and guest, proposes: it’s as if the master, qua master, were prisoner of his place and his power, of his ipseity, of his subjectivity (his subjectivity is hostage). So it is indeed the master, the one who invites, the inviting host, who becomes the hostage – and who really always has been. And the guest, the invited hostage, becomes one who invites, the master of the host. The guest becomes the host’s host. The guest (hôte) becomes the host (hôte) of the host (hôte). These substitutions make everyone into everyone else’s hostage. Such are the laws of hospitality. (2000: 124–5)

Hospitality is conceived of by Derrida in relation to this ambivalence he sees between host and guest and, thinking from Benveniste’s work on these words, he proposes that ‘the roots of hospitality articulate its potential to enact an inversion in the hospitable relationship’ (Farrier, 2013: 159). This conception provokes a consideration that is outside of the SVS metaphor, where the host remains the master – the one who offers hospitality to the guest. How could it be that the host becomes a hostage of the guest: in order to be a queer haven, and thus represent itself as the liberal telos, the state needs asylum seekers and refugees to ask for hospitality. This ambiguous relationship is not confined to the state as the host, but also involves a gay imaginary: the asylum seeker, by moving to the UK in order to live freely, marks this space in narratives as being where one can express oneself. Doing so, the hospitable relationship props up a gay imaginary that represents itself in relation to the right-giving state. Discursive strategies for advocates So far, examination of public discourses from media sources and politicians has shown that homonationalist assumptions shape political discourses and narratives about asylum; indeed, the regimes of justification for public action concerning the social problem are thoroughly permeated by culturalised logics of asylum as an important locus for the production of the nation as modern. More precisely, the way hospitality for LGBT asylum seekers is conceived of in public arenas indicates that homonationalism binds the state into being perceived as doing something for asylum seekers in a logic of Derridean inverted hospitality. In this last section I propose that LGBT asylum advocacy must navigate within such homonationalist regimes of justification and use discourses of nationhood strategically to advance their agendas. A clear strategic use of nationhood discourses by advocacy is seen in the way LGBT human rights are conceived of on the basis of an imagined ‘world of nations’, whereby nations distinguish themselves by the style in which they are imagined (Anderson, 2006). The most obvious way for this is the widespread 63

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use of maps in the representation of homophobia around the world. ILGA, for example, produce a yearly survey called State-sponsored homophobia accompanied by maps of the world. Maps are an essential feature of ILGA’s communication, and the home page of their website features a large map that is customisable – changing the map depending on the category chosen: asylum rights, anti-discrimination legislation, etc. The map paired with the report is colour-coded from red to green and includes the three categories of persecution, recognition and protection, pinpointing the role of states in the protection or abuse of LGBT rights, while simultaneously allowing readers to see the world and their countries as both finite and part of a collection of other nations (Anderson, 2006: 15–16). Imagining ourselves, in this context, is a process of differentiation from these Others who do not place value on protecting LGBT people. The map is a powerful tool to visualise homophobia, but one that strongly relies on an imaginary geopolitics of sexuality emphasising homophobia as a problem to be understood mainly in relation to the nation state – not only homogenising separate countries as part of the same more or less safe spaces, but also homogenising the countries themselves (as ultimately ‘green’ or ‘red’ places). The use of such communicational strategies means that it is the frame of the nation state that increasingly configures the political imaginary of liberal queers receiving requests for help and care from different advocacy organisations. Another strategic use of homonationalist discourses by advocacy groups involves using the state’s political language of national values. I suggest that in asylum discourses, LGBT organisations use the logic of inverted hospitality (the state needs queer asylum seekers to actualise its own fashioning as modern and civilised because tolerant) in order to require accountability from the state. The idea of fashioning the nation though the concept and the practice of tolerance has been analysed in different national contexts – most strikingly in Stychin’s analysis of Canada in the late 1990s, where the national imaginary was premised on ‘new founding myths’ of the nation based on tolerance and openness (Stychin, 1997). Re-imagining the nation on the basis of inclusiveness is exactly what the then Prime Minister Tony Blair proposed at a Stonewall equality dinner in March 2007: The culture of the country has changed in a definable way as a result of civil partnerships. And here is what I think is really interesting, that the change in the culture and the civilising effect of it has gone far greater than the gay and lesbian community. In other words, by taking a stand on this issue and by removing a piece of prejudice and discrimination, and by enabling people to stand proud as what they are, it has had an impact that I think profoundly affects the way the country thinks about itself. (Cowan, 2007: 3)

LGBT rights are therefore not merely about the act of representing ourselves as a nation, in Blair’s conception, but are part of active process of 64

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re-imagining the nation in which a change in the position of this one section of the ­population can ‘civilise’ the country itself. A similar language based on values can be found in many speeches by LGBT organisations. For example, in Stonewall’s report on asylum, Ben Summerskill discusses the flaws of the UK asylum system and explains that ‘Failure to rectify this situation raises deeply uncomfortable questions about our own society and proud national culture [...] Britain has a history of compassion to those in grievous and genuine need who seek shelter on our shores. In future we hope that compassion will be extended to all’ (Stonewall, 2010: 4). Likewise, Paul Dillane, executive director of the UKLGIG, said in 2015: ‘This week, the United Kingdom was declared the most LGBT-friendly place in Europe and yet there is one group of people in this country who have little to celebrate: LGBT asylum seekers. Five years ago, the Conservative Party promised that it would protect LGBT asylum seekers fleeing persecution. So far they have failed’ (UKLGIG, 2015). Both accounts rely on the same strategy, using the values-based nationalist language of tolerance and equality in order to force the state to live up to its promise of a queer haven. In the second quote in particular, the strategy is used to propose the inclusion of asylum seekers in the larger category of queers who are protected by the liberal state, conflating two categories together: the LGBT-friendly space and the queer haven. This statement is not without tension: on the one hand, it is based on recognising the exclusion of these LGBT people who are not considered citizens by the state; on the other hand, it obfuscates the way the inclusion of sexual citizens in an ‘LGBT-friendly’ UK is fundamentally conditional on race, class, sex and access to market autonomy. In this regard, Dillane’s statement goes back to the murder case of the prince discussed at the beginning of the chapter, and highlights what seems to be a clear limitation in using homonationalist strategies for LGBT advocates: it remains uncritical of what really constitutes the promise of the better future of queer hospitality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, organisations such as the UKLGIG deploy a number of different discursive strategies on several regimes of justification at the same time, and the following chapter will investigate how they are articulated around the question of recognition. This chapter has insisted on the idea that homonationalism constitutes a major regime of justification for LGBT asylum rights. Within LGBT asylum discourses, promises of queer havens and professions of tolerance that cast homophobia far away in both time and space function partly as practices of ‘flagging’ the nation through words, in the way Michael Billig conceives of it in Banal Nationalism: ‘banal nationalism operates with prosaic routine words, which take nations for granted, and which, in so doing, enhabit them’ (1995: 93). In LGBT asylum discourses, these familiar habits of language are not only those described by Billig (words such as ‘we’, ‘the people’, ‘still’, ‘our’, etc.) but are these words used in combination with a discourse on tolerance. Declara65

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tions of tolerance signal the coherence of the national ‘we’ in this practice, but necessitate expressions of such tolerance.13 Hospitality for fetishised queer strangers provides an opportunity for the promises of tolerance to be actualised in practice. Homonationalist regimes of justification produce several normative effects that all lead to a partial erasure of the complexities and questions around what queer inclusion and sexual rights might mean in the UK. In fact, the homonationalist formulation of the social problem of asylum flattens its potential dissensus, if by dissensus we mean the collective process of disagreement and elaboration of who deserves rights and what these rights are (Rancière, 2004a). This chapter has shown that the most important of these erasures pertains to race and ethnicity. Culturalised discourses produce concepts and objects based on binarisms all organised along the opposition of tolerance versus barbarism. In this binary semiosis of the social problem, race and sexuality end up being divided up into opposing categories and the relationship between the two becomes an intersectionality based on contradiction: both aspects of the asylum seekers’ identities cannot be authentic at the same time and sexuality is understood through the prism of racialised homophobia. Chapter 3 will investigate in more detail the question of authenticity: what are the effects of assigning authenticity to subjects using benchmarks that are intrinsically linked to hegemonic ideas of globalised queerness? The chapter has concluded by opening up a related question: what are the contents of the promise of the queer haven; what are the happier futures that asylum seekers ought to long for in Britain, in order to even be recognisable as deserving hospitality? This chapter has concentrated mostly on the way the self-representation of the welcoming nation necessitates an immigrant who desires the nation, as Lauren Berlant (1997) puts it. Working on this idea of desire for the nation, Melissa White proposes that homonationalism, for LGBT migrants, can be understood as a desire for the nation’s desire. Homonationalist attachments and longings are never straightforward and are often best described, she proposes, as ‘ambivalent homonationalisms’: ‘hesitant cleaving to the nation, an ambivalent attachment at best, underpinned as it is by relative precariousness and a sense of vulnerability. Taken together, these narrative reflections suggest that relationship recognition and permanent residency rights are “that which we cannot not want”’ (White, 2013: 50). In the following chapters, especially in Chapter 4, I will investigate this notion for asylum seekers in the UK by looking at how the promises of the queer haven promote a longing for the nation that, because of its inherent exclusions, cannot but be ambivalent. I will thus argue that in asylum discourses, homonationalism is based on the reproduction of the political and affective forms of queer liberalism as a happy object, albeit an object that is made impossible for asylum seekers to attain.

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Notes 1 The incapacity of the state to protect a refugee being one of the criteria in the Geneva Convention. 2 There are also a number of examples where persecution is enacted by ‘British’ agents (or at least by ethno-racially unmarked individuals). These examples concern staff working in detention centres, and landlords of accommodation privately let to asylum seekers: ‘Because the landlord wasn’t gay and the people living in the house were gay, so he was giving a lot of problems to people in the house – a lot of cursing. I didn’t feel so safe.’ (NIGERIAN GAY MAN, 24 YEARS OLD); ‘I have had problems with the landlord. He would not give me peace. He knew I was an asylum seeker and he would open my mail. He kicked me out because I was gay. The landlord never liked me.’ ARMENIAN GAY MAN, 25–29 YEARS OLD’ (Refugee Support and Metropolitan Trust, 2009: 17) 3 The story reappeared in the news in 2012, as a prisoner transfer treaty between the UK and Saudi Arabia opened up the possibility of the prince serving his sentence in Saudi Arabia (Binyon, 2012). Interestingly, the question of asylum was not mentioned again, and the possibility of the prince returning to Saudi Arabia contradicts the discourses on the possibility of his claiming asylum for his sexual orientation in the first place. Two remarks can be made here: first, it appears the inclusion of asylum was mainly an effect of the prince’s lawyer mentioning it. Second, the 2012 articles indicate that the interpretation of the asylum storyline comes more as a complement to the representation of the UK as a space for sexual permissiveness than as a real concern about the prince’s safety in Saudi Arabia. 4 The denunciation of Saudi Arabia, and of most Middle-Eastern states in general, in relation to LGBT rights has been discussed abundantly in scholarship (Butler, 2008; Haritaworn, 2008; Mepschen et al., 2010; Puar, 2007, 2008). These denunciative discourses are based on the culturalised form of LGBT human rights described earlier in this chapter, which is summarised concisely by Mepschen et al. For them, the relationship between Islam and queerness has been problematised in a series of ways: the culturalisation of citizenship, which refers to the intertwining of the notion of citizenship with culture and morality, and which frames European modernity against Muslim tradition; the rise of Islamophobia in Europe; processes of secularisation, which assume different forms in different countries; and the increase in sexual freedom in European countries since the long 1960s (2010: 964–9). Likewise, Puar has criticised a fixation on the homophobia of the Muslim subject, where the Muslim (man) is construed as hypermasculine and homophobic (2007: XXIV). 5 This characterisation is a constant in all articles; it is achieved mainly with a lexicon insisting on perversion, for example: ‘The sadistic Saudi prince who murdered his servant after a gay sex session was jailed for at least 20 years yesterday’ (Brown, 2010). The Belfast Telegraph and the Express also quote the prosecution on the prince’s perversity: ‘The court had heard that the murder of Mr Abdulaziz was the final act in a “deeply abusive” master-servant relationship in which the prince carried out frequent attacks on his aide “for his own personal gratification”’ (Anon., 2010b). The reports also focused on the lack of emotion of the killer, as well as on the violence of the assault, as exemplified in this quote: ‘He was bitten hard on both

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cheeks and suffered brain injuries. Bones in his neck were fractured, his lips were split and his teeth were broken. Al-Saud was caught on two occasions on CCTV attacking his victim in the hotel lifts. He showed no emotion as a jury convicted him of the murder and of grievous bodily harm yesterday after just one hour and 35 minutes. Prosecutor Jonathan Laidlaw described their relationship as “deeply abusive” and said al-Saud attacked his servant “for sadistic reasons, for his own personal gratification”’ (Mathews, 2010). 6 This play on authenticity can also be observed in the inclusion of the prince’s fiancée in Saudi Arabia in some articles, with the deployment of a narrative of him cheating on her. The Times thus reproduces the following text messages: ‘Text messages from the Prince’s fiancée, believed to be a Saudi princess, to him, in which she expresses her love and concerns that he is cheating with other women; “My love, I give this song as a present to you” “My love, I am very jealous of other women with you”’ (Brown, 2010). 7 The impossibility of being queer in Saudi Arabia is explained at length in the different news reports, most of which state that ‘homosexuality is a capital offence [there]’ (Brown, 2010). The criminalisation of homosexuality in Saudi Arabia was also raised by the prince’s barrister, who pleaded for the trial to be held behind closed doors, stating that the revelation of the defendant’s sexuality could put him at risk in his home country (Jones, 2010). 8 This process is most evident in articles such as one in the Observer that states: ‘Bahati’s law [...] while being an extreme piece of anti-gay legislation, is not unique. As far as gay rights are concerned, it would appear that much of Africa is going backwards. Nigeria has a similar bill waiting to reach its statute books and already allows the death penalty for homosexuality in northern states, as does Sudan. Burundi criminalised homosexuality in April this year, joining 37 other African nations where gay sex is already illegal. Egypt and Mali are creeping towards criminalisation, using morality laws against same-sex couples’ (McVeigh et al., 2009). This rise in generality is exemplified by an article in the Mirror, claiming that: ‘Gay rights campaigners believe the bill is part of a backlash as Africa’s homosexual community becomes more vocal’ (Anon., 2010a). Of course, it is not a coincidence that this type of rise in generality is present in a tabloid, as its enunciative constraints, especially in terms of article size, call for a quick and short resolution of any event’s aporia. Newspapers with longer articles, like the Observer, have more latitude for the deployment of a more sophisticated circumscription of the event, taking into account different factors, using more examples, etc. However, in both cases, the use of Africa as a resolutely homophobic space is the main interpretative frame for the event. 9 Some activists see the Commonwealth as a potential place for the lobbying for LGBT rights. For example, in March 2010, the Justice for Gay Africans Society launched a petition directed to the Commonwealth, asking the institution to stand for LGBT rights (JFGA, 2011; Onwuchekwa, 2010). 10 LGBT Asylum News started as a support group in Mehdi’s case. They are internetbased and were associated with other online platforms, such as AllOut and 38 Degrees on some asylum cases. The last entries on the blog were published in 2012. 11 The Sun has a long history of a homophobic editorial stance. Activist Peter Tatchell, for example, says he was harassed by its journalists in The Battle for

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Bermondsey. David Rayside also notes several instances of the tabloid offering homophobic reports. More recently, as Joe Moran shows, the Sun was using a strongly homophobic repertoire (such as likening the inclusion of homosexuality in sexual education as ‘sodomizing schoolboys’) in its defence of section 28 during the debates about its repeal (Moran, 2001; Rayside, 1992; Tatchell, 1983). 12 I refer to individuation as a process of mass production of individuals by a social machinery. This machinic individuation consists in this case in parts of sociosexual regimes in countries of origin and in the UK; international legal provisions in relation to individual rights; and legal and economic apparatus in the UK assigning asylum seekers to a specific place and function: in particular as people who must spend their time waiting for a decision, not having the right to work for example (Guattari and Rolnik, 2007: 54–5). 13 Such declarations of tolerance articulate self-congratulation with a statement of evidence, such as when Ben Summerskill reflected on the changes between Stonewall’s 2007 and 2012 surveys in attitudes: ‘We can rightly be proud, as a nation, of the progress we have made. It would have been quite unthinkable at the start of the Queen’s reign that in the year of her Diamond Jubilee more than four in five of her British subjects would feel comfortable if her heir was gay’ (Stonewall, 2012a: 2).

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3

The biopolitics of recognition

Homonationalist formulations of asylum indicate the possibility that the state is bound to appear to be proactive in creating conditions of fairness for LGBT asylum seekers. This chapter looks at the administrative management of asylum, and argues that there is a contradiction at the heart of the social problem of asylum: asylum discourses are based on a specific regime of justification, that of universalistic human rights, which are consistently negated by a tough practice of exclusion. This contradiction puts the state at risk of political opposition and effective criticism from civil society. This chapter looks in detail at the articulation between human rights-based and homonationalist regimes of justification and the social critique put forward by advocates. Doing so, it asks the following questions: how are refugees represented as manageable objects? What processes allow for the constitution of LGBT refugee subjects, as well as draw the limits of a LGBT asylum population? How can the state simultaneously uphold LGBT human rights and practise exclusion? Luibhéid (2008) proposes that the governance of migration relies on heterosexuality, even if heterosexuality itself is an unstable norm. In this chapter, looking at the management of asylum, I would like to argue that debates between the state and its critics have transformed the governance of LGBT asylum to find ways to make it rely on other normative frameworks than solely heterosexuality; as a result, I suggest that since the mid-2000s a heteronormative mode of government of asylum has been accompanied by sometimes contradictory homonormative and homonationalist frameworks. A homonormative mode of governance of asylum relies on the content of the promise of queer optimism, on what it means to be happy and gay in the UK. The most important mode of managing claims for the state is the question of credibility and the ability of the state to recognise truthful claimants, and for claimants to be recognised as such by the state. The question of credibility, and in particular of believing a person’s trauma, is fraught with difficulties for all asylum cases. As Bohmer and Shuman note, contradictory effects are often produced during considerations of credibility, exemplified by the way that ‘more exotic, abhorrent acts of persecution are both more recognized as persecution and more susceptible to [suspicion] as to whether or not such an 70

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act could have actually occurred’ (2008: 210). All types of asylum are based on the state’s ability to recognise whether or not claimants are being truthful. What sets LGBT cases apart is first that the means to ascertain claimants’ credibility are complex and the subject of much public anxiety; and second that the apparatus for the extraction and development of truth is grafted to an apparatus for the production of queerness as an affective and political mode of being in the UK. In this chapter I propose first to look at the efficiency of the use by advocates of human rights-based arguments in criticising the state’s claim-assessment practice. Analysis will thus demonstrate that the move from discretion to credibility in the means of excluding claimants can be interpreted directly as an answer to human-rights based criticisms. The chapter then proposes to look at credibility as a central part of the biopolitics of LGBT asylum, and argues that as a mode of veridiction, credibility is based on a series of sexual ontologies, affects and modes of projection that (re)produce certain forms of liberal queerness as ‘true’. In other words, I will suggest here that the recognition apparatus not only functions to exclude (or not) claimants, but also to strengthen the hegemony of liberal queerness as a universal way of being queer in the world. Looking at the debates and criticisms around credibility, the chapter then shows how: (1) the assessment of credibility involves a neoliberal discipline of self-presentation that assumes autonomy and selfgovernance on the part of asylum seekers; and (2) in the debates around how to best recognise truthful claimants, the state and its critics are engaged in a collective work of gradually improving the biopolitical machinery of asylum. This chapter will thus attend to the contradictions around the tactics of resistance deployed by advocates, between on the one hand improving decision outcomes by fine-tuning the biopolitical power of the state, and on the other hand disrupting in the process the hegemony of liberal queerness as the only recognisable form of queerness. Credibility and the biopolitics of human rights This first section addresses the question asked in the introduction about the contradiction between the asylum machine’s function of exclusion and the universalistic and homonationalist regimes of justification used in LGBT asylum discourses. Modes of exclusion have ranged from fast-tracking and detaining claimants, to requiring them to return to their countries of origin and be ‘discreet’, to simply being disbelieved as gay or lesbian. I would argue here that the move from excluding claimants on the basis of discretion reasoning to disbelieving their sexual orientation can be explained in the light of the structure of debates in public arenas. Discretion in particular was susceptible to criticism, appealing to the ideas of human rights and authenticity that prop up the regimes of justification of LGBT asylum rights. Looking at how the social problem is configured explains the shift from ‘discretion to 71

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disbelief ’ (Millbank, 2009): using credibility to exclude is useful for the state to partially disarm the human rights critique, while drawing from ongoing fears in public discourses about truthfulness and recognisability. I thus propose that credibility should be understood not simply as a technical, legal and biopolitical answer to the quandaries of claim management, nor as the state’s answer to perceived public worries over bogus claims, but as the reconfiguration of the exclusionary apparatus in a context of homonationalist and human rights justification regimes. Practising exclusion: fast-track detention and discretion Thinking about the potential normative effects of homonationalist representations in relation to better treatment of LGBT asylum seekers by the British state, one is very quickly confronted with a problem: LGBT claimants are even less likely to be granted refugee status at first decision than other types of claimants. In 2009, when ‘discretion’ was still routinely demanded, 98–99% of LGBT claimants were refused at initial decision-making stage, against 73% of all asylum seekers (the statistics were better after appeals, signalling that a major problem in the decision-making process was situated at the level of the Home Office) (UKLGIG, 2010: 2). Shortly after being elected, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition presented a position on LGBT asylum, and Home Secretary Theresa May stated that the coalition would not let people go back to a country where they might face persecution (Strudwick, 2010). May’s benevolent statement came at the same time as the Home Office was fighting at the Supreme Court to justify the requirement for discretion, a tool which, this section will show, was specifically designed to exclude LGBT applicants. In some ways, May’s statement pinpoints the political conundrum of LGBT asylum: not willing to lose the political gains offered by a display of queer-positiveness, the Home Secretary ended up making a statement which at best disregarded, and at worst obfuscated, the Home Office’s efforts to keep using exclusionary practices that even some UKBA case-workers considered unfair at the time (Stonewall, 2010: 20). The exclusionary nature of the asylum system has been analysed in depth, and any homonationalist politics of asylum are built on such exclusion.1 Asylum has been increasingly framed, understood and configured as a question of security – not only in the UK but, as Didier Bigo notes, through the dissemination of discourses and practices about securitisation that constitute a ‘transnational regime of truth’ emerging from ‘transnational bureaucratic links between professionals of politics, judges, intelligence agencies, and the military’ (2006: 9). Such a regime of truth produces legitimate unease and fear about particular objects and subjects through a web of interdiscursive expert speech. This regime of truth has effects in public arenas, and in the case of asylum discourses in the UK, Vicki Squire has shown that narratives of control permeating public arenas have a strong influence on EU governmental, press 72

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and party political discourses on asylum. Squire analyses the way technologies are mobilised to enact restrictions while being depoliticised and remote from public scrutiny (2009: 15). There are a series of technologies of government used in the decision-making process to manage claims, and – as Conlon and Gill note – asylum seekers encountering these technologies are inscribed in a ‘security continuum’ (2013: 256). The securitisation complex is conceptualised by Bigo through what he calls the Banopticon dispositif, which has three main characteristics. The first is the presence of exceptionalism within liberalism, not as a fundamental contradiction between the terms (the suspension of every law) but as derogations from normalised legislation. The second is the ability to ‘construct categories of excluded people connected to the management of life’. Finally, normalisation occurs though the imperative of free movement, and the combination of speed and movement – right to movement and freedom to move on the global scale. This normalisation produces exclusions between those who are free to move, and those who are confined to the local (2006: 36–41). LGBT asylum seekers have many encounters with securitisation technologies of government – some that they share with all asylum seekers, in particular the fast-track process and detention. The UKLGIG found in 2013 that a majority of LGBT claimants were fast tracked and put into detention. The fast-track process can be chosen in cases where a quick decision is deemed possible: claimants are detained while the process is accelerated and a decision is taken in a matter of days or weeks. There are clear exclusionary effects to this practice, as LGBT claims tend to require more time: as the UKLGIG explains, proving claims on the basis of sexual identity is difficult and claimants may need time extra time to obtain evidence (2013: 29). Rachel Lewis also notes that ‘in the context of the fast-track detention system, queer female migrants are particularly vulnerable because detention prevents the kind of complicated legal work needed to establish credibility in lesbian asylum cases’ (2014: 968). The UKLGIG has also shown that detention is used as an opportunity to collect information that will be used against claimants in courts, especially information from medical examination, as in the case of a claimant who was disbelieved to be lesbian because she was using a contraception implant – she had no opportunity to explain during the examination that she was using it for medical reasons (2013: 30). This is partly why Lewis criticises the use of fast-track detention in the case of lesbian claimants: The violations of the rights of female migrants who are placed in the UK’s fast track detention system shows how state immigration policies, while ostensibly valorizing neoliberal ideals of personal responsibility and social entrepreneurship, actually produce gendered and racialized states of refugee dependency that transform lesbian asylum seekers into diminished and impoverished subjects in a way that creates serious obstacles to their credibility as lesbians when they seek asylum. (2014: 968)

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This apparatus of management and security, and its tendency to exclude, is central to activist and NGO criticism of LGBT asylum decision making. Stonewall thus has a whole section of its No Going Back report dedicated to the unfairness of a system that deals with heavy workloads and functions via efficiency targets, which make it hard to assess complex cases – effectively meaning that claimants ‘haven’t got a chance’ (Stonewall, 2010: 24). By 2015, fast-track detention had been subject to substantial legal challenges, not just from LGBT claimants, and on 2 July the Minister of State for Immigration James Brokenshire temporarily suspended the operation of the detained fasttrack policy in a written statement to the House of Commons (HC Deb 2 Jul 2015, HCWS83). The best example of the exclusionary nature of LGBT asylum (and the most criticised) is the requirement of discretion. The discretion requirement was frequently used to deny refugee status: the Home Office considered that since claimants had at some point shown discretion about their sexual orientation in the country of origin, they could do so again. Persecution was thereby understood as avoidable if claimants kept quiet about their sexuality. In other words, the Home Office used the discretion requirement to refuse applicants whose claims to be LGBT and to come from a persecutory country had been accepted. Discretion relied on the possibility of internal relocation, whereby claimants can be returned and relocated in another part of the country. The provision of relocation, usually seen in cases of civil war where parts of the country might be troubled while others are relatively safe, assumes that it would be possible for claimants to start a new life in a part of their country where they are not known as LGBT.2 Looking at public discourses on asylum, the disappearance of discretion became inevitable because it so obviously contradicted the central tenets of the LGBT human rights justification regimes, especially concerning the nature of ‘sexual orientation’. The human rights perspective gave NGOs and advocates a strong position to criticise discretion as evidently unjust. The main line of argument, which can be found in civil society and academic reports, is that in discretion reasoning, sexual identity is reduced to physical sexual behaviour, focusing on homosexual acts rather than on matters of identity (Spijkerboer, 2013; Spijkerboer and Jansen, 2011; UKLGIG, 2010; Wessels, 2013). The same argument is mobilised by Stonewall, quoting UKBA case-workers and an asylum seeker insisting that discretion is asking people to deny their identities.3 These criticisms use the notions of dignity, authenticity, lies and double standards to assert that discretion denies fundamental rights. This strategy relies on using the LGBT human rights perspective, in particular the way it conceives of sexual orientation and sexual identity as deeply personal attachments that are felt and experienced in a way that is fundamental to the individual. It successfully identifies the injustice of the discretion requirement in part because of its potent interdiscourse: these conceptions of sexuality (as 74

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identity rather than as mere practice) are so central to human rights positions and LGBT domestic politics that they are part of what prefigures the social problem, that is to say the network of concepts, objects and representations that shape how the social problem of asylum is understood. As noted in Chapter 2, this discourse is borne by governments, activists and NGOs but also by transnational organisations – in particular the EU and the UN – giving much institutional gravity to these conceptions. The state’s use of discretion is severely delegitimised due to its contradiction of fundamental tenets and concepts used by international organisations and law provisions. Consequently, the human rights critique, usually of varying effectiveness when it comes to criticising the migration–security complex, has been particularly efficient in the case of discretion. Indeed, the 2010 Supreme Court decision rejecting discretion referred to a series of conceptions of asylum reminiscent of the discourses studied in the previous two chapters, in its distinction between the homophobic elsewhere and the queer-positive UK, emphasising the latter’s responsibility to offer hospitality;4 and referenced human rights law scholars, in particular the works of Jenni Millbank on discretion and of J.C. Hathaway on persecution.5 The discretion requirement was fought by activists on the basis of a redefinition of what ‘sexual orientation’ means. In this exchange, three different articulations of the notion of sexual orientation were offered by three different social agents. The three positions were as follows: first, for the Home Office, queerness was about sex acts, which people could be discreet about; second, for the courts, queerness was about identity, but discretion could be requested if the tolerability of such a requirement was tested;6 finally, for the social actors such as the UKLGIG, since queerness is about identity, the discretion requirement could not work, as it asked claimants to conceal a fundamental aspect of their lives. The UKLGIG’s position is most clearly revealed in its semantic shifts, where discretion is substituted by clandestineness, hiding and fear of getting caught; in Middlekoop’s works, discretion is substituted for concealment (Middlekoop, 2013; UKLGIG, 2010: 5). This type of criticism of discretion is also based on a criticism of inauthenticity, whereby discretion is deemed inhumane because it forces claimants to be inauthentic. Considering, as I proposed in Chapter 2, that hospitality is offered insofar as sexual orientation comes to represent the authentic part of refugees’ subjectivities, one can understand how a criticism of discretion as inauthentic can work as a discursive strategy. To conclude, with the courts thinking of sexual orientation as a question of identity, and the criticisms coming from civil society, the Home Office’s position was hard to maintain, which made it possible for advocates to represent discretion as a tool for the discretionary exercise of the power to reject claims. As Erin Power of the UKLGIG notes: ‘They don’t have to decide is this man gay, is this woman a lesbian? They don’t have to decide is that country safe or unsafe? They can give the benefit of the doubt on those things because 75

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they’re still going to say no. So they don’t have to go into great detail’ (Stonewall, 2010: 20). Defining credibility and recognition as veridiction It is tempting to think about credibility simply as the consequence of a series of discourses on asylum insisting on the problem of faking and recognising sexual orientation. The process of recognition of truthful claimants is central to all types of asylum, a tension at the source of multiplying discourses on ‘bogus’ claims, which is one version of a general imaginary where migrants are prone to cheating the nation (other iterations have benefit fraud or sham marriages as central anxieties). I propose here that the focus on recognition in the biopolitics of LGBT asylum, at the same time as it reveals the processes of exclusion and disenfranchising of refugees, also tells us something about the recognition and production of the truth about sexual subjects by and in the liberal state. In this section, I will clarify what credibility means in the biopolitics of asylum and show that it is used as a tool for exclusion and in fact consists in a mode of veridiction, understood as the codification of truthfulness and its effects by the biopolitical state. While LGBT human rights assisted with the criticism of the discretion requirement, there are limits to the improvements achieved. One such limit is highlighted by Jenna Wessels (2013), who shows how discretion was not fully rejected by the 2010 decision; rather the new tests proposed by the court still showed signs of discretion logic by distinguishing between gay people ‘living openly’ and gay people ‘living discreetly’, constructed around a distinction between status and acts. More strikingly, Wessels proposes that the 2010 Supreme Court decision in fact increased the discretionary latitude of decision makers: ‘The introduction of a break-down into an “open” and a “discreet” group and then again, and particularly into a subgroup of those “discreet out of fear” and those “discreet for other reasons” requires an exercise of parapsychology which effectively augments the range of personal discretion of the decision-maker’ (2012: 75). The second limitation is described by Jenni Millbank (2009) in the Australian context, when she shows that refusals moved from asking claimants to be discreet, to disbelieving their claims to be gay or lesbian. Millbank identified that between 2002 and 2007 in Australia, asylum decisions have tended to focus increasingly on the notion of credibility. The process she has described for Australia can be seen in the UK as well since 2010. The main mode of exclusion has become the question of claimant credibility: whether they are deemed to tell the truth about their sexual identity and their experiences. This analysis will use the word ‘credibility’, understood as the veridictional value of the claimants’ statements, instead of following a legal distinction between plausibility (the possibility of a claim to be true) and credibility (the possibility of a claimant to be truthful). Credibility will here refer to the assess76

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ment and production of truthfulness in a discursive economy encompassing the political and subjective conditions, production, performance and effects of that truthfulness. Related to this is the question of recognition, understood as the biopolitical process that is simultaneously discerning and deciding on asylum cases, and which combines several intertwined effects: (1) a veridictional effect, for the aim of the process of recognition is to assert and regulate the truth about the claimants’ sexuality; (2) a decisional effect, for it provides a rationale for the function of hospitality and exclusion; and (3) a population effect, for by recognising (and welcoming) certain types of claimants, it sets the limits of what constitutes the LGBT population of ‘morally legitimate suffering bodies’ (Ticktin, 2011) that deserve care. This biopolitical action relies on the fostering and production of truth about the subject, and often by the subject: it involves in particular writing a support statement of more than twenty pages, explaining how the claimants’ LGBT identity emerged; it also includes questioning by decision makers; sometimes the use of medical information and examinations; the use of third-party testimony confirming the gay or lesbian life led by the claimant (from a partner, an LGBT organisation, etc.); and the use of country of origin information in order to corroborate personal narratives, etc. In other words, a complex apparatus is deployed with the objective of determining the truth about the sexual subject in order to recognise LGBT claimants for what they are. In this context, the personal statements and narratives are situated at a junction between the singular and the collective: claimants are simultaneously asked to tell their personal story and trajectory, and they are treated en masse by a system that cannot but rely on preconstructed forms of recognition of acceptable queerness. In other words, narratives need to be singular (proof of authenticity of the subject, with their personal stories and tribulations) but recognisable as part of a collective experience of being a victimised LGBT person. The veridiction of the system of recognition is therefore that of the mass-produced subjectivity, not unlike the way Guattari envisages the mass production of subjectivities in capitalism (Guattari and Rolnik, 2007). Discerning and deciding In this section, I examine how the biopolitical management of LGBT asylum cases is based on the extraction, production and treatment of statements, behaviours and affects deemed either truthful or authentic. Doing so, I will investigate the modes of this veridiction (its sexual ontologies, its conception of the body, its means of production) and see how each of these aspects is a field for the deployment of critique and counterdiscourses by NGOs, advocates and academics. The process of recognition is an elaborate technology of government, and in the case of LGBT claimants a crucial mode of their biopolitical management. Any perceived lack of coherence in personal narratives can be 77

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used by decision makers as a means of exclusion. As the UKLGIG has shown, the Home Office sometimes looks for minor discrepancies in order to cast disbelief on entire personal narratives: The inability to recall the names, addresses and the atmosphere of clubs and bars is often cited as a reason for doubting a person’s sexuality with even minor discrepancies negatively affecting ‘credibility’, for example one refusal letter states: ‘You initially said that the club was in Camden Town. Then you stated that it was in Kentish Town. While it is accepted that these locations are very close it is considered that you would be able to disclose full details of this club, if you ever attended it.’ (The club being referred to is half way between Kentish Town and Camden Town tube stations). (UKLGIG, 2013: 14)

The exclusionary strategy appears at its crudest here because of how evident the decision makers’ bad faith is. This example is also quite exemplary in that it bases assessment on an activity of queer consumption. The assessment of credibility has become a foremost site for criticism and resistance for advocates. I propose to look at several aspects of these criticisms: the personal statement, assumptions about behaviour, the role of the body, and the production of country of origin information. This section will describe the state of debates and the following sections will argue that the biopolitics of recognition have two important features: (1) they produce liberal queerness as a common horizon of representation for queer refugee lives; and (2) resistance strategies have heterogeneous effects on the improvement of the state’s recognition capabilities. Teaching neoliberal autonomy in personal statements A primary aspect of veridiction is exemplified by the personal statements that LGBT asylum seekers write to help their claims: this narrative technology for the extraction and production of truth from the claimants clearly relies on neoliberal ideals of self-responsibility and autonomy for the claimants. The written statement that claimants must produce is the main tool for the examination of LGBT asylum cases; it consists of a long self-narrative detailing the process by which the claimant realised that they were LGBT, the problems or fear thereof they have encountered in their country of origin, etc. With this document, claimants must convince the decision makers that they are indeed LGBT,7 and that they have good reasons for fearing persecution were they to be sent back to their country of origin. In other words, the aim of this document is for the guests to convincingly assert their identities. Indeed, all types of asylum consist, to a certain degree, of a discursive production of the self as ‘a refugee other’ (Barsky, 1994). For Robert Barsky, in refugee hearings, asylum seekers aim to present themselves as a refugee in their testimonies in order to be perceived as such by their interlocutors. In this regard, he proposes that this refugee Other is an Other for both the claimant and the Home Office. It is an 78

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Other to the Home Office because it stands for the stranger that requires the UK’s protection; but it is also an Other for the claimants to the extent that they need to conform to a certain presentation of the self in order to be recognised as a Convention refugee. In their analysis of detention, Colon and Gill deploy a criticism that takes into account the inscription of detention (and the asylum apparatus) in the neoliberal state. They show how detention in particular responds to the theoretical problem of liberal government, which they summarise as ‘how citizens are produced so that they are free from the state and yet predisposed toward conducting themselves in ways that support the functioning and reproduction of “free” markets and society’ (2013: 255). Detention thus functions like an instruction, teaching autonomy and self-governance as ‘self-examining, selfexpressive, and self-responsible entrepreneurs’ (2013: 255). As Lewis argues in her work on the credibility of gay and lesbian claimants, in this context of self-reliance, proving credibility can be understood as a matter of personal responsibility, with the consequence of making help such as legal aid less indispensable – an analysis that fits the drastic changes brought by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, and its consequences for LGBT asylum claimants8 (2014: 966). Logics of deresponsibilisation of the state and of self-sufficiency have also been shown for queer migrants, and not only refugees, with gay and lesbian people being required to show that they will not be a burden on the state and have financial autonomy in order to go through the immigration process (White, 2013). In the case of asylum, the personal statements display an articulation between neoliberal modes of governance (especially the responsibilisation of the individual against the deresponsibilisation of the state) and the biopolitical management of asylum. The state’s management of claims and of the LGBT refugee population is based on extracting truthfulness from claimants that are presumed autonomous, and using this truthfulness as a resource for the decision-making process. Critics of the asylum system, by showing the complexity of writing personal statements, pinpoint the fact that autonomy and self-governance are in fact made of skills and knowledge that must be learned by asylum seekers. Indeed, a convincing personal statement relies on writing skills, the transmission of which is an important part of support organisations’ work. An important tactic deployed by the UKLGIG, for example, is to help claimants understand what is expected of them in this statement – in other words, to enable the autonomy that the state presumes. Indeed, when presuming autonomy without giving the conditions and tools for its enactment, it is all the easier to discount claims and exclude asylum seekers. Among the writing skills useful for the personal statement is the identification of relevant anecdotes to be included in the claimant’s statement to make it credible. For example, Jill Power (2012) from the UKLGIG explains how she transcribed the story of a claimant who ended up unknowingly in a gay club’s backroom in London and turned on his 79

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mobile phone’s flash light, not realising this would constitute a faux pas. This anecdote does not add much substance to the claim ‘I went to gay clubs’, but the details fitted well with a narrative where the LGBT claimant discovers gay life in London, and thus added to its credibility. In this instance, the narrative produced for the state shows the singular experience of a claimant who does not know particular codes of gay sociability. In that respect, this narrative might create a link with the reader at the Home Office, who, not necessarily knowing about backrooms either, might share incomprehension about the situation. The level of detail imposed by narrativity thus creates links between the claimant and the UKBA officer that were not conditioned by their original respective positions: the statement, normally confined to its evidential value, has the power to create kinship and togetherness at an unexpected place. The latter example shows that strategies of ‘credibilisation’ are in fact not necessarily intuitive, but complex, and require considerable knowledge of the decision system. In this example, one also sees that the narrative proposed is at the same time generic (going to a gay club) and idiosyncratic (the anecdote), and this exemplifies a more general tension in the veridiction of personal statements between conforming to narrative expectations of being recognisable and appearing individual enough to be deemed to be telling a true personal story. When proving credibility is a question of personal responsibility, the neoliberal work of writing the self in personal statements reconciles its disciplinary function (conforming one’s story to expectations of identity based on specific sexual ontologies and civilisational representations of sexuality) with the biopolitical definition of the contours of LGBT refugees’ experiences. While personal statements must reproduce some of the features of a standard LGBT victim narrative, the repetition of these standard tropes participates in their enshrinement as the only truth of the LGBT refugee population. Queer pasts are written up (a disciplined act of writing as a technology of the self) and at the same time written off (narratives must come to the conclusion of the impossibility of queer futures in the countries of origin to be plausible). The next question is thus to look at the extent to which recognition is and can be based on recognising unconventional queer faces. Homonormative horizons in behavioural expectations Next to self-responsibility and autonomy, the veridiction of recognition also concerns, most importantly, the type of queerness that can be recognised as being authentic and truthful. Derrida distinguishes between the unconditional, hyperbolic law of absolute hospitality, which is characterised by the welcoming of the absolute stranger – the ‘first arrival’, and the conditional law of hospitality, that is to say its incarnation as a pact between the guest and the host (1997: 21–9). This pact highlights a contradiction: conditional hospitality actualises absolute hospitality, even though it also threatens to undermine its hyperbolic intent. Both types of hospitality presuppose a type of 80

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guest; if the guest of absolute hospitality is the first arrival, a complete Other of whom the host does not ask any questions, conversely the guest of conditional hospitality is a stranger who is prompted to identify themself. The pact is the basis for the politics and ethics of hospitality, and this contract between host and guest starts with the questions: who are you? Where do you come from? Would you like to come in? (1997: 117) The management of LGBT asylum revolves almost entirely around such a process of questioning: claimants must identify themselves in recognisable terms in order to have the right to become guests. Entering the pact of conditional hospitality thus requires having a name. Seeking asylum presupposes that one identifies with the identity that is acceptable in the terms of the pact: the LGBT victim. Failing to be identifiable as such casts oneself outside of the pact as an intruder. Gaining a name requires the ability and skills necessary to answer the host’s questions. Derrida describes this ability as ‘speaking the language of the host’ and, following Socrates, he notes that the guest is asked to speak the language of the host, in particular the language of its laws (1997: 23). I propose that for LGBT refugees this means speaking the language of Western gay identification by following a specific sexual ontology and particular forms of self-presentation. Recognising claimants as LGBT is also based on expected behaviours on the part of case-workers and judges. Such expectations are first premised on the fixity of sexual identity. The courts’ assumptions of the fixed nature of sexual identity are analysed by Sima Shakhsari as a necessity of the legal discourse of asylum, which requires this immutability: ‘Applicants’ narratives, their material conditions, and their multiple and complex subjectivities are reduced to rational and linear definitions in order to match the acceptable “immutable” identity, defined and sanctioned by the refugee law’ (2014: 1002). In the case of Iranian LGBT asylum seekers in Turkey, the author explains that queer diasporic organisations have been coaching asylum seekers in homonormative behaviour and culture to increase their ability to be recognisable as LGBT. The case in the UK is slightly different, as part of the ongoing criticism of the process has been precisely that the Home Office can be blind to non-normative narratives. In their analysis of court hearings, Berg and Millbank state that in order to be considered a plausible gay or lesbian subject, claimants must offer the judges what they call an identity narrative: that is to say a type of narrativitisation of queerness that represents sexuality as an identity according to a Western model. This point follows the previous chapters’ analysis of LGBT human rights, where queerness is situated at an ontological crossroads that distinguishes strands of culturalised subjectivations: queerness being on the side of the liberal Western subject. In this regard, the identity narrative presents to the state queerness as a Western form of subjectivation. A series of problems arises from such expectations, among which Berg and Millbank (2009) identify: the reluctance to reveal one’s belonging to the LGBT group; the lasting effects 81

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of habits of concealment and passing strategies; the weight of trauma on the ability to open up; the problems posed by the sexualisation of the narrative; the courts’ assumptions about the fixed nature of sexual identity, the cultural expression of such identity; and the expectation of a ‘staged model’9 in the expression of sexual identity. Some of the assumptions of such a staged model include the expectation of narratives of realisation and coming out, and failing to provide these could be detrimental to a claimant’s credibility. This expectation disregards the possibility that claimants might make sense of their lives and experiences in a way that does not follow narratives that are premised on subject formations and political contexts specific to the UK, Europe or the US. In this perspective, Middlekoop has shown how fraught with difficulty assessing credibility is in cases of occasional same-sex attractions without self-identification as LGB, of internalised conflicting values, of a disjunction between sexual behaviour and personal identity, or of self-identification as LGB without having pursued same-sex activities (2013: 155–6). Stonewall and the UKLGIG have insisted on the fact that the state cannot expect LGBT claimants to necessarily follow the narrative trope of finding liberation once in the UK, and should not base their assessment on the claimant’s social life. For example, some asylum seekers have not become part of a metropolitan gay scene or have not been involved in a relationship for numerous reasons, not least of them being that socialising requires a certain amount of both economic and social capital. Even though asylum seekers are entitled to support if they are destitute (homeless or without money for food), including emergency accommodation and cash support for food and essentials, this cash support amounted in 2015 to only £36.62 per week for single person over 18 (Gov.uk, 2015). This point of contention reflects the limitations of the wider logic of rescue narratives, since the assumption that the UK is a queer haven enables unreasonable expectations on the part of the Home Office. In other words, some political narratives that set the stage for the welcoming of LGBT claimants can also create the conditions for a refusal of hospitality. Criticisms that the Home Office relies on counterproductive stereotypes have led to the Home Office changing its policy instructions. Stonewall, for example, used interview material to show the extent to which case-owners were left to their own knowledge (or lack thereof) to determine whether a claimant was LGBT or not (Stonewall, 2010: 18). The Home Office has reacted to this type of criticism with new asylum guidance that aims to address this lack of directions. The asylum policy instruction (API) on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in the Asylum Claim now tells case-owners not to expect ‘stereotypical ideas of people – such as an “effeminate” demeanour in gay men or a masculine appearance in lesbians’,10 and second that ‘interviewing officers should be aware that lesbian and gay relationships in some countries may bear little resemblance to relationships in the UK’ (Home Office, 2010: 10–11). However, as the UKLGIG 2013 report shows, these instructions 82

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are not always well followed. There is a contradiction at the crux of recognising LGBT refugees: recognition of all claimants is impossible with only the semiotic resources available to the Home Office, and yet officers must carry on differentiating false claimants from genuine LGBT subjects. Behavioural expectations require of claimants discipline and a conscious work of self-presentation. Such production of the self in LGBT claimants has been analysed in terms of the concept of ‘covering’, coined by Kenji Yoshino (2002). ‘Covering’ is based on the idea that asylum seekers, if coming from a repressive country, had to conceal their sexuality from the authorities and society in general in order to stay out of trouble. Once in the country of arrival, the asylum process requires that the same individuals express and evidence their sexuality in order for the state to assess if they are gay or not. Yoshino describes different cultural contexts pressing gays and lesbians to convert, pass and cover: the first is an injunction to lead a life as a heterosexual person, the second demands they pretend to be heterosexual, and the third requires them to downplay behaviour that could be coded as gay. Yoshino studies the legal implications of these three phenomena, and looks at how they have been at the basis of numerous court decisions in the US. Legal scholars have subsequently looked at LGBT asylum legislation with the tools offered by Yoshino, and have focused in particular on the opposite of covering, which the author calls reverse covering. Reverse covering refers to the need to signify being gay by overtly displaying an expected gay behaviour. In the asylum hearing, reverse covering becomes a necessity, as asylum seekers must present themselves as gay in order to have their claim considered. In this analytical perspective, asylum seekers have to switch between covering or passing and reverse covering depending on the circumstances. Having to pass in their country of origin and to reverse cover during their asylum claim assessment, they might also have to cover again in other circumstances in the country of arrival. As Heller illustrates: One can imagine the plight of a lesbian immigrant facing a child custody hearing one day and an asylum hearing on the next. Should she make sure that the world knows she’s a lesbian or should she keep the fact even from her children? (2009:  303)

The requirement of reverse covering is problematic at several levels. First, individuals who have been covering or passing for most of their life might find it hard to reverse cover: projecting one’s sexuality might be something that claimants are unaccustomed to doing and consequently are unable to adequately perform. This lack of skill in projecting one’s sexual identity could be seen as a lack of credibility by border agency officers or immigration court judges. Another problem lies in what is recognisable as gay by the authorities in the UK: the behaviour assessed must be intelligible as gay by the Home Office, and the next section will explore the mechanisms of this r­ ecognition. Judges 83

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and Home Office decision makers rely on questioning asylum seekers on what they perceive to be the basics of gay culture and experience, with questions akin to a quiz (Heller, 2009: 303; Stonewall, 2010: 16). Non-conforming ways to express being LGBT risk being simply unrecognisable, and claimants will not be accepted as such. As Lewis puts it: ‘lesbian and gay asylum applicants are thus expected to conform to western stereotypes of male homosexual behavior based on visibility, consumption, and an identity in the public sphere in order to be considered worthy candidates for asylum’ (Lewis, 2013). In some instances, assessing claimants’ sexual orientation is also obscured by racial stereotypes on the part of judges, as demonstrated by Deborah Morgan in her analysis of racial and sexual stereotypes in the immigration courts’ narrative expectations (2006). Finally, reverse covering is also problematic when considered in relation to the practice of self-narration used for claim assessment. Indeed, self-narration presupposes a continuous subject – the person giving the account of herself or himself must be the same as the one in the narrative. Following Yoshino’s model, the practices of covering and reverse covering that might be followed by asylum seekers would prevent the narrative structure from being coherent from the perspective of the authorities. Indeed, there are fissures in the public recognisability of the claimants as LGBT, and these make it hard to assess the legitimacy of both the claimant’s belonging to the ‘LGBT social group’, and their fear of persecution. Since the burden of proof is on the asylum seeker, a lack of clarity created by the subject’s shifting expression or repression of their sexuality usually means that the claim will be rejected because of its apparent inconsistency. In other words, it is clear from behavioural expectations that homonormative gayness is the horizon of perception that confines successful claimants, and excludes those who (for many reasons, including lack of self-presentation skills) do not successfully adjust their performance to expectations. The limits of autonomy and the role of the body The body and sex acts are important themes used by the critics of the biopolitics of recognition, especially as they play a role in the production of truth about the subjects and their recognition. The use of the body to prove a claimant’s authentic sexual orientation illuminates the limits of neoliberal autonomy and self-government presumed by the biopolitical system of asylum. Sex acts and the body have an ambiguous position in the biopolitical management of asylum: they can be perceived, in some ways, as the best ways to prove one’s sexual orientation – showing one is gay or lesbian because one has sex with men or women. However, such evidence has been criticised by activists and support workers, which produced change in the Home Office API regarding the assessment of credibility of LGBT claims. The most well-publicised outrage in relation to the use of the body as a witness of claimants’ sexual orientation was the use of so-called ‘phallometry’ in the Czech Republic for gay ­claimants 84

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– a test looking at the physical arousal of claimants subjected to pornographic images. Beyond the problematic medicalisation of claimants (and the treatment of homosexuality as a condition that is adjacent), this practice was widely reviled in public arenas in the UK, discussed in many newspapers in 2011 when the UNHCR criticised it as degrading treatment, and other voices, including the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, raised doubts about the practice in relation to the European Convention of Human Rights. In the UK context, criticism concerning the body has concentrated on two issues: first, the use of explicit images by claimants to prove their orientation, and second the use of explicit questions by case-workers to assess credibility. In the first case, such tactics have been analysed as a type of ‘last resort’ by Lewis: what claimants feel like they must do in order to prove themselves in a system where ­credibility seems impossibility to attain (2014). Such images, however, are also very easily dismissed as lacking in credibility and may even increase the burden of proof for claimants.11 The use of the body as a testifier shows the limits of neoliberal autonomy for the claimants: it is at the moment when all other means of proving one’s sexual orientation fail that the body is used, as a last veridictional resource. In this regard, the other side of the neoliberal coin is a form of Arendtian pessimist theorisation of asylum whereby credibility is an abjectifying technology relegating claimants from abstract subjects to concrete bodies. Concerning the use of explicit questions, here too questions have been raised about their suitability and the dignity of the claimants being assessed. It has been shown that claimants tended to be found not credible because it was very easy for them to be deemed evasive in their answers (Spijkerboer and Jansen, 2011: 55). The Home Office advised against the use of such questions in its API: the UKLGIG notes that some case-workers following this guidance give examples of good practice, but also noted the persistence of explicit questions. It found for example questions such as: Was it loving sex or rough? (2013); What have you found is the most successful way of pulling men? (2013); So you had intercourse with him and not just blow jobs? (2013); How many sexual encounters have you had with your partner? (2013); Can I ask you why you did not have penetrative sex at any time in Nigeria up until December 2009? (2012); You have never had a relationship with a man. How do you know you are a lesbian? (2013) (UKLGIG, 2013)

The consequences of the tactics deployed here as resistance to these practices have been the disengagement of the state from using the body as a way to determine the sexuality of claimants – though it remains a central site for proving physical persecution, in cases of torture for example. Criticisms of the use of the body, although working from within the biopolitical apparatus of asylum, have wider-ranging implications: if the body is a necessary product of considering cases on the grounds of sexual orientation, then tactics aiming at removing the body as a site for the extraction of truth about subjects can profoundly disrupt the regime of veridiction of asylum. 85

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Ideals of cooperation Looking at the debates and critiques of the biopolitics of recognition, it is clear that an important function of the asylum apparatus is to integrate criticism that is useful for the efficient running of the recognition machine. In this respect, tactics of resistance can also be understood as a form of cooperation with the state, aimed at fine-tuning the state’s ability to make decisions on the basis of claimants’ ‘truthfulness’. Country of origin information is an important site for such cooperation. Indeed, one of the main techniques available to assess a claim’s plausibility is to compare it to objective information about the country of origin. COIS country of origin reports are meant to reflect the most up-to-date and accurate human rights situation in a country. Some of these reports have been augmented over the years with sections on LGBT rights. Looking at reports for four countries often discussed in salient LGBT asylum cases – Iran (version of 28 June 2011: COI Service, 2011a), Iraq (30 August 2011: COI Service, 2011b), Jamaica (27 May 2011: COI Service, 2011c) and Uganda (20 April 2011: COI Service 2011d) – I argue that they display traces of tactics of repetition by NGOs and are based on an ideal of cooperation for the production of knowledge about LGBT refugees; this cooperation is, however, organised in discourse by the COIS through the textual management of its own interdiscursivity.12 These strategies are interesting, because such an ideal of cooperation suggests a larger process of cooperation in the recognition function of the biopolitical machine of asylum emerging from the debate in public arenas between the state and its critics. The COIS reports’ main feature is their marked heterogeneity: the reports consist almost entirely of quotes from various sources. They present a series of paragraphs, each consisting of a quote from a different enunciator. There is thus no clear single authorial voice in these documents; rather, they seem to combine many different voices in direct speech. Leaving aside the practical reasons for this discursive heterogeneity (economy in terms of time, money, research resources, etc.), its discursive effects are of interest. The enunciators are quite varied and, in the corpus analysed, NGOs are the most represented voice followed by newsmedia, intergovernmental organisations (in particular the UNHCR) and governmental organisations.13 The reports seem to have no voice of their own: the text is almost entirely inside quote marks. The passages that are not quotes merely introduce the quotations, through presentation sentences without any marker of opinion. The main consequence of this style of presentation is that the enunciator of the reports (the COIS) tends to erase itself from the documents: it reads as if the documents have been written by the different enunciators quoted, thus obfuscating the fact that these quotes are still the result of a work of configuration. The erasure hides two main selections: first of enunciators (who is entitled to be quoted), and second of phrases (what in their discourse is worth repeating). The apparently voiceless structure hides this implicit selection work through a communicational ideal, 86

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which relies on a horizontal enunciative hierarchy where all statements are equal. This equality presents the statements more as pieces of a puzzle than as elements in a hierarchical information structure. Indeed, the US State Department, a British newspaper and Human Rights Watch are quoted next to each other, and introduced in the same way. The communicational structure implicitly suggests that the COIS reports reflect an independent and impartial source of information for decision makers. This mode of veridiction thus reflects on the biopolitical function of recognition for LGBT refugees: there is a need for a reliable benchmark from which to establish the truth and detect lies about this population. The open epistemic structure of these reports seems to be based on an opportunistic rationale: take the information wherever it is situated, whoever its enunciator is. However, such open structure is also placed under elaborate structures of validation and authority, especially in the way quotes have a certain ‘depth’, whereby a quote from an NGO report or a newspaper includes in itself other quotes, usually a testimony14 or an expert speech.15 In the reports there is often interplay between the sources of legitimacy of first-hand experience, expert speech and institutional aplomb, whereby for example a testimonial original truth-value (the first-hand experience) is augmented through repetition by an official source: an almost evidential value is thus conferred.16 The apparent lack of hierarchy in these reports, which rely on computation rather than synthesis, does not therefore mean that they are based on non-hierarchical modes of veridiction. The same observation is true of the apparent mix of political positions that such a computational ideal proposes. If at first sight the reports seem to put together sources with varied, if not contradictory, positions and messages in public arenas,17 examination of the structure of these quotes shows that, although there is neither comment nor synthesis, there are in fact traces of what could be called intertextual rhetoric. For example, the Jamaica report, by quoting different enunciators, claims to present an impartial, unbiased source of information; but by combining contradictory enunciators, without commenting on this contradiction, it effectively makes the comment that certain enunciators are less trustworthy than others.18 The report’s complex intertextuality thus assembles heterogeneous enunciative and political positions in one text. This intertextuality brings into question the possibility of a coherent reading contract: how can one read this series of quotes, when the reading contract of each of the repeated statements is different? Is there a specific contract for the report itself – and if there is, how is it marked in the text? I suggest that the reading contract of the COIS reports posits a detective reader: readers are to infer, conclude, assess and characterise the set of statements put before them by comparing and combining statements that come from different enunciative situations. The reports are not, as their computational ideal would have it, a non-organised, non-hierarchical wealth of aggre87

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gated information; rather, they are texts where interdiscursive tensions exist between statements and (quoted) enunciators. These tensions reflect those that attend the social agents in public arenas, and in this regard the reports display the traces of their strategic positions. In other words, one can read COIS reports as microcosms of the strategic fields around recognition: they embody the tension between on the one hand a cooperative ideal aimed at improving the recognition of ‘truthful’ claimants (and thereby the production of such truth), and on the other hand the elaboration of tools for the potential exclusion of claimants (and thereby the mass production of disbelief). There are therefore two principles in COIS reports: the existence of hierarchies and interdiscursive tensions between the different quotes; and a communicational ideal that mirrors a biopolitical ideal where the state cooperates with support groups, NGOs and international organisations in its pursuit of the fair management of LGBT cases.19 In this respect, COIS reports are platforms for the deployment of tactics against the exclusion of claimants by improving the state’s recognition abilities through more accurate and functional information. In this competitive enunciative structure, two tactics are open to support groups. The first, to client-based groups, consists of providing up-to-date, exhaustive country of origin information in order to back up their clients’ statements. The second, available to campaigning groups rather than clientoriented ones, is to produce research that will be quoted by the COIS. Such tactics show that cooperation with the state can also be understood as a means to diminish the discretionary power of the state in its decision making. The words used so far to describe the criticisms of the state’s recognition of claims are ‘tactics’ rather than strategies. Tactics refer here to the way Gill et al. borrow the concept from de Certeau to describe the types of action put forward by migrant and asylum support groups that do not completely overturn the foundations of migrant control (as opposed to, for example, abolishing borders) (2014: 374). Tactics are procedures of everyday creativity akin to ‘knowing how to get away with things’: they work from within the hegemonic strategic configuration – they do not so much disrupt the diagrammatic relations of forces, to use a Deleuzian image, than deploy means of resistance in a given power relation. The most obvious example would be that of advocates criticising state use of deportation because of its great cost and ineffectiveness, rather than through recourse to a human rights basis: they are more likely to be heard, insofar as they use the same political grammar as the state. Tactics deployed in relation to credibility engage in a process of continual improvement. Support workers and activists, by identifying and promoting actions defined as ‘good practice’, work towards a better recognition of LGBT claimants and thereby participate in the fine-tuning of the biopolitical apparatus of the state. The question of recognition is perceived by all social actors as central to the process of asylum because of the two inherent risks of misrecognition: letting in undeserving refugees and excluding those who 88

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deserve protection. Critics of the way credibility is assessed have emphasised the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of carrying out this biopolitical function – to the point of questioning the appropriateness of the state deciding whether claimants are LGB or not (Middlekoop, 2013). On the one hand, support organisations and advocates have tried, with relative success in the UK, to foster good practice at the Home Office.20 On the other hand, some propose a shift to an assessment of the plausibility of a claimant being perceived as LGBT in their country of origin: this shift eschews the problem of having the state decide on ontological matters of sexuality in order to examine instead ‘whether elements in the narrative indicate that the actors of persecution perceive him to be gay’ (Middlekoop, 2013: 169). In this context, an important tactic is to increase the Home Office’s ability to recognise LGBT claimants. The UKLGIG has, for example, taken part in the protocol of training for UKBA case-officers working on LGBT claims. These changes were implemented after a lack of case-owner training, and the caseowners’ subsequent bricolage and improvisation attracted criticism from both Stonewall and the UKLGIG. During these training sessions, case-owners were shown appropriate methods to enable claimants to freely tell their story. The UKLGIG insists on the importance of offering open questions, such as using notions like ‘difference’ instead of sexual orientation, coming out, realisation, etc., which may have little relevance to non-Western queer experiences. According to the UKLGIG, senior case-workers seem to have understood the procedure advocated in this training, but it has persistent fears over whether this learning will trickle down to all UKBA case-workers. Jill Power thus explained in 2012 that despite the training, she still encounters cases where claimants are asked questions about ‘realisation’ of their sexuality and coming out stories, or questions about the layout of rooms in club Heaven in central London (J. Power, 2012). Training serves to increase the recognisability of LGBT applicants, thereby improving their success rate. This tactic, centred on what can be done to help clients, feeds the asylum recognition apparatus with more sophisticated, differentiated categories. For the state, the biopolitics of LGBT asylum are therefore not confined to tactics of exclusion; rather, they integrate the resistance strategies produced by the exclusion, in order to enhance both the governmental machine dedicated to the efficient treatment of refugee populations, and the legitimation of the UK and its government as queer-positive and modern. Recognition as faciality To conclude this chapter, I propose to understand the biopolitics of queer recognition in the asylum system as a machine of faciality where heteronormative, homonormative and homonationalist modes of faciality coexist. The effects of the social critique of the management of asylum based on human 89

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rights and universalising discourses can be compared with those based on tactics aimed at changing the state’s practice of recognition. In this conclusion, I will consider these biopolitics as an apparatus that simultaneously produces queer liberal faciality and also, in the apparent integration of resistance tactics in the objectives of the efficient biopolitical state recognising legitimate claimants, opens possibilities for subverting the hegemony of queer liberal f­ acialities. The function of recognition can be conceived in relation to the concept of faciality developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Faciality is part of a reflection on the relationship between power, signification and subjectivation; it proposes that faces are produced according to power assemblages. Faciality posits that power impacts on modes of subjectivation and signification by the drawing and recognition of faces. In this regard, faciality is not confined to the face (as a body part), but refers to a process of assignation of faces to individuals, body parts, etc. For example, Deleuze and Guattari consider the average white man as the primary face. From this primary benchmark, the first deviances are racial: they note that European racism does not proceed through exclusion, but rather through the conception of distance between a face and a white man’s face (1980: 197–8). Faciality is also conceived in relation to discourse and enunciation, insofar as faces circumscribe the limits of both discourse and subjectivity. The authors explain: A child, woman, mother, man, father, boss, teacher, police officer, does not speak a general language but one whose signifying traits are indexed to specific faciality traits. (2004: 186)

Faciality and discursivity echo each other; that is to say that discourse is possible within the boundaries of a certain faciality. They insist: ‘Faces are not basically individual; they define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations’ (2004: 186). Faces both open discursive spaces for particular statements, and neutralise non-conforming ones. Faciality in LGBT asylum is not simply a process of improving the ability to recognise claimants though, and Deleuze and Guattari insist on the way faciality is crucial to the exercise of power, proposing that Very specific assemblages of power impose signifiance and [subjectivation] as their determinate form of expression, in reciprocal presupposition with new contents: there is no [significance] without a despotic assemblage, no [subjectivation] without an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and subjects. (2004: 200)

Faciality therefore comes to represent the way power discursively assembles subjectivities. In other words, faciality does not depend on specific modes of signification and subjectivation, but rather such modes emerge from types 90

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of faciality. The authors thus suggest that their concept can be defined as a machine because ‘it is the social production of face, because it performs the facialization of the entire body and all its surroundings and objects, and the landscapification of all worlds and milieus’ (2004: 201). This approach complements the perspective proposed by this chapter, that the recognition of claimants is based on establishing and producing the truth about LGBT refugee subjects. As shown, this process is difficult, and social actors (from advocates to the state) admit the complexity of the task of assessing credibility when the administration is lacking the semiotic resources to do so – wondering, for example, what a lesbian who has pretended to be heterosexual all her life in a different country might look like. The biopolitics of LGBT asylum can be conceived of as a machine of faciality that works in two simultaneous ways: (1) deciding who is telling the truth or not (or, in other words, who is LGBT or not) on the basis of what constitutes the recognisable ‘face’ of a gay or lesbian claimant; and (2) fostering and multiplying self-narratives and descriptions of presumably otherwise unrecognisable subjects in order to improve and add to the faces of LGBT refugees. Faciality in LGBT asylum uses different traits for the recognition of claimants; such traits can be about lifestyle, religion, suffering or gender performance, for example. Several modes can be identified in the faciality of asylum. The first is (1) a heteronormative faciality, which can be seen in many cases concerning assumptions on gender performance relying on a binary sex/ gender system. Heteronormative assumptions are also behind the doubts cast on the sexual orientation of claimants with children, the medicalisation or psychopathologisation of claimants’ sexual orientation and gender identity, the insistence on the veridiction of sex acts as opposed to identity or feelings, and the lack of understanding of the challenges and mechanisms of concealment, discretion, covering and hiding one’s sexual orientation. Faciality is also made on (2) a homonormative mode, when recognition is premised on claimants’ ability to perform their sexual orientation according to homonormative standards, such as having a gay relationship in the UK or going out in commercial gay venues. Failing to perform sexual orientation to the right standard can lead to another attempt at recognition, where subjects can be recognised as queer if they show that they are in the closet because of a persistent fear of disclosure. This is the result of the cooperation of the state with support groups, which have tried to extend the repertoire of potential faces to claimants who do not wish to or cannot be open about their sexuality in the UK – this more open repertoire has yet to be implemented systematically by the Home Office. Finally, one can also identify (3) a homonationalist mode of faciality, when recognition of claimants depends on culturalised representations of LGBT migrants. The face of the victim is central to this formulation, as shown in this chapter and Chapter 2, and the structure of refugee law, with its focus on persecution and possible harm, reinforces the centrality of the 91

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figure of the victim. Some aspects of recognition rely on more than one mode of faciality, for example the possibility of queer happy future is a form of recognition of queerness that is homonormative as well as homonationalist: claimants are recognisable if they able to enjoy the opportunities offered by gay or lesbian social spaces, and the possibility of a happy future serves to reinforce narratives of Britishness as modernity. This chapter focused on the modes of veridiction of the biopolitics of recognition, asking the question: what is it that makes some stories and behaviours truthful or not? The foremost conclusion is that recognition, as a biopolitical apparatus, can be better understood as working towards the mass production of truthfulness about LGBT asylum seekers than towards the recognition of a pre-existing face. The debates and controversies sparked about recognition and its limits show that such an ideal-type of LGBT asylum seeker, by being constantly questioned, criticised and re-framed by dissensual voices in public arenas, especially NGOs and advocates, is in a continual process of redefinition. From this analysis of the debates, there are two poles to this constant redefinition: on the one hand, the criteria of recognition used by the state tend, as they improve, to substitute heteronormative assumptions for homonormative and homonationalist ones, thus producing liberal queerness as a hegemonic horizon of recognisability for queer refugees. On the other hand, the relentless work of criticism and improvement of recognition also extends the limits of queer facialities outside such remits: where being queer is not necessarily following gay and lesbian identifications, and where binary homonationalist conceptions of intersectionality (opposing queerness to race, culture, etc.) are disrupted. Interestingly, the power of these tactics, both as they remove the state’s use of heteronormative assumptions and as they disrupt homonormative criteria of recognition, also show how successful resistance to the exclusionary and abjectifying management of queer refugee populations does not rely on human rights and universalising discourses. This chapter has shown the limits of such discursive strategies in the move from discretion to disbelief. Looking back at the analysis of public debates on asylum in the previous chapters, it is clear that human rights perspectives were not impervious to being appropriated by the exclusionary logics of nationalism and racism; it also appears that human rights justifications concerning the management of asylum claims are easily circumvented by the state through its insistence on credibility. In other words, LGBT human rights discourses, despite being central to the regimes of justification of asylum rights, are not necessarily the best tools for an efficient critique of the state.21

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Notes 1 By homonationalist politics, I mean that homonationalist incentives can act in favour (to a certain extent, and with certain limitations) of an effort on the part of the state to improve its decision-making process and avoid flagrant injustice. This, of course, does not mean that it redresses the balance of the problematic political involvements of homonationalist politics; nor does it mean that such a consideration in terms of ‘balance’ is appropriate or productive to think about these issues. 2 The UKBA justified discretion by claiming that society required everyone to be discreet in relation to sex acts. This justification is most apparent in the refusal letters the administration must send to all refused claimants. This Iranian claimant’s refusal letter illustrates the UKBA’s argumentation: ‘Legislation which renders homosexuality illegal in Iran may cause you to be secretive in the conduct of your homosexual relationships there […] it is clear from your own evidence that you have demonstrated neither past nor future intention of publicly engaging in any homosexual conduct […] which would expose you to any real risk on return to Iran [...] when an individual’s right to pursue his sexuality is placed within the context of a civilised society, the need for discretion in relation to sexual practices is the accepted norm’ (UKLGIG, 2010: 4). 3 One can read: ‘If somebody’s got a particular political opinion, we wouldn’t send them back and say well if you keep a lid on it nobody will hurt you. So why does the law say that we can do that with gays and lesbians? (Amelia, UKBA senior caseworker); The discretion issue just shows a complete lack of understanding of what it’s like to live that way. I don’t understand how it can be anything other than inhuman and degrading to expect someone to not be able to admit who they are. That’s the part I find hardest really. (Jody, UKBA presenting officer); I think what they’re talking about; living discreetly, is get a woman, marry, have kids and secretly be sleeping with men. They’re telling you to live a lie. (Johnson, Ugandan asylumseeker)’ (Stonewall, 2010: 20). 4 In his introduction to the case of HJ (Iran) and HT (Cameroon) v Secretary of State, Lord Hope says: ‘The fact is that a huge gulf has opened in attitudes to and understanding of gay persons between societies on either side of the divide. It is one of the most demanding social issues of our time.’ He also says: ‘No mention is made of sexual orientation in the preamble of [the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948] […] But coupled with an increasing recognition of the rights of gay people since the early 1960s has come an appreciation of the fundamental importance of their not being discriminated against in any respect that affects their core identity as homosexuals.’ 5 Millbank’s works are cited in paragraphs 92, 93 and 112. Hathaway’s works are cited in paragraph 13. See also Millbank’s article on discretion and disbelief (2009). 6 Assessing whether discretion was tolerable followed the ‘Anne Frank’ principle, which stated that: ‘Refugee status cannot be denied by expecting a person to conceal aspects of identity or suppress behaviour the person should be allowed to express.’ Therefore, in matters of sexual orientation, the courts held that decision makers should assess if the need to be discreet could reasonably be tolerated. This principle shows a contradiction between the courts’ understanding of sexuality as a fundamental aspect of identity, and the UKBA’s criteria, which relies on finding

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ways to exclude claimants. This contradiction exemplifies the problematic role of discretion as a means to reconcile LGBT human rights and practices of exclusion (Gower, 2010). 7 Although for ease of reference I use the umbrella term ‘LGBT’, the issues surrounding credibility are quite different for LGB claimants than for trans and intersex ones. Jhana Bach (2013) has, for example, noted that claimants are expected to identify as trans upon their first interview, despite not necessarily being familiar with UK terminology and finding it difficult to describe themselves to the Home Office; the author also mentions that narrative expectations from the Home Office are based on practices that might be common in the UK (for example, telling colleagues and family, seeking legal changes of name, etc.) but not necessarily in the claimants’ country of origin. 8 Bad decision making (for example the use of the discretion argument) worsens the issue of the scarcity of legal aid. Lord Avebury notes in the UKLGIG’s 2013 report that ‘although legal aid remains for asylum cases, practitioners are having to do unnecessary work inside diminished time allowances to rebut wrong arguments still being used by decision makers. In two thirds of the cases reviewed, for instance, the possibility of internal relocation is still being cited as a reason for refusal’ (UKLGIG, 2013). 9 The authors refer here to Vivienne Cass’ works in psychology, which identify stages in the emergence of homosexual identity: ‘This model theorizes that identity develops through a series of discrete stages: Identity Confusion, Identity Comparison, Identity Tolerance, Identity Acceptance, Identity Pride and Identity Synthesis’ (Berg and Millbank, 2009: 206). 10 Similar criticisms have been formulated in other contexts, such as the US, where Fadi Hanna (2005) has shown that male claimants performing masculinity in their assessment failed to be recognised as gay because of assumptive links between gender performance and sexual orientation on the part of the courts. 11 Lewis quotes, for example, Millbank concerning a Canadian case where such video was dismissed as evidence because it looked ‘too mechanical’ and not like the sexual relations between loving partners. 12 This analysis distinguishes between interdiscursivity and intertextuality. Interdiscursivity is used to refer to the general process of co-production of meaning through relations such as memory, concomitance, presence and distantiation. Intertextuality refers more precisely to the practice of quoting texts from other enunciators in the reports. The reports’ intertextual nature will thus be read as an organised combination of speeches that constitutes traces of competing enunciators’ strategic positions in the public arenas. The praxeological nature of these arenas is thus inscribed in the way the different voices are configured together in one document. 13 NGOs, international and local combined, account for 40–60% of the quotes in the different reports; governmental sources account for 16–22% of them; newsmedia (from community websites to local newspapers) account for 8–19% of them; and inter-governmental sources account for 0–12%. 14 For example, in the report for Jamaica: ‘a July 2009 Associated Press article reported on the story of Staceyann Chin, a Jamaican lesbian writer living in New York: In 1996, when she was 20, Chin came out as lesbian on the Kingston UWI [University

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of the West Indies] campus. She said she was ostracized by her peers, and one day was herded into a campus bathroom by a group of male students, who ripped off her clothes and sexually assaulted her. “They told me what God wanted from me, that God made women to enjoy sex with men,” recalled Chin … Chin said she doesn’t know if she would have the courage to come out now [in 2009] as a lesbian in Jamaica. “The tensions are higher now”’ (COI Service, 2011c: 20.46). 15 Expert speech is, for example, used in the Iran report, using the translation of an article written by the state-run Fars News Agency posted on the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) website. This article recounts an interview with the Director of Social Vulnerable groups at the State Agency for National Well-Being about stopping classifying transgender people as ‘people with mental disorders’ (COI Service, 2011a: 21.53). 16 A similar quote within a quote can be found in the report on Iran, but this time it is used not for its testimonial value (it does not give a personal account of events), but for the authority that the enunciator, presented without question as ‘an Iranian lesbian’, gives to both her own speech and HRW’s: ‘An Iranian lesbian who started an internet site for other women says: “What are the most important things lesbians need? They need somewhere to be safe, to find other women, to be able to communicate with them. The major problem is the family and the culture”’(COI Service, 2011a: 21.39). 17 For example, the Jamaica report quotes the following: Amnesty International (three times); AIDS-free World (once); Associated Press (twice); HRW (three times); J-Flag (eleven times); the Jamaican government (once); the Jamaican Observer (twice); Maurice Tomlinson (five times); Pink News (twice); Jamaican Prime Minister Golding (once); the Freedom House (twice); the Gleaner (once); the Universal Periodic Review (twice); and the US State Department (ten times). Here are short descriptions of these enunciators: –– J-Flag is a local LGBT organisation whose mission is ‘to work towards a Jamaican society in which the Human Rights and Equality of Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays are guaranteed. To foster the acceptance and enrichment of the lives of same-gender-loving persons who have been, and continue to be, an integral part of society [...] And, furthermore, to ensure the human rights of Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays, as set out in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (J-Flag, 2012). –– The Jamaican Observer is a Jamaican daily newspaper. –– M. Tomlinson is, according to the COIS report, an ‘activist and legal advisor with AIDS-Free World.’ He was later a recipient of the David Kato memorial award (see Chapter 2 for discussion of this award). –– PinkNews is a UK-based LGBT news website. –– Golding was a Labour Prime Minister of Jamaica between 2007 and 2011. –– The Freedom House is an American NGO founded in the early 1940s, which has been the regular subject of criticism – most notably by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (2002) – for being an ‘ideological arm’ of the US government in international affairs. The organisation presents itself as a non-partisan NGO dedicated to human rights and has a long history of defending itself against criticisms of partiality. –– The Gleaner is a Jamaican daily newspaper.

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–– The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is, according to the UNHCR’s office, ‘a unique process which involves a review of the human rights records of all 192 UN Member States once every four years. The UPR is a State-driven process, under the auspices of the Human Rights Council, which provides the opportunity for each State to declare what actions they have taken to improve the human rights situations in their countries and to fulfil their human rights obligations’ (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2012). 18 Here, for example, PM Golding’s hypocrisy is underlined: ‘20.13 In an interview, recorded on 25 September 2010 and reproduced on the J-FLAG website in October 2010, Prime Minister Golding asserted: “We [Jamaicans] are tolerant provided that homosexual lifestyle does not invade our space. And what do I mean by that? Persons who wish, because of their own inclination, to live in a homosexual relationship, do so in Jamaica and there are many such persons in Jamaica. The society in Jamaica in general do not want to be … do not want it to be flaunted” […]; 20.14 The 2009 Country Report on Human Rights Practices: Jamaica, (USSD Report 2009), released 11 March 2010, stated, “In October [2009] Prime Minister Golding, who upon taking office [in September 2007] announced that no gays or lesbians would be allowed to serve in his cabinet, called for a constitutional prohibition against same-sex marriage”’ (COI Service, 2011c: 20.13, 20.14).There are many other examples of such rhetoric in the corpus, where attempts by officials to justify, excuse or downplay homophobia are frequently discredited (COI Service, 2011a: 21.14, 21.43, 21.44, 21.53, 2011b: 23.17, 23.18, 23.19, 2011c: 20.43, 2011d: 19.15, 19.21, 19.23). 19 The idea of an efficient and fair asylum system having been the objective as laid out in Home Office guidelines and parliamentary reviews for the past ten years (Constitutional Affairs Committee, 2003; Home Office, 2002). 20 The idea being that credibility is assessed on the basis of an interview that allows the claimant to tell their story as freely as possible. Risks associated with this practice include the expectation of specific narratives of identity and self-discovery that might not apply to some claimants. As the report Fleeing Homophobia puts it: ‘This means that it should be geared towards enabling applicants to tell the story of the sexual orientation as they have experienced it, in a detailed manner and in a safe space’ (Spijkerboer and Jansen, 2011: 62). The Asylum Policy Instructions for sexual orientation asylum claims offer a description of a potentially useful approach (Home Office, 2010: 10–11). There is a significant gap between the good practice fostered in the guidance and the actual management of cases. For example, the guidance notes that no adverse judgement should be drawn from someone not having declared their sexual orientation at the screening phase, yet the UKLGIG has found instances of claimants being rejected on these grounds by Home Office case-owners and immigration judges (Home Office, 2009; UKLGIG, 2013). 21 This assessment echoes works on other issues of queer migration, exploring other types of limits to citizenship and rights-based advocacy (Chavez, 2014).

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4

Feelings of sympathy

In the last two chapters of this book, I will investigate in detail the last aspect of my general argument about homonationalism, nationhood and neoliberalism. In the previous chapters, I focused to a certain extent on political rationality and the way debates shaped representations about the nation, sexuality and citizenship. Now, I propose to look at how political affect is central in the configuration of the effects of the social problem of LGBT asylum. This analysis is premised on the idea that the expression of social suffering is dependent on (1) a collective affective disposition towards the suffering subjects and (2) a foreseeable solution aimed at reparation. There are two main complexes of affect that are central to the social problem: on the one hand around claimants’ suffering and liberal queers’ compassion; and on the other hand around happiness and longing for a better life in the UK. I will investigate the first in this chapter, and the second in Chapter 5. In these two chapters I argue that in the affective politics of LGBT asylum, examining the production of queer liberalism is essential to understanding the subjectivation of queer refugees and liberal queers: discourses on suffering and compassion are central in the self-representation of queer liberals as sexual citizens with a claim to the state; and discourses on potential happiness frame the representation of asylum as an exhortation of happiness as well as a cruel optimism. I aim to articulate homonationalist discourses, biopolitical management and affective relationship in the circulating personal stories and testimonies of refugees in order to show how the homonationalist configuration of public discourses are hinged upon the representation of queer happiness (as an objective) and compassion (as an affective relational mode) that produce co-extensively queer refugees and liberal queers in Britain. For the first part of this analysis we will turn to stories of suffering, and in particular testimonies of pain. This will enable us to see how they configure an affective relationship of compassion that co-produces liberal queers and asylum seekers, insofar as liberal queers define themselves in the affective relationship they have towards the less fortunate queers who seek hospitality in the UK. This analysis will show a different picture from the neoliberal fantasy of self-­responsibility explored in Chapter 3, and demonstrate that this affective 97

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relationship between liberal subjects who feel for suffering queers puts the latter in a disempowering position of enforced symbolic passivity. This chapter unveils three important ways in which suffering and affects of sympathy configure the social problem of LGBT asylum. First it looks at how liberal queers can identify with refugees through sympathy, and represent themselves as feeling subjects in the process. Second, collective feelings of sympathy fashion LGBT refugees as bodies legitimately deserving care, thus defining the relationship between the state and claimants. Finally, claimants’ suffering is used by liberal queers in discourses that reconstruct their political claim to the state by appropriating the wound of being queer embodied by the refugees. Before presenting this argument, it is necessary to clarify a few questions in relation to the value of testimonies in the representation of social suffering and its political and affective implications. One of the most notable aspects of public debates on asylum is the ubiquity and centrality of testimonies and self-narratives. This centrality can be understood in relation to the biopolitical governance of asylum described in Chapter 3: first, of course, because of the importance of the function of recognition in case management; but also, and equally importantly, because of the importance of fostering expressions of social suffering for a biopolitical state aimed at managing and improving life on its territory. As explained before in this book, social problems, understood as the publicisation of trouble in public arenas, ask for political responses. In the social problem, knowledge, representations and institutions are configured in a way that enables the state to exert diverse forms of power over populations (Foucault, 2004: 111–12). This mode of governmentality places the state and populations in a relationship, whereby the state takes the populations into account only insofar as they are inseparable from its own power; that is to say, according to Foucault, what they do with their life, death, activity, individual behaviour, work, etc. (1994b: 819). The relationship between the authorities and the group of individuals who complain about the problem is articulated through complex interactions. A first way to interpret these interactions is offered by Jean-François Laé. He explains that the emergence of a complaint is dependent on the existence of a policy aimed at solving it and on a collective affective disposition towards the suffering subjects. Laé therefore argues that narratives of suffering have functions within the state: they feed political ideologies with narratives that ground them in individuals’ social experience. The consequence of this is to enable greater social cohesion through the agglomeration of all narratives of suffering within one grand social narrative (1996: 10). In Laé’s idea, the complaint is part of a process that legitimises the authorities, which allows political ideologies to take root in narratives that are equated to the reality of a social experience. This idea raises a question about the management of suffering: could one argue that stories of suffering are elicited, developed and multiplied in order to manage suffering in the social body? In other words, is the publicisation of individuals’ suffering part of a social device of 98

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rationalisation and complaint management? From this perspective, stories of suffering from asylum seekers are articulated to specific formulations of the caring state. Conversely to a repressive hypothesis regarding social suffering (the authorities would try to minimise complaints in public arenas), one could argue that instead of concealment, complaints are cultivated. When fostered, gathered, heard and interpreted over and over again, complaints would therefore partake in the efficiency of a political system – this practice would attain a type of governmentality where the state cares for those who suffer by listening to them (Fassin, 2006). This approach will invite us to look at the political relevance of social complaint, and to wonder if Philippe Roussin’s insight that testimonies have become the narrative form of neoliberalism’s exercise in assuaging its conscience is also true of LGBT asylum (2006: 360). It seems therefore clear that in the social problem of LGBT asylum, the multiplication of testimonies of suffering are intrinsically linked to the functions of the biopolitical state. Yet what this chapter aims to uncover are the effects of these testimonies, not on the governance of asylum by the state, but on the subjectivation, both political and affective, of asylum seekers themselves and liberal queers in Britain. In order to look at the effects of such narratives of pain, the question of testimonial speech as a discursive mode must be clarified. The expressions ‘self-narrative’ and ‘testimony’ distinguish between two issues: the former insists on the fact that what is produced is indeed a narrative (and can be studied as such); and the latter suggests that asylum seekers are witnesses. Following Ricoeur’s work on narrativity, narrative semiosis has three functions: referentiality, communicability and selfunderstanding. These functions refer respectively to the mediation between the subject and the world, between subjects themselves and finally between the subject and themself. Emplotment is therefore the common work of the text and the reader where, as Ricoeur notes, ‘Following a narrative is reactualizing the configuring act which gives it its form’ (1991: 27). Ricoeur’s conceptualisation is useful for an analysis of self-narratives because it offers three hermeneutical levels within the problematisation of migrant queer identities. With referentiality, self-narratives configure a world where homophobia is conceptualised and linked to events, characters and motives. With communicability, self-narratives fulfil an enunciative function in public arenas: this chapter will argue that this is a witnessing function, and that it is used strategically by different enunciators in the problematisation of LGBT asylum. Finally, the notion of self-understanding foregrounds the idea that the production of non-liberal queers as victims is a narrative act through which they mediate their relationship to state and society. In this regard, suffering is an experience that turns into a mode of belonging through narration (1991: 29). There is room for tension or discordance between the pre-narrative experience of suffering (which may have a variety of configurative possibilities, and different narrative outcomes) and the constraints under which 99

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configuration can happen in the media, or in the asylum decision process. In other words, the one-size-fits-all model for tales of woe in public arenas leaves room for tensions in the narrativisation of the self. This chapter will look at self-narratives as a power nexus, technologies of the self around which opposing strategies of control, management and emancipation are deployed. Subverting dominant subjectivations of LGBT refugees can thus be achieved through reclaiming the act of self-narration. Subverting these modes of subjectivation does not only concern refugees themselves, but also British liberal queer subjects. As Ricoeur insists, narratives have effects on their reader during what he calls the ‘refigurative stage’, understood as the point at which the subjects re-interpret themselves. LGBT refugees’ self-narratives offer hermeneutical tools for the understanding (and, it could be added, the production) of queerness and liberalism for liberal queer readers. Being liberal means having a specific political, ethical and emotional response to tales of woe. More precisely, there is a process of selfcrafting through this hermeneutics whereby the liberal reader is confirmed in their own ipseity by the way they feel and think about the suffering of queer refugees. In this chapter, I propose to look at how the self-narration of non-liberal queer victimhood helps perpetuate the production of white dominant identities (whether they be queer or not). What is the nature of this relationship through which liberal queers craft themselves? This can be understood by thinking about the question of testimoniality. Roussin defines the contemporary notion of testimony as any type of narrative in the first person, in both oral and written forms, which deals equally with intimacy, fait divers, justice, society and even social information when the latter is treated like a fait divers. The testimony is not any longer a narrative […] it comprises now a ‘fundamental relationship to experience that is outside of law when affects invade logics.’1 (2006: 337)

The use of the testimonial mode in public arenas has vastly increased in many areas; most importantly, it has become a central source of discourse on social suffering, whether it is in development literature, sociology, newspapers or on television (Bourdieu, 1993; Laé, 1996; Laé and Murard, 1995; Mehl, 1994, 1998; Roussin, 2006). Testimonial speech brings a specific type of veridiction concerning suffering: it relies on the spectacle of social suffering in public arenas, and exposes a type of truthfulness rooted in experience and affect rather than analysis and expertise. It also calls for a specific communicational relation, that of the witness, which can match (or mismatch) the testimony itself and produce various affects and reactions. What kind of politicisation is thus made possible when ‘readers, viewers, spectators, consumers are all required to become witnesses as they participate in different cultural forms’ (Ahmed and Stacey, 2001: 1)? Bob Plant distinguishes between three notions regarding testimonies: iterability, performativity and futurality (2007: 32). Iterability reflects the ubiquity 100

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of testimonies in the public arenas: testimonial repetition is central to the formulation of social problems, even though this repetition might change the nature of these testimonies. These repetitions also question both the homogeneity of the experience of witnessing (do we all feel the same when faced with these stories?) and the enunciative strategies using testimonial speech (to what extent can emotions be strategically used in discourses?). Testimonies could be considered as information, a mere record of experiences past, even though one is never sure that the information in a testimony will be deemed the knowledge of record (Berlant, 2001: 43). However, as Berlant notes, testimonial communication can also be understood in relation to its consequences: what will be the interpersonal effects of the text upon the reader; or, in the case of a study of public arenas, what type of reaction will they foster, and how will it impact on the problematisation of LGBT asylum? This chapter will show that testimonial communication revolves around an affective mediation (especially around pity, fear and compassion) between the subjects themselves and between the subjects and the state. The question of the affective effects of these repeated testimonies leads to the second quality Plant distinguishes: performativity. Testimonies are more than mere reportage, and their enunciation can make them into something else – in the case of testimonies of suffering from queer refugees, this performativity can be thought about in relation to the ability to mobilise politically, through affect, liberal readers and listeners. What is central in this communicational situation is the readers’ position and their ‘commitment to keeping the event open, which means experiencing the trauma of someone else’s story and communicating in a way that keeps it traumatic for others’ (Berlant, 2001: 43–4). The performativity of tales of woe resides in their capacity to be transformed, through affect, from being a record of what happened, to becoming an impetus to act or a political inspiration for the readers. This chapter will look at the way NGOs and advocates implement enunciative strategies that aim at orchestrating public feelings in order to mobilise through affect. It will thus argue that in this affective and political mobilisation, queer refugees’ suffering acts as a counterpoint to the fantasies and realities of queer inclusion. This performativity of the LGBT refugee testimony constitutes what Plant calls its futural or promissory content, that is to say the testimony as a commitment to change oneself. In this case, it is not a confessional promise (‘I will make amends’ or ‘I will not sin again’) but a promise that binds reader and enunciator in the configurative act. This promissory content reflects the Ricoeurian refiguration, that is to say the meeting of the reader’s and the text’s horizons. In this way, reading LGBT refugees’ stories transforms the reader with significant consequences: the knowledge of the suffering of others bridges affectively the distance between the reader and the sufferer/enunciator. This bridging, however, relies on a problematic universality of suffering, eluding the possibility that the two painful experiences (that of the trauma and that of the 101

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witnessing) are not equivalent, nor do they easily generate one another. Rather, the question must be kept open: is it ever possible for readers to understand the suffering exposed to them? More precisely, what relationship can a liberal queer subject have to a persecuted LGBT asylum seeker? Is the experience of homophobia in a small town in the UK comparable to an experience in Jamaica? Does knowing one help to understand and feel the other? This chapter’s thesis is that the identification of liberal queers with queer refugees, which forms the basis of their solidarity, is made possible through such ­universalism of pain and allows for the appropriation of the wound of being queer by liberal subjects. This appropriation thus relegates queer refugees to the status of mediators in the self-production of liberal queerness in the British public sphere. In order to address these questions around the coextensive subjectivation of liberal queers and queer refugees in Britain, this chapter will first look at how testimonies are deployed as a communicational strategy by advocates. It will then explore critically how suffering and pity are mobilised in order to motivate or rouse liberal subjects to act and feel for asylum seekers. It will finally look at how political affect and the ubiquity of testimonies of suffering have an effect on the relationship between state and asylum seekers, and between liberal queers and asylum seekers. It will propose that in asylum discourses, liberal queers can appropriate the pain and the wound of being queer from asylum seekers in a mechanism that articulates nationhood, fantasised queer histories and affect. Testimonies as communicational strategy The heavy use of testimonies in public discourses on LGBT asylum has the function of maximising both political rationality and emotional engagement, by combining testimonial and evidential truths. Looking in detail at Stonewall’s No Going Back illuminates this composite mode of engagement. Interestingly, the report’s expert speech relies heavily on the use and quotation of testimonies from the social agents involved in asylum rights: asylum seekers, solicitors, Home Office officers and support workers. The first important feature the report promises is to offer both expertise (it is a report, concentrating on the law) and a spectacle of suffering.2 Testimonial speech plays a double veridictional role in the report: first it illustrates or evidences the claim that LGBT people face persecution in large portions of the world; second it accompanies the abstract notion of persecution with a representation (both image and substance, that is definition, concept, etc.). In the following example, an argumentative account of persecutions is augmented by testimonies: Gay people – both men and women – are vulnerable to ­exploitation by those that discover or suspect their sexual orientation. Often this ­persecution is of a sexual nature. Both men and women suffer rape and sexual violence.

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I got raped by my religious teacher for about a year where I had to keep my mouth shut and just keep going without question or complaint. Mahmood, Iranian asylum-seeker (Stonewall, 2010: 6)

On the one hand this quote generalises the singular experiences of the testimonies by making them into a picture of widespread sexual abuse. On the other hand it confronts the abstract wording of the argumentative section (reminiscent of legal discourse from transnational organisations) with individual experience. Doing thus not only gives substance to the vague notions of vulnerability and persecution, but also complements legal discourse with the vividness of the embodied experience of the concepts it uses. In other words, testimonial speech provides more than an image or a definition for the notion of persecution. Rather, testimoniality subverts legal intelligibility by exceeding its categories. Persecution as a legal term is an eligibility criterion; as a testimonial term, it becomes an unfathomable experience of suffering that exists outside of its legal representation. The interaction between argumentative and testimonial speeches can thus be read from this perspective: in particular, it can be concluded that the report’s problematisation of asylum relies on narratives that load conceptualisation processes with affect. Berlant notes that testimonial cultures combine extra-legal truthfulness and legal rhetoric, ‘in order to create a counter-public for a regime of justice that does not exist yet’ (2001: 42). Testimoniality also transfers authority from the institution and consenting audiences to self-evidence, thus transgressing, she adds, the rules of these genres. No Going Back’s main characteristic is precisely to articulate a strategic use of testimonies with a critical discussion of the legality of asylum. There is a paradox here, in that testimonies oppose the evidence of the self to the power of the state, and yet they are inseparable from the state’s power based on the administration of self-evidence. How does an organisation like Stonewall negotiate this paradox? There are several veridictional aspects to the strategic use of testimonies by advocates. The first is to establish hierarchical effects between voices: when opposing voices are pitted against each other – for example a Home Office case-worker and a refugee saying opposite things – the reader can take sides, and the report itself, by pitting the two testimonies against each other, makes the authority of the institution clash with the authority of the suffering body.3 This technique has the effect of showing the Home Office as disingenuous, and delegitimising its voice against the asylum seeker’s experienced truth. The hierarchies thus created are not simply an affect of intertextual rhetoric, but a consequence of the way the report assigns authority to the self-evidence of the suffering subject: qualifying and questioning testimonies mean different things when the statement to qualify is a narrative of suffering and when it is an explanation of how to do one’s job. If communicating suffering is a call for acknowledgement, the asylum seekers’ testimonies cannot be queried without putting into question the existence of the suffering itself. In other words, there 103

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are two aspects to this differential treatment: first a rhetorical one, which sees Stonewall deploying its argument by using asylum seekers’ and the Home Office’s testimonies as evidence of either persecution or disingenuity. Second, there is an aspect related to the particular veridictional value of narratives of suffering, which cannot but be trusted within the report’s enunciative device. Any discordance between asylum seekers’ testimonies and other voices will either put in jeopardy the possibility of trust in their suffering, or discard the discording voices as false or dishonest. This process is made clearer when looking at how truthfulness is expected from Home Office workers and asylum seekers. For example, in a passage about judges’ bias towards the Home Office, three UKBA officers and one asylum seeker are quoted. UKBA officers offer statements that are within the realm of opinions: opinions that are substantiated by their observation and analysis (a case-worker comments on the demographics of the judiciary that are ‘white, middle class males of a certain age’) or their experience of presenting cases in court (a presenting officer explains that she feels some judges that come with their prejudices will ‘bend over backwards’ to ensure that the Home Office wins cases). Conversely, Adebayo, the asylum seeker, has the following testimony: ‘I’ve got scars on my dick from when I was tortured, but the judge said they think the scars are just from having gay sex’ (Stonewall, 2010: 24). His testimony is not about opinion but facts: he states the fact of his torture and recalls the judge’s misinterpretation of his scars. Here the direct language signifies a type of truthfulness (his despair about what happened to him in court) where truthfulness lies outside of the rules of properness or politeness. There is thus a contrast in the scene pictured in his statement, between a judge on the one hand, the ultimate possessor of the right to speak (and the skill to use language), and on the other hand a victim whose directness brushes against the de-realising language of the law. Moreover, his story is just as much about the judge’s prejudice as it is about his body not being trusted. LGBT asylum seekers do not necessarily have many opportunities to express their opinion in this report, their enunciative function being to narrativise persecution and suffering to give them flesh. There are contradictory effects in the asylum seekers’ testimonies, for on the one hand they will be trusted over others, but on the other hand their enunciative capabilities do not reach beyond the description of their story. This illustrates two separate regimes of veridiction in this testimonial economy: there are those who can speak for themselves, that is to say who have control over their enunciation (here, UKBA officers being able to give their opinion, even in a report hostile to their action); and there are those who can only speak about themselves, and who are confined to the assertion of their victimhood without much possibility of enunciating their agency in the asylum process. Looking in detail at the longer self-narratives present in the report,4 the testimonies have the triple function of explaining homophobia, ­communicating 104

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suffering and providing self-understanding for both the sufferers and their spectators. I would like to argue that sympathy and affective intensities co-produce queer liberal and refugee subjectivities: more precisely, these two (affective) processes of subjectivation are in fact coextensive, making the social problem of LGBT asylum central to the contemporary production of liberal queerness in the UK. Before doing so, I will establish how referentiality, communicability and self-understanding are enabled by testimonies. Referentiality is the function that has been analysed for other narratives in previous chapters, and was also called semiosis: it makes sense of the world of the action by articulating a network of characters, causes and consequences that allows the reader to understand the persecution of LGBT people. The report’s testimonies are not merely a succession of events with motives and characters, but also set out a conceptual structure for the representation of homophobia in non-Western countries. Indeed, they correspond to well-established categories in the conceptualisation of LGBT human rights: the right to privacy and the right to express one’s identity. These testimonies thus echo and reinforce the ­ refiguring the operative categories of analysis in LGBT human rights, the latter p narrative at the same time as being reinforced by the testimonies’ ­configuration. The second function of communicability of suffering is crucial in the communicational apparatus of Stonewall, for it allows the making of a claim for hospitality in the name of a past wound. The narrative mode recreates a vivid image of the fear and acute stress of the narrators. It gives presence to the past through the use of dramatic structures: ‘You just have to keep lying, no I’m not, no I’m not, no I’m not, because if you say you are they can kill you’ says Adebayo; ‘They’re shouting and throwing stones at us. You stupid people, you’re immoral ones’ recalls Agnes; ‘Nobody tried to save something from the fire for me. No-one. All I had was the clothes on my back. I was crying. I was crying because I had nobody,’ explains Clarence. In these three examples, the use of repetition, emphasis or direct and indirect speech pushes further the enunciative capabilities of the report. In this respect testimonies offer stylistic possibilities that turn into rhetorical tools once associated with argumentative or media discourses. These stylistic idiosyncrasies represent at the same time the markers of testimonial authenticity (the account has not been tampered with, since it still looks like oral speech) and offer a complementary type of discursivity to the argumentative style. Testimonial authenticity is also signified by making the body testify in the narratives. The description of bodily pain is complemented, in Clarence’s case, by the mention of scars left by torture, and Adebayo at another point in the report also talks about his scars. Scars have evidential value in the asylum process, and they can be used to prove that a narrative is true to the Home Office. They have the same value here, except that their existence is not extradiscursive – the reader does not actually see the scars left on Clarence’s face. This kind of bodily testimony goes much further in the discourses deployed 105

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by Paul Canning, regularly mentioned or interviewed in national newspapers, on the website LGBT Asylum News. On his website, Canning (2010) frequently uses images for dramatic effect – for example, in an article about LGBT people in Iran, he mixes journalistic description and testimonies with pictures of scarred and wounded people having been flogged and tortured. In all these examples, the body is a testifier that both provides information and confirms the identity of the victim as such. Resorting to this type of evidence also confronts the reader emotionally. The communicability of experience in both the report and LGBT Asylum News opens the door to affect insofar as for the testimonial pact to be possible (and create trust) the reader must take the risk of being moved by the experience of reading. Finally, the scars also illuminate the question of communicability in another way. In his testimony, Clarence explains: ‘Two guys I remember because one got me here [scar on face] and the other busted my head with the bottle and the board […] Every time I cut my hair I see those scars and I remember them and I grow my beard to hide this scar. There are a lot of cuts in my head. I’ve so many cuts on my body’ (Stonewall, 2010: 8). Here, the reader is transported to the scene of enunciation, in particular with the use of the bracketed ‘[scar on face]’. The reader goes from reading an account of someone’s life to the scene of someone giving an account of himself. In so doing, readers become witnesses themselves of the wounds left on the victim’s body. Readers of these testimonies can be thought of as virtual witnesses who read content that can be authenticated as true in the original testimony. By recreating virtually the scene of enunciation, Clarence’s quote highlights the fact that the reader is the witness of probative evidence: evidence that is not merely narrative but inscribed as scars on the body of the victim. This situation illuminates the testimonies’ iterability: the readers fulfil the dual function of judging and trusting the testimonies, and of being witnesses and thereby authenticated tales of woe. Through this process of making the reader a virtual witness, Stonewall uses testimonies as highly repeatable statements that can disseminate ‘true stories’ about LGBT human rights in public arenas. The last aspect, self-understanding, revolves around the ability of both the asylum seekers and the readers to recognise and craft themselves through the narrative acts of configuration (the emplotment) and refiguration (the meeting of the text with the reader’s horizon). This process is complex, and the following sections argue that it corresponds to a political–affective mediation of sympathy and identification between liberal queers and queer refugees. Sympathy and identification The main affective relational mode between liberal queers (and more generally liberal subjects) and queer refugees is through sympathy. Sympathy and identification are closely intertwined in the social problem of LGBT asylum: in 106

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other words, asylum discourses are central to contemporary formulations of gay and lesbian subjectivities in the UK. From the way online advocates such as AllOut.org communicate with their audiences, to the way the UKLGIG addresses potential supporters, liberal queers in the UK, in Althusserian fashion, are defined in their interpellation in public arenas as feeling for and with queer refugees. This section will thus look at media representation of suffering, the UKLGIG’s website, and analyses of online advocacy platforms to argue that through the representation of suffering, liberal queers are subjectivised in their affective relationship of sympathy with refugees: in other words, being gay or lesbian in the UK is defined, in these discourses, by an affective affinity of projective identification with the plight of queer refugees in the UK. The universalism of suffering Looking at reports of cases in the news, such as Mehdi’s, one cannot but notice the prevalence of words and expressions emphasising emotions and sentiments, especially in opinion pieces: they often emotionally question the reader, and talk about ‘monstrous injustice’, a ‘huge and justified outcry’, and describe Mehdi as ‘a human being in a situation that we can thank God few of us will ever face’. Emotion is present at a more discreet and descriptive level in factual articles, mainly to describe the characters’ feelings, for example: ‘[Mehdi]’s uncle, Saeed, asked Ms Smith to take pity on his nephew, whom he said was confronting a terrible fate’; ‘He is living a nightmare’; ‘He applied for asylum in 2006 after discovering in a single distressing phone call that his former boyfriend had been charged in Iran with sodomy’ (Anon., 2008f; Ford and Syal, 2008; Verkaik, 2008e). Eliciting pity and sympathy through public discourses presumes the universality of suffering. Democracy is co-conceptualised with sympathy in Tocqueville; as Fabrice Wilhem explains, sympathy is the feeling that unites democratic individuals. For Adam Smith, sympathy comes from the spectacle of suffering: ‘through imagining, we place ourselves in her or his situation, we conceive of ourselves as enduring the same torments, we enter inside her or his body so to speak, and we become to a certain extent the same person’5 (Wilhem, 2007: 75). In other words, sympathy is a form of ‘projective identification’, which echoes Tocqueville when he claims that ‘what one sees in others is oneself. When one sees another’s suffering one imagines suffering oneself, and through this compassion discovers oneself as one’s peer.’6 This perspective, which insists on the capacity to become the same, asks the question of the homogenising effects of narratives of suffering: to what extent could an assumed universality of pain simplify the heterogeneity of experiences in order to foster compassionate feelings? Behind compassion lies the idea that one could suffer the same fate – pain is universal and should be narrativised as such in public arenas, hence the importance of scars and other embodied evidence that equates an experience of suffering to its bodily trace. The universality of pain is premised in the legal 107

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formulation of LGBT asylum, where suffering is a currency that grants protection to categories of population. In the eyes of the Convention, the plight of queers is analogous to that of religious and racial minorities or political dissidents. At every step of the process the suffering of LGBT refugees can be and is compared to others: as shown, for example, in reports such as Stonewall’s (2010) or Refugee Support’s (2009) likening LGBT asylum to the plight of migrant or trafficked people, homeless people, those under arrest or in prison, etc. Other examples seen in previous chapters, such as Stephen Fry’s equivalences between homophobia in Iran, the Holocaust and school bullying, illustrate the logic of universalism of suffering: suffering is an experience that takes different shapes and varies in intensity, but that is universally understandable and conceivable. As will be investigated at the end of this chapter, it is also this universalism that allows for liberal queers to appropriate the suffering of LGBT refugees, enabling them to act in the name of the refugees’ wound with the objective of reasserting the queer-positiveness of the state upon which their own subjectivity is based. However, one must question to what extent the pain felt by a specific population can be fully understood by others: what are the assumptions in the scenes of LGBT refugees’ suffering that make their pain universal? There are several issues in this universality; the first meeting, in some ways, Arendt’s criticism of human rights, when considering that ‘because the ideology of true feeling cannot admit the non-universality of pain, its cases of vulnerability and suffering can become all jumbled together into a scene of the generally human, and the ethical imperative toward social transformation is replaced by a passive and vaguely civic-minded ideal of compassion’ (Berlant, 2008: 41–2). The vagueness of the generally human as an object is complemented by a problem concerning the communicability of pain: if the pains of slavery or classist and sexist racism cannot be fully understood by a white middle-class reader, ‘the politics of personal feeling cannot address the institutional […] reasons for injustice’ (Woodward, 2004: 71). The same concerns are expressed by Ahmed, who warns about the danger of ‘flattening’ out the differences in pain experience. Rather, she looks at how pain ‘is involved in the production of uneven effects, in the sense that pain does not produce a homogeneous group of bodies who are together in their pain’ (2004: 31). To assume universality would prefigure woeful self-narratives as experiences fully understandable by others, that is to say that the communicability of suffering is a given in the act of self-narration. However, the efforts made for the representation and signification of emotion in articles and NGO material also hint at the limits of this understanding. In a long interviewportrait in the Observer, readers are warned in the subtitle that the stories they are about to read are ‘harrowing’. The article then introduces its subject: Although the story she tells me is a horrific one, Florence does not show emotion as she recounts it, beyond a slight narrowing of the eyes, a glance to one side, a short pause in her narrative [...] It is cold when we meet and Florence is wearing

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a long-sleeved zip-up sweatshirt but, even in the milder weather, she does not like to show the twisted ridges of skin that snake all the way up her arms. [...] She never heard from her girlfriend Susan again. ‘We tried really hard to locate her,’ she says, her voice drained of emotion. ‘I think I’m getting used to it.’ (Day, 2011)

‘Me’, here, is the journalist who becomes a secondary witness of Florence’s trauma – the journalist’s authorial voice emerges from the representation of the emotions elicited by her stories, as if she had been prompted to step up and share the story because of its harrowing nature. This presentation of the testifying victim is also rich in signifiers of repressed emotions and trauma, from the hidden scars to the despondent wording. Similar techniques can be seen in another long portrait and interview of an asylum seeker named Moses in the Scotsman, where his story of sexual abuse is very simply stated: ‘“They said to me, because I’m kind of womanly, that it would solve the problem of payment,” he says slowly’ (Ramaswani, 2011). Details, such as the way the interviewees speak (‘her voice drained of emotion’, ‘he says slowly’) unveil their trauma, all the while keeping it unreachable, beyond words and standard expressions of emotions. In the videos produced by the group ‘None on Record’, ‘a digital media project that collects the stories of [LGBT] Africans from the African Continent and the Diaspora’, filming and editing is also used in a variety of ways that flag and emphasise the emotion that the testimonies they present aim to elicit (None On Record, 2015). In the case of Skye, a lesbian refugee, the interview occurs in the domestic and intimate setting of her life with her partner – having her hair shaved, walking together down the streets. The video is thus crafted in a manner that insists on her settled life, its opposition to the homophobia of her country of origin, and the routine normalcy of her existence – a terrain upon which feelings of compassion and empathy can grow. In the cases of Bisi and John, the use of music and close ups intensifies the content of the narrative. In Uche’s video, the camera follows him in different bleak environments in the UK, in asylum seeker accommodation, on the train to Croydon and the Home Office, queuing outside the building and so on. All these techniques of mise en scène of the self-narratives rely on forms of non-verbal and non-rational forms of engagement with the viewer, hoping for an emotional engagement on top of a rational one. Their rhetorical efforts also emphasise the limits of communicability: the incommensurability of pain, only approximated by these techniques, conveys a heterogenisation of the population of ‘queer refugees’ into a series of particular situations, psyches and existences. For the enunciators using these self-narratives (None On Record, the newspapers), the universalism of suffering is something that must be fostered and strengthened through techniques to elicit and signify emotions for the viewers and readers. If these emotions are not an accidental by-product, their role in public arenas must be investigated. In ‘The epistemology of state emotion’, Berlant argues that public arenas are not merely spaces for the deployment of political rationality, but rather combine rationality with emotions: 109

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Providing a context for debates about state power, economy, and community (thereby helping to shape the practices of the representative state) had been considered the main function of the public sphere. This essay contests the notion and norm of political rationality as the core practice of democracy in the United States by considering the national political sphere not as a real or ideal scene of abstraction-oriented deliberation, but as a scene for the orchestration of public feeling – of the public’s feelings, of feelings in public, of politics as a scene of emotional contestation. (2004: 47)

This is not to say that the problematisation of asylum relies solely on emotions, but that it is important to account for how it is impacted by public feelings. In Berlant’s metaphor of the ‘orchestration’ of public feeling, the notion of the public is conceived of as both the feeling body of people and the audience of publicised feeling. Emotions thereby configured in public arenas are not simply raw suffering and raw pity. On the contrary, particular emotions have particular underlying ethical and political assumptions. One can thus ask: what kinds of political subjectivity and modes of citizenship do the affective politics of asylum engender? Between identification and compassion The UKLGIG’s website, dedicated to LGBT asylum seekers as well as to bi-national couples looking for immigration advice, contains a section called ‘stories’ with short portraits of LGBT asylum seekers and refugees. The portraits are accompanied by an introduction and a conclusion; the introduction, titled ‘This is the world we live in’ says: In order to gain even a slight understanding of the struggle that LGBT asylum seekers go through before they reach the UK, here is a sample of the backgrounds of a few of those who have come to UKLGIG for help in the last year – it does not make for easy reading! (UKLGIG, 2012)

And the conclusion explains: The vast majority of us live in a place of safety. If you are one of the 15,000 people who are visiting this website or the forum each month to find out how you can live together with your partner in the UK, under laws which were passed following 12 years of patient work by UKLGIG, we need you to understand that now we urgently need your help. More and more people are contacting us from immigration detention centres. They have claimed asylum because they fear to return to their home countries to certain abuse and worse, merely for being a lesbian or a gay man. Shockingly, some of those in detention, possibly just down the road from where you live, are suffering beatings and other abuse within the detention centres themselves. The fast-track asylum system means that very few of these people have access to adequate legal advice. With our limited and stretched resources, we cannot currently reach them all. With your help we can change this. Please donate now. (UKLGIG, 2012)

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These two quotes illustrate several issues surrounding the use of testimonial speech in the formulation of a social problem of LGBT asylum. First, they use the portraits strategically to advance the needs of the support group. The message is clear: if you care about the suffering of other queers, you can help by donating to the group. There are also a series of more delicate questions concerning representation and the politicisation of a suffering that is not shared by sufferers and readers. There are two forms of address and two forms of politicisation offered in this call for donations: one relying on political equivalence and the other on compassion. First, the addressee of the call is one of the 15,000 people visiting each month to find out about their (relatively new) rights as part of a bi-national couple. In other words, the call is saying to the readers, you (we) may have rights now, but we had to fight for them; just as we have to fight today for the rights of LGBT asylum seekers and refugees. In this respect, the call is not appealing to pity, but rather draws an equivalence between bi-national couples reading the call and asylum seekers, as part of a community of queers whose rights are never a given. Those who have the rights (now) therefore have a political obligation to help fighting for the (future) rights of other queers – extending sexual citizenship to all. Alongside this political equivalence, there is also an appeal to emotion: a couple looking for advice on civil partnerships is reading the harrowing persecution stories shared on the website. This address illustrates tensions in the spectacle of queer suffering, which sees queer citizens on the one hand, whose politics are directed towards marriage and assimilation, and queer asylum seekers on the other, whose goals are not to benefit from the rule of law but to escape unliveable conditions. This relationship is centred on distance and proximity, which are negotiated in different ways throughout the text. First, the title ‘This is the world we live in’ activates universalistic ideals of one humanity, and thereby the responsibility that the privileged reader has towards the victims. The use of the demonstrative pronoun ‘this is’ insists on the act of showing, that is to say, on the idea that being shown suffering is the starting point for action. This universalism is asserted again in the pronoun used in the sentence ‘the vast majority of us live in a place of safety’, where all queers, if not humans, are part of the same ‘us’. This statement’s implicit message is also that being a victim or not is a matter of luck: it only depends on where one lives. This is one of the main foundations of a politics of compassion and pity, where the opposition between the victim and the (potential) helper is an opposition between the unfortunate and the fortunate (Boltanski, 1999: 5–6). The attempt to express suffering to a listener is central to this communicational situation. As Veena Das notes after Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein uses the route of philosophical grammar to say that [‘I am in pain’] is not an indicative statement, although it may have the formal appearance of one. It is the beginning of a language game. Pain, in this rendering, is not that inexpressible something that destroys communication [...] Instead, it makes a claim asking for acknowledgement. (1997: 70)

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Communicating suffering is thus always a call for acknowledgement: narratives of suffering bridge the distance between pain, its expression and its acknowledgement by a spectator. Tales of woe are not signs of a lack of politicisation where grand narratives of domination are absent, but rather the product and the origin of another type of socialisation where suffering mediates intersubjective relationships between enunciating sufferers and listeners. The point of a mediated spectacle of suffering, that is to say of the organised publicisation of people’s suffering in public arenas, is to touch the fortunate so they realise their fortune. In order to do so, discourses on suffering must negotiate the distance of the experience and the proximity of help. How can one be touched by and acknowledge a suffering that is remote and alien? The quotes from the UKLGIG’s website illustrate how enunciators must deploy strategies to erase the distance. In this case, the reader is shown victims presented as ‘them’ (‘they have claimed’; ‘those in detention’; ‘these people’; ‘we cannot reach them’); however, these victims are not complete strangers because of their geographical proximity, as they are possibly in detention ‘just down the road from where you live’.7 Producing this proximity is also a way to mark these strangers that are LGBT asylum seekers as closer to the community of the nation. Just as Ahmed proposes a conception of the nation not ruled along the insider/outsider divide, but according to the ideas of relative distance and proximity, one can read the UKLGIG’s enunciative strategy as a way to insist on the proximity of LGBT asylum seekers to the ‘us’ of sexual citizens reading their stories. As Lise Jacquez (2014) shows in her work on French discourses on undocumented migrants, an important discursive strategy for advocates is to insist on the integration of migrants in the local social fabric. This strategy is not a rare occurrence in LGBT asylum discourses either, and one can read many versions of these ways of making asylum seekers closer to the nation by insisting on their inclusion in the social fabric of their localities – whether it be by showing Skye walking through the streets of a town in the Isle of Wight in her ‘None On Record’ video, or stories of asylum seekers being involved in local churches, taking courses or going to college. Constructing queer liberal subjectivities A first way to look at the affective politics of solidarity and engagement of liberal queers in LGBT asylum is organised around notions of proximity and affect: this articulation of liberal queer identity as the capacity to feel for refugees, and feel close to them, is central to the way the online LGBT rights advocacy platform AllOut.org works. Looking at the emails the group sends to its registered supporters8 concerning asylum, one sees how a promise of proximity serves to define liberal queerness partly as an affective position of identification and compassion with refugees. I would argue that in fact the position of affective identification takes the place, in AllOut.org, of an engage112

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ment based on political rationality and knowledge of the situation. Indeed, very little information is given about the asylum system in the UK – one can find interdiscursive traces in the sparse use of facts from existing reports,9 but little context or explanation of the complex asylum system is given to readers. This reduced information echoes Nyong’o’s work on online platform Avaaz and LGBT rights in Uganda, where calls seek ‘to compensate the absolute minimum of knowledge provided with a sort of maximum participation urged, envisioning a “worldwide outcry,” expressed through petition signatures, as the only way to tip the balance in favor of clemency for Ugandan queers’ (2012: 46–7). Participation in AllOut.org’s emails is always urgent, and this is emphasised in the narratives presented (there is always little time to act, for example before deportation), the use of deictics (repeated use of ‘now’, ‘before’, etc.) and of questions (starting in ‘will you ...’, ‘it takes a few seconds and could make a huge difference’, etc.). In a call to sign a petition for Brenda, one can read that ‘[h]er situation is desperate, but right now we have the opportunity to stop her deportation and defend all of our rights to live and love freely. We urgently need your help to spread the word before it’s too late.’ This sentence illustrates well the logics of mobilisation of these calls: (1) they rely on immediate action with limited time to act, and by extension limited time to understand and produce knowledge about the situation. As Nyong’o argues, this reduction of information can have the effect of disorienting the reader, and unreliability and affective intensity are linked in a way that ‘the less reliable information we can glean, the more we attach ourselves to intensities that seem plausible insofar as they conform to imaginary structures’ (2012: 49). Here, (2) such an imaginary structure clearly revolves around a form of universalism that we have seen in previous chapters and discourses, and has a strong affinity with forms of homonationalist and liberal conceptions of sexual rights and asylum: helping Brenda is also defending ‘our rights to live and love freely’. Finally, (3) one could argue that in this process of mobilisation, the call produces an affected liberal (queer) subject whose sexual subjectivity is reaffirmed in their universalising affect of sympathy and projective identification with suffering queer asylum seekers. In a way, one of the resorts of AllOut.org’s mobilisation is to be a mirror of affective intensities in which liberal subjects are willing to recognise themselves. This process of mobilisation relies on an uneasy tension between a fleeting engagement, based on little time, little knowledge and a strong affective involvement. Nurturing such involvement is managed in the emails through a promise of proximity. The main way of signifying such proximity is through constant reassurance to the reader that the team is in contact with the asylum seeker; for example, ‘“Of course I’m in danger there in my country,” Eddy told us by phone from the Harmondsworth detention centre. “They know who I am. They’ll arrest me when I get back there”’ (AllOut.org, 2011b). Another email ends with a post-scriptum: 113

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P.S. The AllOut office team’s in touch with Aderonke. She says that this campaign isn’t just important for her but also for other LGBT asylum seekers whose voices are unheard and are facing this hostile asylum process. Will you join Aderonke as she bravely fights for her life and the lives of others in the same danger? (AllOut. org, 2014)

Here, beyond the communicational strategy aimed at mobilising liberal queer readers, one can see how a queer universalism constitutes the imaginary structure that props up the affective intensities of the engagement of readers. The universalism of queerness thus works by saying that asylum seekers are like ‘us’ (AllOut.org and the readers), that they do not long for anything but what ‘we’ want and have in the UK (happiness understood as the ‘freedom to be oneself ’) and that, by extension, ‘our’ solidarity with asylum seekers can have a self-interested dimension (and in this regard, the affect at play here can be fully described as a Smithian form of sympathy). Focusing on the affective relationship posited in such processes of mobilisation reveals important differences in the way queer refugees and sexual citizens are co-conceptualised within the political rationality of the fantasised teleological times described in previous chapters. In the teleology of sexual modernity, sexual citizenship is the fruit and signifier of ‘our’ modernity, and the telos of those queers who do not occupy the same time scale as us. Regarding sympathy, identification and proximity, one can look at the relationship between asylum and sexual citizenship in another way: first, instead of one subjective position being more advanced than the other, sexual citizens and queer refugees occupy contiguous spaces, a proximity that generates, and is reinforced through, sympathy; second, instead of liberal queerness being the mode for the self-invention of asylum seekers as recognisable gays and lesbians, affect, and in particular sympathy, is the mode for the self-understanding of liberal queers. These affective transactions produce a distinction between the ‘we’ of liberal queers and the ‘them’ of refugees: first, ‘we’ feel for ‘them’ insofar as they are like us; and second, we recognise ourselves (reinforced in ‘our’ ipseity) because we feel for them. In other words, liberal queer subjectivation needs racialised queer victims that are both Othered (as an object of our sympathy) and whose difference is negated, so we can think of ‘their’ plight as equivalent to ‘ours’ and so we can imagine ‘their’ longings as similar to ‘our’ goals. In the affective politics of mobilisation in LGBT asylum, this process echoes Nyong’o’s question, following Dean, ‘whether [our] values and democracy are powerful self-deceptions, things we cannot give because they are things we do not have’ (2012: 53). Indeed these calls, made within a continual state of emergency with the aim of preventing victims from being deported by an uncaring state, epitomises the tension in the performativity of queer hospitality: its aim being not only to welcome LGBT asylum seekers, but also to reinforce the fantasy of the homonationalist ideal of inclusion. Asylum fulfils 114

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the function of allowing us to think and represent ourselves as specific rightbearing subjects: it is insofar as we feel pain for others, who are in worse conditions than ours, and are willing to call upon the state to protect them that we can symbolically enact sexual democracy in the UK. Homonationalism here is understood as self-deception: the focus is not on the normative effects of thinking of them as inferior because they are not as advanced as us (as described in Chapter 2). Rather homonationalism emphasises here the precariousness of our modernity: what asylum shows, in the way we organise ourselves to defend the right of asylum seekers to be protected, is precisely that we need it to prop up the fantasy of our own identity. The caring state AllOut.org’s communication strategies include messages that highlight their success, such as the following one concerning Brenda’s case: ‘Now more than 35,000 people have sent our letter, drawing major international news stories and building pressure on Theresa May to do the right thing’ (AllOut.org, 2011a). What exactly are the aims of such a strategy: what does it mean to ‘shame’ the government through media pressure? This process is common in discourses about international LGBT human rights advocacy, but it is here deployed against the British state. What kind of relationship between the government and asylum seekers does it presume? Does it differ from the biopolitical management examined in Chapter 3? I propose here that the focus on suffering fulfils the main function of making LGBT asylum seekers into subjects of care for the state, with two contradictions: on the one hand, suffering is a strategic resource that is used to orchestrate public feeling and influence the configuration of the social problem as urgent. On the other hand, the focus on suffering is disempowering insofar as it not only folds LGBT asylum seekers into the biopolitical state as part of the extension of its life-managing power, but it is also integrated with a communicational strategy of the caring state. The overbearing presence of tales of woe in LGBT asylum discourse is part of a larger trend in the politicisation of the social realm, which tends to be described, listened to and understood through the concept of suffering – the suffering created by poverty, illness or discrimination, for example. Suffering is integral to a type of governmentality, a category of analysis and evaluation of public policy used by the state to govern. As Didier Fassin notes about discourses on suffering in France: [I]f one considers suffering, not in the phenomenological perspective of the description of the experience of putatively suffering individuals, but rather from a sociological point of view looking at the construction of an analytical category that allows us to understand certain social situations, then, one must interrogate the conditions making its emergence possible – rather than simply the strategies of the social actors that carry it out. 10 (2006: 140)

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This position is akin to that of deconstruction of social problems: the question is not to assess whether suffering is a relevant phenomenological category, but to look at how it is used as a tool of governmentality (Pfohl, 1985). This mode of governmentality is based on the publicisation of suffering, and on the state putting itself in the role of a listener. The role of suffering and of tales of woe in public arenas has long been considered problematic because of their potential effects on the assumed rationality of a political public sphere.11 Pained testimonies call for carefulness; however, narratives of pain cannot be simply dismissed because they do not necessarily accord with the political rationality that putatively forms the basis of public arenas. Numa Murard reflects on the distance between the reader and the testimonial enunciator: ‘you are told it is horrible, but you cannot live the events yourself […] In that respect, you are right to say that to read about people’s lives is worlds apart from living them. Yet, the value of the narrative lies in this relationship’12 (Laé and Murard, 1995: 162). The contradiction here is that despite their limitations, testimonials of suffering are the only material available in the semiosis of suffering, and their political effects must be examined. In discourses on migration in France around the Sangatte camp, Fassin notes confusion between the humanitarian and the political, rather than their separation as in Agamben’s analysis (Fassin, 2005: 367–8). Following Ticktin, I look at the conflation of the humanitarian and the political exemplified in the Stonewall report as a process of production of ‘morally legitimate suffering bodies’: such bodies are not simply suffering, but they appeal to images of the universal suffering body, ‘the central figure of a politics grounded in the moral imperative’ (2011: 11). The quantity of pained testimonies is therefore a production of subjects to care for, or in Ticktin’s words, a ‘political device to create the conditions of care’ (2011: 14). In this respect, the repetition of tales of woe in public arenas allows for the accumulation of public emotions related to the spectacle of suffering and the imperative to act. This repetition has an interdiscusive quality to the extent that the emotions can be felt again, remembered, criticised, (dis)believed, etc. In their analysis of the forms of social complaints, Laé and Murard talk of the ‘sedimentation’ of sentiments, whereby ‘flows of feelings, when they are not attributable to a particular individual or enunciator, to a singular experience, or to an interiority, occupy an intermediary and inter-personal position which sediments (itself) in blocks in an invasive sphere of encounter’13 (1995: 181–9). This repetition can take a configurative function in the problematisation of LGBT asylum by becoming an interpretative frame for social practices. Public feelings, here, contribute both to the legitimisation of the suffering bodies of LGBT asylum seekers and to the rooting of a specific organisational and perceptive relationship to them. In the act of producing oneself as a victim, testimonies introduce a double relationship to the subject, subjectivation and subjection: 116

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A relation of subjectivation through which the individual presents itself as a victim, with various degrees of interiorisation of this persona, or conversely, of conscious and tactical manipulation of the body and its suffering in order to obtain a permit to remain or emergency help. Also a relation of subjection through which the authorities instantiate a relationship of generous benevolence.14 (Fassin, 2002: 687)

This ambiguity is most explicit when John looks back reflexively at his own testimony in an Observer article and wonders why he is doing it: ‘“Calling the memories back stresses me out,” he says, at the end of our conversation. “But the reason I do it is because if I don’t, people won’t understand what is happening, especially the people in Uganda who do not have a voice. The only way they will understand is for me to tell you about it”’ (Day, 2011). Forms of subjectivation and subjection are present in this quote, for it displays an ambiguity between, on the one hand, the fact that testimonies are always part of another enunciator’s device, thus showing that LGBT refugees have little to no autonomous access to public arenas, and on the other hand the fact that they nonetheless deploy strategies in their testimonies. In this case, John’s enunciation is autonomous to the extent that it is his choice to speak in public arenas (in order to find witnesses for his suffering), even though his speech can only arise in media outlets that have a relative monopoly on the access to public arenas. To constitute himself as a victim, John engages with the veridictional value of his own speech: he explains that his strategy is to give his voice to all the people suffering in Uganda. In other words, his suffering is not merely a relationship of subjectivation to himself as a victim worth the state’s protection, but is also a relationship to a collective subjectivation, whereby he represents all the suffering gay people in Uganda. Victimised subjectivations can thus be re-appropriated and used strategically by LGBT asylum seekers. However, as Fassin notes, this is accompanied by a subjection to a mode of relationship with the state where its benevolence is bestowed on victims. The state’s sovereign power to decide who to help is kept intact by the appropriation of victimised subjectivations. The contradiction between forcing the state to act on the basis of its care duties, and the subjection of LGBT subjects to a disempowering regime of care, is visible in the case-by-case approach. The case-by-case approach is also reinforced by the affective economy of suffering, whereby the repetition of tales of woe creates an affective space in public arenas where the state can retain leeway for manoeuvre. In this regard, critical views on the use of emotion in politics are partly confirmed in the case of asylum: the affective space opened by the representation of suffering allows for a type of hospitality characterised by the state being obliged to help incoming subjects, but this obligation relies on a feeling that not all state representatives share – as exemplified by all the workers showing bad faith in the Home Office and in the courts. In other words, when a responsibility relies on a feeling of obligation, individuals who are not 117

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willing to feel in the first place are not obliged by it. The obligation produced by such feelings is thus bound to public arenas: the state is obliged insofar as it is perpetually leading a communication strategy aimed at legitimising its own power – it engages de-personified discursive logics, rather than individual moral feelings. In this respect, feeling obliged to help can be equated to taking the risk of (not) seeming to care in a precise affective configuration in public arenas, where the state is expected to display compassion or firmness with certain subjects. Fassin proposes that the relation of compassion, although it humanises the relationship to the other, also depoliticises it by eluding the relations of economic domination or the forms of civic participation (2002: 686–7). In LGBT asylum, politicisation and depoliticisation coexist. On the one hand, analysis of self-narratives indicates that the insistence on victimisation positions the refugees in a relationship of dependence on the state. In this respect, it is clear that their tales of woe feed the state’s representation of itself as benevolent. Likewise, the faciality that props up the biopolitics of recognition described in Chapter 3 (heteronormative, homonormative and homonationalist) recognises primarily neoliberal forms of queerness as a set of practices of consumption and emphasises partly depoliticised, consensual (as opposed to dissensual) forms of sexual citizenship. On the other hand, support workers have continuously politicised the issue, in particular by outlining the power relations refugees are subjected to (in relation to housing, work, detention, etc.).15 In these cases, self-narratives produce political effects that go beyond the production of victims by asking a question about rights, rather than pity: the right to work, the right to be housed, etc. LGBT asylum is thus problematised on the basis of two competing discursive registers: a politico-legal one, where subjectivation is based on the affirmation of rights, and an affective one, where subjectivation is based on sympathy. However, these two registers are not separate in public arenas; on the contrary, affective discourses are bound up with the legal register. Indeed, the constraints of trust and truthfulness, central to both the legal and testimonial economies of asylum, open up a space for the plethoric production of pained self-narratives which in turn allows for the establishment of pity as a mode of relationship to asylum seekers. The main technique for the state to use this leeway is through the use of what solicitors and support workers qualify as bad faith. According to them, bad faith is expressed by the Home Office when it fails to play fairly by the rules of the asylum claim: for example, a case-owner will ask very precise questions early in the interview, and come back to them a few hours later and expect perfect consistency; or the Home Office will try to find ways to fast-track as many claimants as possible. The recourse to such bad faith can thus be read as a strategy that combines both registers of rights and pity, in that it is grounded in a regulated legal and administrative process, but it relies on simply not showing good will. 118

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The appropriation of suffering To conclude this chapter, I will look at how the affective disposition of liberal queers towards the mediated suffering of LGBT asylum seekers is indeed central to their subjectivation. Asylum has a contrapuntal function in relation to discourses of LGBT inclusion in public arenas: in a context where sexual politics of inclusion rely on the folding in of certain queer subjects in the realm of life (and the folding out of others in death-worlds) (Edelman, 2004; Puar, 2007), asylum is a discursive movement towards a return to death as a motor for the exercise of queer political claims. In other words, asylum rights are at the junction between a claim of citizenship (the extension of asylum rights on the basis of sexuality) and the appropriation of death, which with its spectacle of suffering enables liberal queerness to be redefined. I propose that the social problem of LGBT asylum offers an arena filled with political rationality and affective intensities (in particular compassion and sympathy) that participate in the reproduction of a queer liberal identity in Britain. Compassion and sympathy rely on a horizontal representation (the liberal feeling of ‘it could happen to me’) as opposed to charity in a vertical one. Sympathy is the central emotion for liberal queers in these narratives, who are prompted to ask: what if I had been born in Uganda? Wouldn’t I try to flee to the UK? The success of LGBT human rights in public arenas probably relies to a certain extent on the question of sympathy. For Brown, using the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment, there has been a problematic investment in the wound in subaltern politics; in particular she talks of the fetishisation of a wound which comes to stand for an identity (Ahmed, 2004: 32; Brown, 1995). A fetishisation of LGBT refugees’ suffering can be read in the context of the continuous assimilation of certain forms of gay subjectivations, in particular those of homonormative assimilationism whose representations are disseminated in public arenas to stand for sexual modernity and, of course, to serve those who have an interest in proclaiming the fight for LGBT rights officially over. In this context, liberal queers can be represented as having two positions: in rescue narratives, they absorb (white and non-white) queer subjects in colonial imaginaries; and on the other hand, refugees reactivate the wound of being queer when it becomes harder to stand against counter-discourses in public arenas claiming that the battle for gay rights is over. In other words, queer suffering can be reintroduced in public arenas through refugees’ stories, at the cost of reasserting discourses on sexual tolerance that claim that LGBT people do not suffer so much in the UK.16 The discursive logics of the appeal, the call for help and the testimonial economy of suffering tend to solidify the distinct separation between those who have rights (sexual citizens) and those who don’t (asylum seekers). I propose that in fact this distinction is not so clear, and that LGBT asylum discourses co-produce both asylum seekers and liberal queers. Both subjectiv119

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ities are coextensive, and rely on what the other comes to represent symbolically and politically for their own political and symbolic existence. This link between the two can be seen most clearly in the words of Sam Rowe, a theatre director who wrote and directed a verbatim play called Hearts Unspoken about LGBT asylum seekers in 2011. Rowe (2011) gave an account on the project’s development blog of what it was like, for him, to go to Croydon to the Home Office centres for asylum screening and signing in. Starting his firstperson account, he explains: ‘If I arrived in this country and wanted to claim asylum, I would first have to attend a screening interview’, and then decides to set off for Croydon to see what this is like. The narrative follows then his impressions, and the ‘I’ of the narrator oscillates between this hypothetical self as a gay man claiming asylum, and his self as a theatre director doing research. His comments on the area, accompanied by photographs of the Home Office buildings against the backdrop of the large roads of the South London suburb, reflect on this dual perspective: first exercising sympathy in the sense of placing himself in an unfortunate’s position then, as the narrative evolves, increasingly the ‘I’ of the UK theatre director takes precedence. Through this shift, the author feels outrage and tender heartedness because of what he sees: bleak buildings, intimidating officers and the spiked gates behind which people are sent into detention. The interchangeability of the position between sexual citizen and gay asylum seeker hints at the fact that sympathy does not solely rely here on a common humanity but on a specific equivalence or relation between liberal queers and LGBT asylum seekers. More specifically, this relationship, in the sentimental engagement of liberal queers, might involve a blurring of the borders between the political categories, histories and experiences of those who are now sexual citizens and those who are cast at the margins. What are the implications of this identification? What kind of solidarity can it foster? The pact of hospitality relies on the existence, expression and acknowledgement of suffering which emerges in public arenas as testimonies. Through this pact, the guest is subjectivised both as an individual with a right (the right of asylum) and as a moral burden who tentatively forces the host’s door open (the suffering queer). Through this pact, the host is subjectivised as the one who is obliged by the spectacle of suffering, and as the body whose limits are drawn by its reactions to affect. By welcoming suffering queers, the hosts define themselves through their limited capacity of compassion. Asylum narratives produce queer liberal subjects not only from their original position (as not persecuted) but, as the previous example shows, also through the process of reading, witnessing and being affected. This production is heterogeneous: in advocacy discourses, queer liberal subjects are conceived as those who have benefited from previous struggles for LGBT rights and ought to fight themselves for the benefit of those who are yet to access rights and sexual citizenship. In homonationalist discourses, liberal queers are produced as 120

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lucky first-world subjects who see in LGBT refugees an image of their less lucky selves. This can be read as an invitation for liberal queer readers to represent themselves as people grateful to the liberal state for its queer-positiveness, and whose claim on the state concerns the (still) persecuted queers asking for asylum. Compassion here is for a less modern self and charges the narratives of sexual modernity with affect. This affective position for liberal queers can also be conceptualised in terms of envy. As Ahmed notes, others can be envied for their enjoyment as well as for their lack thereof, in particular ‘for the authenticity of their suffering, their vulnerability and their pain’ (2004: 162). In the case of LGBT asylum, what she calls the ‘pleasures of being charitable’ take a special significance within the homonationalist teleological narrative of sexual modernity: if homophobia is a thing of the past and queer-positiveness a thing of the future, as well as being a frontier between the West and the non-West, then non-Western queer subjects can represent the past of the Western queer subject. An investment in the lack of enjoyment of LGBT refugees is thus also an investment in a wound that is ‘ours’ but read as past. Suffering thus becomes a universalism where all suffering is equivalent, and ‘their’ suffering can be compared to ‘ours’ and be appropriated likewise. This appropriation is enabled by the emplotment of places and characters in the testimonies. Stonewall’s report title, No Going Back, as well as the conclusion of its macro-narrative (the chapter titled ‘I can’t recover/Being sent back’) hint at the dual self-understanding offered by the report’s narrative (Stonewall, 2010: 29). Primarily, no going back means not returning to one’s home country for LGBT claimants – it is about escaping homophobic spaces and follows the idea of impossible futures analysed in Chapter 2. However, for queer liberal readers, no going back also means not turning back the clock, that is to say not accepting that the British state should still display homophobia in its treatment of refugees. Ben Summerskill’s quote regarding Mehdi’s case discussed earlier is symptomatic of this conception: ‘You only have to listen to people who were terrorised by the Metropolitan Police in the 1950s and the 1960s to know that telling gay people to live discreetly is toxic’ (Verkaik, 2008b). This equation between refugees and liberal queers offers modes of engagement for UK-based organisations, in that it is unacceptable for liberal queers to let refugees go back, for it would imply they would themselves go back in time by not living in the queer-positive state upon which their sexual citizenship and liberal subjectivation rely. In other words, the mobilisation of liberal queers for the cause of LGBT refugees is imperative to the extent that a liberal queer mode of subjectivation relies on the existence of a liberal queer-positive state. Therefore, the establishment and the perpetuation of this queer-positiveness is crucial to liberal queers, whether or not they are the direct recipients of this positiveness. We therefore face a difficulty in the subjectivation of liberal queers in relation to asylum. On the one hand their position as sexual citizens has several 121

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dimensions: the existence of a queer-positive state guaranteeing their rights as sexual citizens; their inclusion in national narratives of optimism, including in reproductive futurism; their association with imperialist and colonial projects and imaginaries, such as rescue narratives; their insertion in the neoliberal order of the labour and consumer markets, as putatively autonomous agents, pink consumers, protected workers and LGB workplace leaders; the inclusion of their existences and experiences in the imagined community of the nation (Binnie, 2004; Duggan, 2002). On the other hand their political identity, in the context of the politics of injury and ressentiment described by Brown, is predicated on the persistence of a wound from which to derive symbolic authenticity and political purchase. As Ernest Renan notes, building the nation relies on an act of amnesia: to imagine ourselves together in the community of the nation, we forget what might distance ourselves from each other, what might create dissension (1990: 10–11). From this perspective, the inclusion of liberal queers in the nation founded on tolerance involves a form of erasure of homophobia that sits precariously with its endurance and the continued need for forms of politicisation and engagement to fight it. LGBT asylum discourses perform such erasure with civilisational narratives: rescue narratives function insofar as the UK can be represented as the space of liberation, free of homophobia. LGBT refugees therefore actualise this erasure and become the benchmarks for the demonstration of the UK’s advancement on sexual tolerance. However, at the same time, asylum is also the opportunity not for a disappearance of narratives of homophobia but their explosion: the victim status of asylum seekers being produced through countless self-narratives of homophobic violence. In other words, at the same time as asylum performs the homonationalist act of producing the UK as an exceptionally tolerant civilisation, it also fosters and multiplies discourses on homophobia. The act of forgetting is therefore ambiguous: as civilisational discourses on asylum erase the actuality of homophobia in the UK, they re-inject it through the narratives of asylum seekers themselves. It is in this context that the engagement of liberal queers takes place in the form of an appropriation of the suffering of these Others that becomes ‘ours’ as we also assimilate their wound. This chapter has investigated the way the testimonial economy in LGBT asylum configures the relationship between the state and asylum seekers, on both registers of rights and affect. This testimonial economy thus creates the conditions for care, and generates a possibility for the strategic use of stories of suffering for asylum seekers. The limitations of this strategy are that reliance on such stories also circumscribes the modes of subjectivation to forms of victimisation, and of engagement to expressions of compassion. The next chapter will build on these analyses, albeit with a different corpus: concentrating on less institutionalised enunciative environments, in particular artistic practices from theatre, performance and poetry. Focusing on these types of discourse allows us to investigate forms of resistant speech that disrupt fundamental 122

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tenets of the biopolitics of LGBT asylum – thus offering a glimpse of ways of thinking and representing asylum more freely and creatively than in traditional advocacy. Notes 1 ‘tout type de récit, oral ou écrit, qui traite, à la première personne, et sur un mode égal, du fait intime, du fait divers, du fait judiciaire, du fait de société, jusqu’à l’information sociale lorsque celle-ci est traitée sur le modèle du fait divers. Il ne s’agit plus seulement ni même du récit [...] il circonscrit désormais un “rapport fondamental à l’expérience hors du droit lorsque les affects viennent envahir la logique”.’ 2 The combination of expertise and testimony is visible in many aspects of the report: for example, in the report’s structure each chapter’s title is divided into two, with one sentence in a narrative mode, and a second in an argumentative one. For example: ‘Tomorrow you might die; The experiences of lesbian, gay and bisexual people’ or ‘I can’t recover; Being sent back’ (Stonewall, 2010). Another example is the report’s back cover, which does not offer a blurb in the conventional sense, but rather a collection of four voices: ‘As soon as you’re discovered you have to leave or they’ll come to your house and burn you down. Adebayo, asylum-seeker; Someone from Jamaica claiming they’re gay will just automatically be disbelieved. Indira, UKBA case owner; If a gay person gets caught in fast-track they haven’t got a chance. Jody, UKBA presenting officer; Unless you’ve got an exceptionally able lawyer, you’re just going to be processed and removed. Edwin, Solicitor’ (Stonewall, 2010). These short extracts in place of a blurb invoke an intended readership, that is to say the people who should be interested in the report: in this case, readers eager to learn about LGBT asylum from testimonies rather than from expert discourses. The solicitor’s voice can thus be understood not so much as an expert (of law) than as a witness of how the asylum system works, and how LGBT claimants are discriminated against. The four voices display a picture of plurality and highlight the report’s comprehensiveness through this apparent polyphony. Doing so, it also presents the main characters of a meta-narrative of asylum that emerges out of the testimonial micronarratives. The specificity of this meta-narrative is that it articulates a narrative intelligibility with an expert stance: this combination results in a discourse that offers different points of entry into the problematisation of LGBT asylum in public arenas. 3 In this example, the juxtaposition of voices exposes the Home Office as showing bad faith: ‘Our attitude is if you’re a genuine asylum seeker, you claim asylum when you first arrive in the country. Oliver, UKBA caseworker […] I arrived at the airport at 8:30. I claimed asylum at 9:30 and they said I have a bad history. They said instead of asking for asylum immediately I had waited. Agnes, Ugandan asylumseeker’ (Stonewall, 2010: 11). 4 The corpus considered is made up of four longer testimonies narrating stories of persecution, by Adebayo from Nigeria, Mahmood from Iran, Clarence from Jamaica and Agnes from Uganda. For example, Agnes’ testimony is the following: ‘My girlfriend cannot leave anything discreet. I was getting into a taxi. She’s like come on baby, give me your hand. I was giving her a hug, she was kissing me and

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people are shouting, shouting, pulling our clothes. They thought we are prostitutes. They thought we wanted attention. They’re shouting and throwing stones at us. You stupid people, you’re immoral ones. During that commotion police came and then my girlfriend started going at one, giving them back words. So the policeman said okay, we can finish this at the station. They took us to the police station. They say, okay, you’re going to sleep here and then we release you in the morning. They put us into a room, they told us to remove our clothes. These two men came in and beat up my girlfriend because she was talking too much. They really beat her up. They were using a belt. They brought some electric cords, big cords because blood was flowing down. After beating her up – oh, God – these guys come to rape me. You know, two guys raping us both – it was really horrible’ (Stonewall, 2010: 9). 5 ‘Par l’imagination nous nous plaçons dans sa situation, nous nous concevons comme endurant les mêmes tourments, nous entrons pour ainsi dire à l’intérieur de son corps, et nous devenons dans une certaine mesure la même personne.’ 6 ‘Ce que l’homme voit en autrui, c’est lui-même. Il s’imagine souffrir quand il voit la souffrance d’autrui, et par cette compassion se découvre son semblable.’ 7 This ambivalence between distance and proximity is identified by Luc Boltanski as the main discursive instantiation of the spectacle of suffering (1999: 13–17). 8 The corpus considered here comprises emails sent via lists by AllOut.org between 2010 and 2014 concerning three asylum cases in the UK (Brenda, Eddy and Aderonke). A specificity of the platform is that their website does not keep archives of their past campaigns accessible to the public, and the corpus is made of archived emails by the author. The vanishing of archives from the website reflects an important feature of AllOut.org’s communication strategy, which is based on a clear insistence on the present and the emergency of each individual call to the public (usually for a petition). Each call requires urgent attention from the reader, and is often followed by another email explaining to the readers why and how their action was useful for the individual campaigns. After that, the only traces left of the actions are the individual emails that the readers may have kept or not. The website for the group has a section of archives, which are only a very few important past campaigns (AllOut.org, 2016). 9 Reports such as the UKLGIG’s Missing the Mark, or news from large scale groups such as ILGA’s website, or smaller scale outlets such as the blog LGBT Asylum News. 10 ‘Néanmoins, si on la considère [la souffrance] non pas dans la perspective phénoménologique d’une description de l’expérience des individus qui sont réputés souffrir, mais du point de vue sociologique de la construction d’une catégorie d’analyse qui permet de penser certaines situations sociales, alors on doit s’interroger sur les conditions de possibilité de son émergence – plutôt que simplement sur les stratégies des acteurs qui en sont les porteurs.’ 11 Not least for Hannah Arendt who considered in On Revolution that suffering had to be banished from the public realm precisely because one cannot be indifferent to it. Likewise, the use of suffering in a media economy where it becomes a commodity has also been noted (Arendt, 2009; Kleinman and Kleinman, 1997; Nelson, 2004). 12 ‘On te dit que c’est horrible, mais [on] ne te fait pas vivre les événements […] En ce sens, tu as raison de dire que lire la vie des gens, ça n’a rien à voir avec le fait de la vivre. Pourtant, c’est bien dans ce rapport-là que se joue la valeur du récit.’

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13 ‘C’est considérer que les flux de sentiments, lorsqu’ils ne sont plus rattachables à un individu ou un récitant, à un vécu singulier, ou à une intériorité, occupent une position intermédiaire et interpersonnelle qui se sédimente par blocs dans une aire de rencontre envahissante.’ 14 ‘Rapport de subjectivation par lequel l’individu se pose en victime, avec des degrés divers d’intériorisation de cette figure ou, au contraire, de manipulation consciente et tactique du corps et de sa souffrance afin d’obtenir un titre de séjour ou un secours d’urgence. Et rapport d’assujettissement par lequel les pouvoirs publics instaurent une relation de bienveillance généreuse.’ 15 In particular, the reports by Stonewall, the UKLGIG and Refugee Support all use tales of woe to challenge the representation of the state as simply benevolent (Refugee Support and Metropolitan Trust, 2009; Stonewall, 2010; UKLGIG, 2010). 16 This argument extends Rao’s reflections, which concern Tatchell’s role in the 2005 affair of the Iranian hangings. Rao contends that the success of rescue narratives in the UK can be partly understood in the light of the relative fulfilment of the main issues in the LGBT rights agenda in the UK after Labour’s accession to power in 1997. He adds that ‘[generous Western patrons] derive significant non-material resources from their Third World interlocutors: a raison d’être, legitimation for international activism, proof that their agenda remains unfulfilled, symbols for broader campaigns, prestige with their support base etc.’ (Rao, 2010: 184–5). This chapter’s analysis complements these insights by suggesting that a similar process is at play in LGBT asylum, and that this process is part of the affective politics of LGBT rights in the UK.

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5

The queer optimism of asylum

This last chapter will look at the other side of the affective economy of LGBT asylum discourses, and concentrate on the question of optimism. Asylum discourses are bound up entirely, though often implicitly, with the question of queer futures and optimism. Behind the way hospitality for queer asylum refugees is conceived lies an organising nexus of homonationalism, neoliberalism and futurism, where liberal queerness itself is re-imagined as a goal orientating subjects. This chapter proposes that at the core of the social problem of LGBT asylum lies the reconfiguration of the assumption noted by Luibhéid (2004) that all queers are citizens, and that all immigrants are heterosexual. Public discourses grapple with different ways to conceive of the position of asylum seekers in relation to sexual citizenship, a rights-based conception of sexual politics, and a deeply exclusionary understanding of migration in general and forced migration in particular. In this chapter, I argue that the question of optimism and the promise of happiness are central in this act of reconfiguration: the way the possible queer futures of asylum seekers are imagined allows for a public re-imagining of the position of queer migrants who are not citizens. Looking at the queer optimism of asylum, this chapter will in fact show that the reconfiguration of the relationship between migrants, sexuality and citizenship is based on a cruel optimism that cannot but fail in its promise of happiness. Optimism in LGBT asylum is a combination of discourses on neoliberalism, sexuality and rights-based aspirations which simultaneously imagines futures for asylum seekers and closes them off to make them unachievable. To emphasise the failings of queer optimism illuminates not only the contradictions within discourses on LGBT asylum, but also the contrapuntal role played by asylum seekers in sexual politics discourses in the UK: their function often has more to do with the re-imagining and re-conception of what queer liberalism means than with their empowerment as queer migrants. The chapter proposes that queer optimism provides the benchmark of what sexual citizenship strives for, yet in doing so gives rise to multiple critical discourses in public arenas. The unreachable telos of the good life turns asylum into a site for a critique that extends beyond just 126

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asylum policy, in which voices from asylum seekers and advocates challenge a dominant conception of sexual citizenship that obfuscates its exclusion of queer migrants. The second part of this chapter will analyse three art projects and performances in order to re-evaluate sympathy and queer optimism in LGBT asylum discourses, recasting the possible relations between asylum seekers and liberal queers in the UK. Cruel queer optimisms By next year I hope I will have got into college and have leave to remain. I can only be positive and hope the future will be bright. The rest is up to the Home Office and God. Anna (Cunningham et al., 2014)

As the previous chapter has shown, testimonial discourses by asylum seekers in public arenas are articulated to an orchestration of public emotions that, through compassion and sympathy, subjectivise both asylum seekers and liberal queers. Another effect of public testimoniality of asylum seekers concerns discourses of hope and optimism that are integrated into the larger discursive trends excavated in this book. In homonationalist discourses, the asylum-seeking victim plays a narrative function in generating comforting representations of the nation as enlightened, a representation necessary for the existence of liberal queer subjectivities as sexual citizens holding rights. Likewise, in the biopolitics of claim management, the machine of faciality, whether it works on a hetero- or homonormative mode, can only recognise claimants on the basis of what it means and what it looks like to be queer in the UK. This section will interrogate the way optimism works with or is in tension with these two major discursive trends. The quote opening this section exemplifies discourses of optimism in LGBT asylum, which articulate hope and optimism, but in a way that is both forced (there is not much choice) and dependent on contingency (it is up to the Home Office). Oliver Bennett proposes that since optimism, as a ‘mode of viewing the future’, is ‘an implicit expression of values and desires, it follows that it can have no single or absolute content, but will always be relative to the values and desires it expresses’ (2011: 304). There is a tension at the crux of these discourses of optimism: between one form of optimism which relies on self-responsibility (the neoliberal ideal of individuals being their own agents of change and success), and another which acknowledges the degree of contingency there is in attaining the happy goals of LGBT asylum discourses. I propose that optimism in LGBT asylum is a form of queer cruel optimism. Berlant, in her analysis of the function of optimism in a neoliberal age, conceptualises the notion of cruel optimism (2011: 23–51). Optimism becomes cruel when the means of reaching the object of happiness are precisely what will prevent the subject from reaching this object. In other words, cruel optimism acts as an injunction to reach the good life, while reproducing the forms of 127

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social and economic domination that in fact curtail access to this same place. The promise of happiness for LGBT asylum seekers works as a cruel optimism, with three closely related dimensions: the first is that the promise of happiness is about the neoliberal domestication of the subjects, and is cruel because it promises happiness while being premised on market autonomy as workers and consumers. The second is the duty of happiness, which corresponds to the homonationalist function of asylum seekers’ longing for a queer-positive nation, and which is cruel because it obfuscates the intersectional (racial, economic, gendered) obstacles to reaching such happiness. The third dimension is an exhortation of happiness, which fulfils a disciplinary function whereby refugees can only be recognised insofar as they conform to a normative identity, a queer liberal faciality that excludes them de facto. The promise of happiness and neoliberal responsibility A first mode of conceiving of the cruel optimism of LGBT asylum is to consider happiness as a neoliberal promise, where being able to build a safe, open life in the UK is linked to a wider set of discourses about what it means to be a happy and successful LGBT worker and citizen in the UK. Asylum seekers’ testimonies engage with the optimism adjacent to this promise, and propose versions of that optimism that always hint at a certain unease, or precariousness, in the promise of happiness. In Uche’s video for None On Record, he is shown walking down London’s Chinatown, near the gay centre of Soho, and says: ‘My first time I came I see people that are gay, they are free, they can move around. Nobody harassed them, nobody beat them, so that’s the only thing that make me to want to stay here.’ In Skye’s video she is in a car, talking about being taken in the middle of the night for detention: You know, I’ve always felt that I can do anything and be anyone. But at that moment, I felt really really scared and really really unsure, and very uncertain about tomorrow, and I didn’t know what was going to happen to me, whether I was gonna get beaten up, whether I was gonna get raped, and what was really gonna happen to me, or whether I was just gonna be, you know, left out in a cell.

In John’s video, he is ambivalent about his position and the possibility of freedom in the UK: The life I had in Uganda was totally different. I had my own house, I was the ... middle class! Now, I live in one room […] In Uganda, I never had the chance where I can tell somebody that I’m gay, and they embrace you and they say ‘oh everything will be all right’. Nobody has ever done that.

A similar position can be found in Prisoners of Words Unsaid, a selection of poems arising from the Hearts Unspoken project and published with the UKLGIG. In one of the poems, the author calls for better human rights for LGBT asylum seekers, and also reflects: 128

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I was not a beggar back home, I had a career and property. Refusing me to work Is depriving me of my basic needs. I have a right to medical, food, clothing and shelter I am human. Denying me a good life is unfair, A social life keeps humans healthy, Property makes them happy, Career makes them respectable citizens. All have become a dream! I have a right to a career and good life, I am human. (Rowe, 2010)

All these texts deal in some way with the notion of the good life, understood as a form of queer optimism – whether it is about their standing as citizens with career and property, or expressing the optimism of the liberal subject, able to become anyone they want. These testimonies call for an examination of this promise of happiness: first of its content, and second of its availability to asylum seekers. In her analysis of the cultural politics of emotions, Ahmed proposes that happiness is something that subjects are oriented towards. Orientation here is taken in the sense of her queer phenomenology: there are happy objects that one should strive to attain, and objects that carry other affects, such as anxiety or fear, which should be avoided (Ahmed, 2006, 2010). Looking at the promise of happiness for LGBT asylum seekers means also looking at the social options available to them, at what is perceived and produced as desirable for them. In the testimonies reproduced here, objects of happiness are too hard to reach to still be seen as a promise (‘All have become a dream!’), they are also understood as nostalgia and loss (‘I had my own house, I was the middle class!’). For Uche, the scope of the promise is more minimal, not encompassing the good life, but the right to be openly gay – ‘that’s the only thing that makes me want to stay here’. There is a relationship between offering asylum as a refuge, and offering asylum as the possibility of becoming a liberal queer. There are two aspects to this question: the first is to look at how asylum seekers can be represented with the terms and the semiotic tools of liberalism; the second is to wonder, looking at the practice of recognition and credibility of the state, whether there are normative effects to this promise of happiness. In other words, what is the liberal queer faciality of LGBT asylum seekers? The promise of the good life is regularly produced by Stonewall in their reports. Queer optimism in the reports relies on the power of LGBT subjects as citizens, workers and consumers. For example, a brochure about visiting the UK for LGBT tourists illustrates the distinction between those gays and lesbians who are, to follow Bauman’s distinction (2003), considered mobile citizens and workers whose lives must be multiplied and developed, and those 129

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who are cast as wasted lives, superfluous populations that are in excess for the wellness of the environment, the welfare state, etc. The visitor’s guide to the UK is an explanation of the different rights and protections that LGBT tourists can expect – it is colourful and has many drawings of ‘typical’ tourists in their holiday clothes, a stark difference from either the lack of pictures in No Going Back, or the photographs of the 2009 Asylum Guide, which depict people whose faces are hidden, veiled women seen from behind, hands holding pens, etc. (Stimmler et al., 2009; Stonewall, 2012c). Queer optimism allows LGBT subjects to show homophobes ‘the colour of [their] money’, following the title of another guide about protection for LGBT consumers where each page is a mock, pink banknote with gay and lesbian couples instead of the queen’s head (Stonewall, 2007b). One of the most prominent queer optimist discourses produced by Stonewall concerns the workplace, with a yearly publication of the 100 best employers in the UK and many reports on the position of LGBT people at work. The protection of LGBT workers as productive and globally mobile individuals on international assignments is, for example, the topic of their document called Global Working (Stonewall, 2007a). Another document, about LGB role models, is a series of testimonies from LGB people who are successful at work: role models are living proof that queer optimism is legitimate and that the promise of happiness for liberal queers is not false.1 Interestingly, in one of the testimonies, Noel, a young bank worker, talks about how he managed to gain a position of responsibility in a big bank, and then talks about an asylum seeker: Today, I’m also a mentor for a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender charity helping young homeless people. I’m paired with a 16-year-old boy who’s an asylum seeker from Algeria. He’s super bright and my role is to be there to encourage him to believe in himself.   People have said I should manage his expectations about what’s actually achiev­­­able but, given my own experience, I’m completely unwilling to dampen his ambition. (Stonewall, 2012b: 25)

In this story, queer optimism is evidently open to asylum seekers, and those who might question the value of that promise, the ‘killjoys’, to use Ahmed’s expression (2010: 50–87), are cast as dampening the ambition of the asylum seeker. The self-belief fostered in the young asylum seeker is the same selfbelief and ambition that is shown repeatedly in the testimonies of successful workers in the Role Models brochure. In other words, in this positive and uplifting discourse, the asylum seeker is included in the population of individualised people, which is to say under the realm of the normative expectations and the habitus of contemporary, neoliberal individualism. The asylum seeker’s position and experience can be comparable to the role model himself – the reason why he believes in making him reach as high as possible is precisely his own experience. Noel’s story begins with trying equestrianism as a child: 130

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growing up in a family that could not afford an expensive horse, he trained hard with an old horse and ended up in top-level competition. This parable works as the basis for his belief in the levelling virtues of hard work and is also the grounds for his refusal to limit the ambitions of the boy he is paired with. It highlights the universalising dimension of the discourse of individualist achievement: there is an equivalence (enough for one experience to inform the other) between his experience and that of a young asylum seeker. This form of universalisation (alongside that of suffering discussed in Chapter 4) inscribes the queer optimism of asylum within the realm of the individually achievable for neoliberal subjects. The possibility of finally being oneself is combined with a positive message about individualism. This excerpt conflates both the right not to be persecuted on the basis of one’s sexual orientation and gender identity, and with self-belief refers also to what critics of contemporary individualism have called the injunction of being oneself (Corcuff, 2002). With these encouragements, individualisation can also be interpreted as an individualisation of responsibility towards the achievement of the promise of the good life. In this regard, this type of discourse recalls Conlon and Gill’s analysis of the detention system in asylum (2013), where claimants are taught modes of existence based on neoliberal ideals of individualism and selfresponsibilisation. LGBT asylum seekers can be included in a much wider way in such discourses of self-reliance, in the same movement as they are constructed as dreaming of, or being promised, the good life of the protected liberal queer. The testimonies’ expressions of precariousness or fragility correspond to a first formulation of the cruel optimism of LGBT asylum and are revealed in the gulf between discourses of ‘not dampening ambitions’ and the material living conditions of LGBT asylum seekers. In the process of claiming, asylum seekers are economically disempowered and put at the margins of the labour and consumption markets and of the welfare state – being forbidden to work legally, relying on sub-standard accommodation and low-value hand-outs, living in expectation of potential detention and refusal, in a thwarted temporality of latency, waiting for a decision rather than projecting oneself towards the future. The promise of happiness is therefore a point of anchor for the deployment of critical discourses; the rest of this chapter will look at the different ways in which failed promises open up asylum, and also the general framework of liberal queerness, to critique. The duty of happiness and homonationalist narratives The precariousness of happiness has implications for the reproduction of homonationalist narratives in relation to asylum. One of the clearest articulations of the question of happiness in relation to homonationalism is offered by David Murray in his study of LGBT asylum in Canada, where he reworks the idea of the ‘happy migrant’ (2014: 465). In this trope, the happy migrant gives 131

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the spectacle of desiring the gift of citizenship or refugee protection, and is central in the figuration of a general desire for the nation. Likewise, the happy goals offered to asylum seekers in public discourses are those of the neoliberal inclusion of self-sustaining LGBT workers and consumers in markets where they can fully express themselves (and be all the more productive for that). There is thus a conflation between on the one hand the aims of liberal queer optimism (for better institutional and market inclusion of LGBT people) and those of queer asylum optimism (understood not solely as finding safety, but as projecting oneself onto specific forms of happy queer existences). These optimistic discourses fail to truly foster on a large scale the ‘success stories’ necessary for the reproduction of homonationalist narratives. In her work on homonationalist attachment and affect in queer couples in Canada, Melissa White talks of ‘ambivalent homonationalisms’ (2013). This ambivalence describes the different and often contradictory ways that queer migrants can feel and conceive of their relations to the nation, which are sometimes somewhat homonationalist and at the same time recognise the limits of hospitality and the way the promise of a good life can sometimes fall short. I propose that there is what could be called ambivalent homonationalisms in discourses on asylum – not based on the affective relation of individual asylum seekers, but permeating public arenas through the ubiquity of testimonial speeches. In John’s story in the Observer, the failed promise is narratively expressed through a contradiction, with the story starting with John being able for the first time to reveal his sexuality when claiming asylum, and then the realisation that this does not actually improve his perspectives in life: the exclusionary system puts him in a situation of constant deportability and of costly legal battles.2 Such narratives, by highlighting that the asylum promise of a better life is empty, provide an anchor point for critical readings of the events concerned. In this case, by emphasising the precariousness of the promise of happiness, asylum seekers’ voices in public arenas disturb the public narrative of homonationalism, showing the happy goals of neoliberal inclusion for what they are, especially through the mention of the legal battles: a process of self-responsibilisation and individualisation of queer subjects that cannot but fail as optimism when offered to asylum seekers. The end of the story uses description and narration to represent the failures of optimism: Back in the cafe in Southampton, John’s hot chocolate has gone cold. He says he misses his family ‘all the time’ and does not have much of a social life, feeling too black to be fully welcomed by the predominantly white gay community in this part of the world, and too gay to be fully accepted by the straight people he meets. He spends most of his evenings and weekends in a rented room watching TV soaps. (Day, 2011)

This section of the article reads like a mirror image of the optimism of homonationalist narratives in two ways: first, in the division between race and 132

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sexuality and John’s difficulty in finding his place in groups that never seem to accept him the way he wants them to; second, it conjures an image of life in Britain as cold and isolated (even the comfort of a hot chocolate is shortlived) that counters the narrative of liberation figuring the UK as a space for self-realisation. The exhortation of happiness and homonormative management The cruel optimism of queer asylum also takes the shape of an exhortation of happiness: in order to be recognised as LGBT refugees, claimants must conform to a certain extent to representations of queer happy futures. This mode focuses on the disciplinary function of optimism. In this regard, the exhortation of happiness corresponds to the idea that recognition must conform to a specific type of queer optimism and longing, where happiness comes from a freedom afforded by liberalism, and where freedom is understood in a restricted manner as a matter of choice between a series of (homonormative) consumption practices (Duggan, 2002; Lewis, 2013: 179; Newfield, 2002). Being able to produce, for example, a partner met in the UK can greatly boost the credibility of a story. As discussed in Chapter 3, the same phenomenon can be noted in the way Home Office case-owners have sometimes assessed a claimant’s sexuality by testing their knowledge of the commercial gay scene in London, such as describing the layout of the large central London gay venue Heaven (Stonewall, 2010: 16). Alongside such assumptions that claimants are part of a commercial scene, other examples of questioning on cultural tastes have included a ‘First Tier Tribunal [that] could not accept that a Ugandan lesbian woman was not more familiar with lesbian books and magazines’ (Spijkerboer and Jansen, 2011: 58). While this type of question is now less likely to be asked, since Home Office staff have been trained to avoid this approach, the UKLGIG’s latest report shows that problematic lines of questioning are still being followed (2013: 13–14). This type of questioning simultaneously reveals assumptions about the identification of sexual freedom as freedom to consume, and obfuscates the heterogeneity of the ‘gay scene’ by identifying it solely as a specific commercial arena. It abstracts how such scenes work through distinction and social relations involving, in particular in the case of asylum seekers, gender positions, economic capital and ethnicity. As Lewis shows about the UK, ‘state immigration policies, while ostensibly valorizing neoliberal ideals of personal responsibility and social entrepreneurship, actually produce gendered and racialized states of refugee dependency that transform lesbian asylum seekers into diminished and impoverished subjects in a way that creates serious obstacles to their credibility as lesbians when they seek asylum’ (2014: 968). The author argues that the 2010 decision, with its focus on proof and credibility, has in fact facilitated the state’s denial of lesbian asylum claims. It is clear here that queer optimism, precisely because it takes the form of such valorisation of neoliberal ideals, is a cruel optimism 133

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that denies what it purports to offer. In other words, the exhortation to happiness contributes to the reproduction of dreams of the good life and of queer optimism only insofar as LGBT asylum seekers are recognisable as oriented towards liberal queer subjectivations. With asylum, a homonationalist framework does not simply mean praising the sexual modernity of Britain, but also means offering hospitality as a restrictive queer future comprising liberal and normative identities and experiences. Chapter 1 showed how the idea of queer futures in the UK (and impossible pasts) was central in the configuration of the social problem of LGBT asylum. Looking in detail at this queer optimism, and how it is in fact a form of cruel optimism, shows how such queer futures may be ambiguous and problematic. This section has argued that three dimensions are constitutive of the cruel optimism of LGBT asylum: neoliberal failings, homonationalist longings and disciplinary function. Discourses on optimism are as important in the co-production of refugees and liberal queers as those on sympathy and suffering investigated in Chapter 4, insofar as they enshrine liberal queerness as the goal orienting all LGBT people around the world. However, the cruelty of this optimism and the persistence of failure mean that LGBT asylum does not produce happy migrants who reiterate the promise of happiness. Instead, their discourses disseminate and mirror discourses on the limits and the failures of inclusivity promised by rights- and status-based queer advocacy. As others have argued, status-based advocacy might not be the best way to fight for the rights of LGBT asylum seekers (White, 2013), and it is clear from public discourses that, in fact, the effect of asylum seekers on the discourse of queer optimism moves in an opposite direction from that of teleological gay and lesbian inclusion. In the next section I will look at several art projects in order to identify how and where something else can be done outside of these logics of happiness and suffering, to propose other modes of political and affective relations. Beyond the imperative of recognition and happiness Following the Foucaultian adage that resistance is born out of particular power relations, testimonies and self-narratives can be used in subversive practices, which criticise power configurations and open new ways of imagining LGBT refugee subjectivities. Crafting oneself as an LGBT subject in self-narratives has a hermeneutic implication for claimants, who may reinvent themselves in the act of telling their personal stories, homogenising them in a series of events, causalities, chronologies, etc. This last part will analyse Ashery’s Staying and Duckie’s Border Force and identify the ways in which they offer potentially subversive and creative opportunities of self-crafting for refugees, as well as new ways of envisaging the relationship between liberal queers and asylum seekers. For Staying, twelve lesbian asylum seekers met several times 134

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for workshops over 2009, and during these meetings they were asked to create and impersonate characters, which were simultaneously reflections on their experiences and creative opportunities. The corpus examined here comprises the documents issued as a result of these meetings – a set of cards about the different characters that can be used for discussions, a booklet comprising stories about each character and introduced by short texts on the experience of asylum seekers, the legal aspects of asylum and the use of alter egos in art, and finally workshop notes giving details about and statements from each character.3 The UKLGIG’s Erin Power explained that the project was so successful in terms of what it brought to the participants that they decided to carry on with other projects of this kind by setting a theatre group that took part in projects, including a theatre production called Babel in 2012,4 and a performance at a conference on asylum in Greenwich. According to Erin Power, one of the most noticeable benefits of these projects is the confidence they grant the participants (E. Power, 2012). For Jill Power (also from the UKLGIG), Staying has not only provided confidence which helped the participants during their asylum claims, but it has also prepared them for the aftermath of the asylum process, for example by providing a safe space for them to talk about their experience as lesbians. Erin Power considers that since Staying, the UKLGIG’s mission has been gradually transformed from being wholly dedicated to legal and administrative aid to clients, as well as community support, to an equal division between art and theatre projects involving clients and its legal support activities. This shift echoes at a practical level this analysis’s interest in selfnarrative as a technique with the potential to open up subjectivation processes for LGBT refugees. Projects like Staying displace the ‘domain of speakability’, transforming, in their speech, ‘the domain of the sayable within which [they] begin to speak at all’ (Butler, 1997: 133). This is an act of resistance and reinvention of the self within a biopolitical state that not only censors and disciplines asylum seekers’ speech but also, as we have seen in the previous chapters, thrives on its circulation in public arenas. In Staying this displacement of what can be said revolves around a critique of the power relations observed in British public arenas seen in this book in at least three ways. Looking at the ethics of refugee performance, Staying first reconsiders the very role of enunciation and testimonial speech in LGBT asylum; second it transforms hegemonic narratives, particularly in the way it talks about sex, deportability and agency; and finally Staying rejects LGBT asylum’s affective economy of pity and sympathy, to propose new ways for readers to relate to the participants. Contesting the biopolitics of asylum In a context that sees the biopolitics of asylum based on modes of veridiction whereby truthfulness is produced and used for decision making by the same 135

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institutions, criticism of refugee performance has often insisted on the delicate nature of using testimonies and ‘real’ stories. As Stella Barnes puts it, when artists insist on their desire for the refugee participants to tell their stories, what they are really saying is: ‘I want to know your story; I want to know something you remember from the past; I want to know what home means to you […] I want to know your trauma’ and the artist (as well as the audience) thus become the recipients of the refugees’ stories (2009: 35). Refugee performance therefore has the potential for the same pitfalls of sympathetic engagement described in Chapter 4. Barnes’ choice of words (‘I want to know’) also reminds us that this will to know reproduces the enunciative structures of the repressive biopolitical apparatus of asylum: refugee participants are put into the same position and asked the same questions: the hospitality of the performance stage can be just as conditional as that of the asylum system itself. Hélène Cixous, in her notes for the programme of Le Dernier Caravansérail, a 2003 performance by the French company Théâtre du soleil, conceives of the theatre stage as another place where hospitality can be exerted. However, this hospitality, in order not to be conditioned by repressive logics of appropriation and subjection, must be reflexive: Cixous presents the show with an introduction titled ‘How not to …’, a series of questions seeking ways in which the refugees’ stories can be expressed without being appropriated (2003b). As she explains: ‘We are not asked to be hospitable unto death. We are only asked not to desire reshaping the Guest [hôte] in one’s image, and instead to make oneself a stranger anew, for everyone was/has been a stranger one day’5 (2003a). Staying is constructed on the premise of a radical criticism of the potentially exploitative structure of refugee performance: it is built on a critique of the veridictional apparatus of both asylum and refugee performance. It subverts the relationship between subject and enunciator. As Chapter 3 showed, selfnarration is central to the way power is exerted on the population of LGBT asylum seekers in the UK. Staying shows that subverting dominant subjectivations can be achieved through reclaiming the act of self-narration. The project demonstrates strategies that have the liberty to experiment and play with ways to talk about, narrate and approach asylum without having to work within the established limits of the administrative process. In the workshop notes’ introduction, Ashery talks about the process of using alter-egos in the production of self-narratives. She explains that the idea came to her after learning about the support statement used in decision making, and the requirement for people to tell their life story to the state. Taking this act of ‘performing one’s identity’ as a starting point, she proposed using alter-egos in the sessions – a process she has applied extensively in previous works – and based Staying on the premise that lesbian asylum seekers would collaborate in the project by following this methodology. Ashery explains: 136

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As an artist who deals extensively with the performance of identity and subjectivity [...] I was drawn to the writing-of-the-self, the writing of one’s ‘gay 20 page profile’ aspect of the immigration experience. The notion of writing, and hence of performing one’s identity, in order to ‘prove’ who you are to the state and its legal ambassadors, struck me as a significant feature for those who have to engage with it. I wanted to facilitate processes whereby the writing and the performing of oneself and one’s experience are freed from the need to ‘prove’ anything, to be true or accurate, to remember dates and details, to account for over and over again for gaps that might appear in memory and recalling […] I wanted the participants to be able to tell their stories […] and perform their identity in a way that allows for gaps, slippages, repetitions and new structures of embodying and imagining the self. (2010b)

This approach starts from two observations: (1) that power is concentrated on techniques of the self whereby subjects are required to tell the truth according to specific veridictional regimes; and (2) that the testimonial economy of LGBT refugees is based on acts of assignation (of identity) and distribution (of population). The two observations overlap in biopolitics, since the state’s ability to manage political identities and political categories relies on testimonial discipline. Ashery’s device aims to disrupt this testimonial economy by subverting the testimonial discipline constituted by its mode of veridiction and its narrative object (the recounting of suffering and sexual identity). The first way it does so is through the disruption of the apparent seamlessness of the relationship between enunciator, subject and political object in the testimonial economy of asylum. Ashery wants to free the participants ‘from the need to “prove” anything’. By doing so, she extracts the self-narrating participants from the testimonial economy, and asserts that telling one’s story can have another aim than producing truth and truthfulness. Staying thus offers a resistance strategy precisely aimed at the most important power nexus of LGBT asylum. Distancing itself from the notion of truthfulness, or at least revoking the way truth is conceptualised and used, it also dismisses a form of power based on the manufacture of truth by the testimonial economy. For Foucault, there is no exercise of power without something akin to an alethurgy, that is to say that power is based on the ability to distinguish what is true from what is invisible, hidden, forgotten, etc.6 Staying, by displacing the question of truthfulness and evidence, disrupts the modes of veridiction through which power is exerted upon claimants. The project’s enunciative framework leaves room for gaps, slippages, repetitions, etc. The importance of such an endeavour is illuminating when thinking about Ricoeur’s notion of self-understanding. If narrative intelligence allows for self-understanding, then freeing the narrative from dominant alethurgies opens the door to possibilities of self-crafting that go beyond the double process of subjection (as an object necessitating care) and subjectivation (as a victim) described in Chapter 4. 137

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Many characters displace the relationship between enunciator and subject; from the character House, whose experience is related through the metaphor of a house with many rooms, to the character Super Lover, who is created collectively through group discussions, improvisations, games and photography. All characters are to a certain extent the product of group sessions, interviews and dialogues between participants, further diluting the pre-eminence of a single authorial voice in the representation of the self. As a result, the discourse itself is heterogeneous and fragmented in that it is not a clear-cut narrative but a collection of texts: poems, songs, dialogues, interviews, stories, etc. There are several layers of heterogeneity and polyphony, and the characters often express multiple, sometimes conflicted, identities: Treeman is about finding hidden strength in dire circumstances; Cloud about optimism and hopelessness; CameraGunMan about violence and self-affirmation. The characters’ enunciation is also explicitly relational, as they talk about themselves in dialogues, interviews or in relation to existing texts and poems. Collective enunciation is at its pinnacle with the character of Super Lover, the ideal lover: ‘We could all give Super Lover material to write the Memoirs of a Super Lover. Not necessarily stories about the sex you are into, but different stories we could all give you’ (Ashery, 2010b). Super Lover is the aggregation of the group’s experiences, and thereby displaces the singularity of the experience to be narrated. In tales of woe, the opposition between singular and collective lies on the ambiguous notion of exemplariness: the tale of woe one reads is a singular story but it stands for countless untold stories. The idea is ambiguous because on the one hand it requires trust, evidence and so on to be believed, but on the other hand it implies that the stories are representative of many other cases (which one is asked to believe without reading). In Super Lover’s case, a collective experience results in a collective enunciation. However, the power relations within the collective are not obfuscated or erased behind a unified collective voice and, instead, the workshop notes offer a long transcript of discussions. Another example of the dissociation between the subject and the enunciator is the characters’ low level of reliance on the testimonial ‘I’. ‘I’ is the grammatical guarantee of the testimonial authenticity: in other words, it seals the pact of trust and responsibility that underlies testimonial enunciation. Staying offers a variety of alternatives, as evident in the character of Bin who uses several modes of address. The character itself is not the subject of the enunciation, but the object of the bin. In her text, the use of pronouns is fluid and objects can become subjects and vice versa in the middle of the text, which ends with the following paragraph: This is what the Bin says: ‘I see you. I recognise you and I hate it. Do I need to say that? And if I do, what would the other bins around me say? How would they feel? I feel the hurt. I can hear her shouting. She told me that they don’t want her to be around them. They tell her that she cannot stay. Will she fit in? Is she big enough? Can she face it? Can she cope?’ (Ashery, 2010a, 2010b)

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Her text is about suffering, albeit differently expressed from that represented in the tales of woe studied earlier. First, it does not focus on the minute description of what happened to a body, but rather on how this suffering can be expressed – in this case, the metaphor of the bin. In the story, the meaning ascribed to the bin changes: it is at times a metaphor for homophobia, an image of the symbolic violence she is subjected to, and at other times the participant herself. Likewise, the range of experiences conveyed by Bin is wider than the standard tale of woe: for example, it includes remarks on the spectators of suffering, and it rewrites the metaphor of coming out in a narrative more relevant to her experience. Staying plays with the performativity of the act of enunciation, in particular with the form of enunciation (who speaks, in what name, etc.) and with narrative configuration. This performative power is turned inside out in Bin’s last paragraph; there, the reader is lost between the different meanings given to Bin, and so between the different voices it/she has. Unlike in the use of self-narratives in the biopolitics of recognition, this paragraph does not aim to produce a coherent and homogeneous subject, but rather to split her voices and experiences into a heterogeneous set of positions, relations and experiences. Challenging hegemonic narratives Another way that Staying offers a critique of the main power relations at play in LGBT asylum discourse is through a double work of displacement: both of hegemonic narratives, and of the hegemony of narratives as the main mode through which asylum seekers’ experiences are presented as intelligible. As Rea Dennis notes about refugee performance in theatre, ‘uncritical trusting of the seemingly logical, sequential order of narrative can lead to organising the refugee subject into a single essential or general identity position, thus obscuring the individual’ (2008: 212). From the way that participants in Staying talk about sex, deportability and their own agency in the asylum process, as well as their settling in the UK, it is clear that there is both a move away from narratives understood in the sense of a homogenising chain of events, and from specific repeated narratives of suffering and optimism. The project’s discussions of sex exemplify this shift. In standard asylum narratives, sex and sexuality are only used insofar as they enable plot progression: they are the trigger for persecution, the basis for the development of an identity, and a legal criterion to have the right to remain in the UK. Staying offers the opportunity to most participants to talk individually about their sex lives and experiences, in discussions with others or in poems and creative writing exercises about fantasies and desires. Doing this enables a much wider palette of available terms, identities and themes to be explored, evident most particularly in the character Soft Stud. The language she uses to describe her identity revolves around the different qualities that a Soft Stud should have as a lover, preferring femme or butch partners and the differences between 139

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‘soft studs’ and ‘stud studs’. These experiences and distinctions, allowing the character to express feelings and desires, could be considered as excellent evidential information for proving sexuality (they demonstrate an affinity with certain sexual cultures) and yet is only possible outside of a mainly heteronormative environment designed to force people testify about the truth of their subjectivity. The collective character of Super Lover also provides the opportunity to talk about sex free from these requirements: she does not talk of sex in any national context, nor inscribe it a refugee narrative, but rather talks of love, relationships, sex drive, butches and femmes, control in the bedroom and sex toys. Ashery suggests that this session had particular political significance, and adds that the sessions ‘seemed to be the nearest [she was] ever going to get to be part of those mythical feminist awareness-raising women’s groups of the 1970s, when women apparently shared information, their desires and their anatomy with one other’ (2010b: 6). Another form of identification happens here, except this time the situation with the participants is perceived as the renewed possibility for a form of politicisation and community that has been irrevocably lost. Compared to the other types of identification between liberal queers and refugees investigated so far, this one is not based on the topic of sentiment, but on the possibility of an actual communal experience about sex and one’s body. Talking about sex in Staying is therefore paradoxical in that sex becomes the discursive space where dialogue is built among asylum seekers, and between asylum seekers and other participants: the artist, others involved in the project, and by extension the readers of the project’s documentation. In the process of talking about sex and desiring bodies queerness is re-established as the political and experiential link between asylum seekers and the readers of their texts. Sexuality escapes its evidential function in asylum discourses and replaces sentiment, compassion and teleological narratives as the basis for the projective identification of liberal queers with the asylum seekers. The other critique of the biopolitics of asylum concerns the emphasis on the experience of deportability – the ever possible impending deportation as it impacts on the participants’ experiences. In her work on the deportation of lesbian asylum seekers, Lewis looks at Staying as a platform for the expression of the subjective and political consequences of the systems of exclusion of LGBT asylum. Treeman, for example, when she remembers how she avoided deportation by shouting so loudly on the plane that they could not proceed with it, illustrates how migrants, when they are deprived of fundamental rights, have no other option than their physical ability to resist (2013: 185). The question of deportation is also linked to the question of affect and the multiple temporalities of LGBT asylum that have been discussed in this book. For Lewis, Treeman’s narrative of her attempted forced removal acknowledges the psychological effects of deportability, in particular producing feelings of hopelessness and despair. She works with Lois McNay’s analysis of hope as 140

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an ‘agent’s objective ability to manipulate the potentialities of the present in order to realize some future project’ to claim that the deportability of lesbian migrants is an ‘enforced orientation to the present’ (Lewis, 2013: 185). Deportability epitomises the orientation of the present and the latency, that of ‘staying’ and waiting for the state to decide and potentially reject claimants, making their queer futures impossible. If stories of suffering tend to disempower them, the participants in Staying propose other ways to talk about their lives and experience that place their agency at the centre. The character called Dream talks about a bad dream she had, where she was handcuffed and persecuted; later, she recalls starting claiming asylum in the UK, and living that dream in real life. This plays on good and bad dreams, and between the dream of the good life and the actuality of claiming asylum in the UK: Dream: Because when you’re in Africa you think when you come to Europe, you know, that there are gay rights, this and that. House: Mmm. Dream: But it’s not like that. There are so many issues that I’m dealing with right now, which makes things even more difficult for me, so I’m in a big battle. And until I win that battle, everything is on hold. (Ashery, 2010b: 44)

Looking at media narratives, like those of Mehdi or Brenda, the narrative configuration of cases in the news depict the asylum seeker as mainly passive, insisting rather on the activity deployed by the UK-based facilitators and advocates (MPs, activists, etc.). Yet these long, protracted cases required an immense amount of effort on the part of the claimants in order to make progress and succeed in gaining asylum. Most narratives in Staying insist on the high amount of activity required to live as an asylum seeker, in the legal and political limbo into which they are forced. Dream illustrates this contradiction between the stillness of the experience of waiting for the Home Office to decide, and the level of activity that is constantly required for the asylum process and for daily acts of living is illustrated. Violence also plays a crucial role in LGBT refugee narratives, in particular in producing victims. The character CameraGunMan offers a narrative where violence plays a role beyond the representation of persecution. CameraGunMan also displays no unity of the self, and presents herself using a poster explaining her name: the gun ‘represent my ego as a Tom boy and for protection’, the camera ‘represent my future’ and the man, a self-portrait with a hat, sun glasses and a scarf covering the mouth ‘represent my sexuality as a Butch’ (Ashery, 2010b.) In this picture, CameraGunMan asserts a butchness that goes beyond the scale of acceptability in the testimonial economy because of its violent iconography: the gun and the covered face. She fully challenges the victimised refugee subjectivation by appropriating codes of violence in her performance – she does not aim to inspire pity but fear. Going back to the 141

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homo- and heteronormative facilities of the recognition apparatus, CameraGunMan’s butchness eschews in its iconography the ways in which it might have been recognised by the state’s biopolitical apparatus: it does not correspond to heteronormative binaries about gender inversion, not does it correspond exactly to forms of homonormative expectation, in particular in the way she re-employs the codes of gangster performance. Violence displaces the refugee narrative point of view: she is not simply the victim of persecution, but rather has become a tough gangster. In her narrative, violence is thus not about being the victim of homophobic persecution, but a wider array of childhood experience, including school bullying and her experience of ‘always, always wearing small shorts under my skirt because I knew I was fighting every day, and [I had] a small knife too. And then one of them, the big brother, just punched me and I pulled out my knife and cut him from here to here (gestures with her finger)’ (Ashery, 2010b). Such a display of violence would be problematic at a Home Office or court hearing because it does not refer to homophobia. More generally it could be perceived as disconcerting, as the claimant displays a violence hardly compatible with the production of oneself as a victim and as a future citizen. In this respect, one could also see CameraGunMan’s performance as a displacement of homonationalist faciality, insofar as it breaks away from the narrative series of homophobic violence leading to safe haven in the UK, offering a more complex and personal story. Likewise, her use of gangster iconography and performance also insists on her ability to construct an image and a persona that overwrites the semiotics of race in LGBT asylum (where race is understood through its conflictual relationship with sexuality), drawing from and reinterpreting globalised images of Black gangster life. It is clear that in this act of self-presentation, CameraGunMan is resisting the subjectivising gaze of the state’s machine of faciality and proposing her own self-reinvention. Agency was also central in another theatre project led by the UKLGIG, where asylum seekers co-wrote and performed short satirical plays about their experience in the UK. These short plays were presented at the Greenwich conference on LGBT asylum in July 2012, and performed again at the UKLGIG in August 2012. One of the plays presented a narrative taking place on a train where commuters (played by asylum seekers) read and discussed negative articles about asylum in Britain. Then, other participants (playing asylum seekers) responded fiercely to these criticisms, taking a position not given to them in other enunciative instances. This scene was conceived as a response to the questions: why do you think the public hates asylum seekers? What would you say to them? (J. Power, 2012). In her narratives of violence and agency, CameraGunMan recounts racial abuse, such as the time in London when she attacked someone on the bus who had been shouting racist abuse at her. These stories contrast with the standard narratives where racism seems to disappear behind homophobia. Talking about racism goes against dominant modes of 142

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understanding asylum seeker lives to a certain extent: as Jill Power from the UKLGIG explains, in the narratives it fosters the Home Office closely follows the Convention criteria and is neither interested in racism (if one’s claim is for sexual orientation) nor in events happening in the UK (if they do not help to establish the claimant’s sexuality) (J. Power, 2012). Finally, racial abuse is described as taking place in both the UK and CameraGunMan’s country of origin, displacing again narrative expectations about liberation. In the combination of these traits, being Butch, being Black and being a ‘gangster’, CameraGunMan represents herself in ways that intersect multiple, localised forms of identification, rather than as a homogeneous (passive) victim of African homophobia ready to be saved by the UK. Recasting kinship The ethical problems of refugee performance also revolve around the risks of ‘seeking “truth” in representation’ (Grehan, 2009: 118) and the position of the audience. As the previous analysis has shown, Staying’s relationship with truthfulness is radical as a necessity emerging out of the political economy of testimonies in LGBT asylum. The performance’s detachment from the need to be truthful also has consequences for the audience. A risk in refugee performances that focus on revealing the ‘truth’ of people’s lives, on top of that of asking participants to go through traumatic experiences, is that of making a spectacle of the refugees’ lives and suffering. As Julie Salverson says of her own practice: ‘if our play invites an audience to step into the shoes of the refugee, to empathise with her “as if ”, then the refugee becomes an object of spectacle and the audience member – and by extension playwright, director and actors – offstage voyeurs. Both are less secure, able to listen and respond to the encounter. It is possible that both even disappear’ (Grehan, 2009: 119). In the last two chapters, we have seen that the position of liberal spectators of the suffering of LGBT refugees, in particular queer ones, is indeed more complex than that of a voyeur: complex games of identification and longing mean that liberal queer and queer refugee’s subjectivations are intertwined. Nonetheless, the ethical question asked by Grehan, when she conceives of the on-stage spectacle with the tools of Boltanski’s analysis of distant suffering in public arenas, opens up the possibility to think, in turn, of the relationship between a critical performance space – such as the one created by Staying – and public arenas where LGBT asylum is discussed. The following section suggests that Staying, by refusing the moral economy of sympathy, offers a hospitable public stage for the expression and repetition of resisting discourses. These new ways of giving an account of the experiences of lesbian asylum seekers also challenge the affective economy that has been discussed in the past two chapters. LGBT refugee performance offers three important ways to cast new types of relations between asylum seekers and the spectators of their experiences: the refusal of exchanges of pity and sympathy; the production of hospital stages; and a 143

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new focus on the difference in experiences between asylum seekers and liberal queer spectators, audiences and readers. Such refusal of pity is exemplified by Rebel With a Cause. Her narrative maintains many of the rules of testimony: it recounts how she arrived in the UK and how she was transformed into a lesbian refugee. However, this transformation does not follow the established narrative, whereby persecution is followed by migration and the UK becomes the site for the realisation of queerness. Rebel With a Cause uses material from the typical, expected narrative, like stories of being bullied in her youth and enduring homophobia, but instead of using these peripeteia to generate the narrative outcome in which the LGBT refugee is constructed as a victim worth the state’s pity, they lead to the emergence of the lesbian refugee as a rebel. Her critique of the politics of pity and compassion linked to the testimonial economy is made explicit in one of her texts: I don’t need your pity!!! I am your equal sometime even more. But you say I belong in that box and there I should stay, so you feel good about yourself when people are looking at you thinking you are so good and kind to help the poor refugee (to stay in the box you created for me[)]; how I exist to make you look good: who is helping who? But like my ancestors before me I refused to conform to your views of who I should be, when I dress speak and act like you, all I am seeing is a reflection of you looking at me. (Ashery, 2010b)

Rebel With a Cause pinpoints the power relations that condition her speech as a lesbian refugee and inscribes herself in a rebellious becoming. She refuses help born of pity, and she identifies the ambiguity of LGBT human rights in a homonationalist context. By saying ‘who is helping who?’, she reverses the charitable problematisation of asylum where victims are dispossessed of any possible agency, and recognises the fact that the power relation between LGBT refugees and the UK is a double bind, where hospitality is given at the benefit of legitimising the host’s credentials of sexual modernity. Also, by likening her situation to her ancestors’ resistance to colonial (subjective) domination, Rebel With a Cause aligns contemporary liberal subjects with imperialists from the past, thus critiquing the power relations at play in the economy of pity. More precisely, by saying ‘I exist to make you look good’, she contends that the problem is not simply the political objectivation of refugees, but their subjectivation as well: the LGBT refugee subject exists (that is, is produced as such) in a game of deceptions where human rights postulate a universal subject. In Rebel With a Cause’s narrative, there is a breaking point in the subjective trajectory of the character, where the moment of conforming to the LGBT refugee faciality triggers a divergent direction: in this new becoming, the subject produces herself as rebellious in a bricolage with the tools available to her, including a genealogy of rebellion going back to colonial domination. Finally, Rebel With a Cause pre-empts the possibility of what Dennis calls 144

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‘passive empathy’ (2008: 213) with her story: her participation in Staying reorganises the relationship between spectator and lesbian asylum seeker. When she says ‘all I am seeing is a reflection of you looking at me’, she is rejecting the logics of equivalence, identification and appropriation that the past two chapters have described: she is insisting rather on the lack of equivalence between experiences, and equates her claim to escape these imposed modes of representation and subjectivation to her becoming rebellious. In this regard, Staying proposes a mode of relation between the onlooker/reader and the participants that does not use the testimonial art performance as what Shuman calls the ‘reductive scaffold that shores up the promise of mutual understanding and the redemptive power of empathy’ (Dennis, 2008: 218). Rebel With a Cause asks the readers and viewers to adopt a reflexive position on their universalising gaze and its function. Art practice offers the possibility of opening up a series of hospitable stages for LGBT asylum that attempt to keep the benefits of narrativity while addressing these ethical limitations. A hospitable stage offers a space for the voices of asylum seekers to echo, while eschewing voyeurism by creating the practical conditions for the exercise of freedom on stage (Jeffers, 2013). I propose here the extension of the meaning of hospitable stages to describe not just a way of making refugee performance and theatre, but of articulating how these performances can have a function in the construction of the social problem of LGBT asylum. The power to inform and move audiences can be understood in the context of the configuration of social problems. Earlier in this book, I looked at the notion of repeatability, understood as the ability for a statement to be repeated, criticised, continued, etc. by a variety of enunciators, thus placing this repeated statement in a position of influence and privilege in the conceptualisation of the social problem. The pity, empathy and sympathy elicited by narratives of suffering can be understood as increasing the repeatability of narratives of suffering: the story’s ability to make the reader and spectator either feel with or understand an unfortunate other’s position is linked to its ability to migrate between enunciators and enunciative environments. In other words, performances can play a part in the reconfiguring of collective affective dispositions, by producing knowledge whose circulation can be increased by the audience’s affective disposition. For Cixous, following Derrida’s shifting positions between Host and Guest, stage hospitality goes both ways: audiences offering a space for asylum seekers to tell their stories, but also refugees welcoming listeners in their story-telling (2003a, 2003b). In Staying, stories are disjointed from the need to be true, participants are freer in the way they can tell stories and audiences are asked to relate critically and reflexively to the material. Thinking of refugee performance as an act of hospitality on the part of the refugees sharing their stories attends to the ethical dangers of voyeurism or appropriation. This reversal of hospitality corresponds to what Shuman calls entitlement, which she 145

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describes as the ability to say ‘this is not your story’, and which emerges out of the dispossession and appropriation of one’s story and experience of suffering (2005: 29–53). Considering the logics of appropriation of refugees’ stories in public arenas, performances have the interest of offering repeatable statements that are also attentive to the ethical dangers of the use and circulation of selfnarratives in public arenas. A third way of conceiving of the relationship between liberal audiences and LGBT asylum seekers can be found in the way performances play with expectations from audiences who are challenged to leave behind positions of spectatorship and affective identification. A commonly noted conundrum in relation to the political power of refugee performance points out the limitations of the alternative between on the one hand educating the audience, and on the other preaching to the converted. Staying’s use of conversation cards, and Duckie’s Border Force club night, both try to move beyond the two dyads of knowledge–ignorance and empathy–indifference. Along with the workshop notes and interviews, Staying offers a series of conversation cards (one for each character) that can be used by other groups for discussion (Ashery, 2010a). Bin’s card asks the readers a series of questions. In asking questions such as ‘Have you, or people you know, had experiences of being treated like trash because of sexual orientation or sexual identity’, the card tries to recreate the conditions for equivalence and solidarity – the difference from the formulations of such equivalence seen in other LGBT asylum discourses being that it is disconnected from a discourse about hospitality. Another question prompts the reader to imagine what might happen next in Bin’s script, requiring the reader to move away from the passive empathy of the consumer of tales of woe in order to make an imaginative and creative effort. A final question asks readers if they think that ‘fictional texts, such as [Bin’s], can play a part in some way to help with the process’ of writing the factual biographical accounts necessary for asylum seekers to build their case. By initiating such discussions, the project takes on a reflexive approach where the value of the narrative, its scope and its effects are constantly questioned. Reading testimonies in Stonewall’s No Going Back or in newspapers involves a strict reading contract establishing the limits within which the voice of LGBT refugees can be heard, and where the reader’s trust and affects are engaged. Staying subverts these circumscriptions, not through the absence of a reading contract, but through forms of engagement between the story and the readers that invite the reader to interact with the text: finish it, talk about it, criticise it, etc. In cards for other characters, Staying also plays with the idea that audiences using the cards can simultaneously feel they share experiences with the refugee characters, and recognise that they live very different lives. The topics of the questions range from sex (‘[Have you] in some way pretended to be someone else sexually?’), potential experiences of migration (‘Is being in the UK different to what you imagined?’) or relations to the authorities (‘How 146

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can the authorities best be challenged and contested without resorting to rhetoric of anarchy?’). The apparent aim of such questions is to look at ways of understanding between audiences and refugees that are neither spectacular, involve the projective identification of sympathy nor share a flawed promise of happiness. Duckie’s Border Force illustrates well how cultural practices open up such paradoxical spaces. Border Force was a club night hosted in 2015 by the performance collective Duckie, based on exploring ideas around freedom of movement, sexuality and migration. It described itself as a ‘geo-politicalimmersive-disko’ challenging the ‘drag of national identity’ (Duckie, 2015a). The night was not organised in a traditional gay commercial venue, but in in a town hall, a space of civic engagement. The club space was divided into areas designated as different countries; participants were forced to complete paperwork and be photographed in order to be issued a passport and had to pass tests at different embassies in order to gain access to the different areas. The main device in Border Force was to restrict the participants’ movements, in order to remind the audience ‘how privileged British passport holders are in their freedom to travel the world’ (Duckie, 2015b). As a club night, Border Force’s relationship to its audience combines entertainment with information and takes literally the idea of putting the audience ‘in the shoes’ of migrants, not through the putatively transformational experience of listening to true stories, but through a role play of a parody of immigration that reminds participants how borders are more tangible for certain bodies than others. The foremost function of this device is to illuminate the intersectional forms of privilege that members of the audience might enjoy, implicitly rejecting any form of transfer and appropriation of the pain and suffering between the queers in the audience and LGBT refugees. At first sight, the way visas were granted during the night opened up questions about the use of orientalist and exotic stereotypes: getting a visa involved a short activity based on a national clichés, from table tennis (China) to receiving a wax hair removal treatment (Brazil). One’s ability to live up to a certain cliché granted access to specific sections of the club. The use of clichés was deliberate, as Duckie explained: While reducing historical, geographical and social realities to the ‘tourist snapshot’ or the ‘Sunday newspaper photo-spread’ we want to press the idea that national identity, like gender, is a kind of ‘drag’. We perform our nationhood. (Duckie, 2015b)

Thus, the countries in questions, ‘India’, ‘China’, ‘Brazil’ and ‘Russia’ were put in inverted commas to insist that these were magnified, sometimes grotesque, notions of national identity that are necessarily performative. The club-goers’ performance of a certain stereotype granted them access; the organisers’ power to restrict movement recreated the conditions of a machine of faciality, which worked on the parody of national identity. Both the exclusionary nature of immigration systems and the coercive nature of faciality were forced upon 147

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the participants, who were thereby invited to think about their solidarity and kinship with asylum seekers and queer migrants not on the basis of what they have in common with them, but on the basis of how different their experiences and political subjectivations are. Being subjected to the need to perform national identity as drag, participants experienced the possibility of being unrecognised by the club ‘authorities’, and having their rights denied due to giving a performance that didn’t meet requirements. Border Force thus offered a very different experience of engagement than traditional advocacy discourses, insofar as instead of insisting on the need to universalise the protection enjoyed by liberal queers, it showed the participants that their protection as sexual citizens depends on their respective positions in the intersectional matrix that subjectivises them. This device also made the audience think about their own protection and relation to the state as dependent on acts of performance that might be difficult to perform satisfactorily: in doing this Border Force illuminated the naturalised aspect of national belonging for queer liberals, and laid the foundations for a new potential type of critical solidarity that does not base itself on optimism and promise. The event’s loose narrative saw its resolution at the middle of the night when the physical barriers constituting national borders were abolished with the proclamation ‘Demolish all borders – pull them down people!’ The removal of the border walls meant all participants could mix and move freely. Through first restricting then enabling movement, the show made two points: first that a radical critique of the legitimacy of borders is relevant to queer people when the nation, far from guaranteeing to protect all queers, oppresses some bodies more than others. Second, with its ‘no border’ conclusion, Border Force also proposes an altogether different form of queer optimism, prompting participants to rethink their relationship to, and solidarity with, queer migrants and asylum seekers. The event invited participants to playfully enjoy a queer space that rejected the logics of citizenship that are bound up with the necessary exclusion of certain unrecognisable bodies, and thereby to rethink their kinship with those queers whose performances of sexuality, nationhood and gender prevent them from accessing the promises of liberal queerness. Notes 1 Ben Summerskill, then CEO of Stonewall, explains in the report: ‘Young people tell us how much better they feel when they know another gay person, and staff in big and small workplaces alike say they can imagine being successful when they see people like them succeeding. This report, kindly sponsored by IBM, shows that people like us can succeed’ (Stonewall, 2012b: 3). 2 The article thus narrates: ‘When she asked me, “Why did you leave?” I said because of my sexuality. She said: ‘That’s OK, that’s not a problem.’ I had to sit back like this.” He leans back in his cafe chair, crossing his arms over his chest with an expression of shock in his eyes. “I was shivering. I’d never had anyone talk to me like that. She

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was the first person I’d ever told about my sexuality and she was nice to me.” He breaks off, bows his head and rapidly wipes his eyes. After four months in Haslar, John was given leave to stay in the UK but the Home Office appealed against the decision. For the next six years, from 2002 to 2008, John’s life became an exhausting cycle of legal battles. He got a job working at a mental health charity in Southampton and poured £21,000 of his own money into solicitors’ fees. In 2008, during a routine visit to the police station (the terms of his leave to remain in the country required that he report to the police once a month), he was manhandled into a van, taken to the airport and put on a flight back to Uganda’ (Day, 2011). 3 The part on experiences is written by the UKLGIG’s Jill Power, the legal aspects are covered by solicitor Catherine Robinson and the discussion of art practice is offered by Julia Austin. The documents included in the corpus (cards, booklet and workshop notes) are available in an electronic version on ArtAngel’s website. I wish to thank Erin Power of the UKLGIG for generously providing me with a print edition of the material. 4 In partnership with Battersea Arts Centre, World Stages London and Wild Works. Wild Works’ website contains information about the project (Wild Works, 2014). 5 ‘Mais on ne nous demande pas d’être hospitalier jusqu’à la mort. Seulement de ne pas vouloir refaire l’hôte à son image, mais plutôt de se refaire étranger comme chacun l’a été un jour ou un autre.’ 6 By alethurgy, Foucault (2002) refers to the production of truth as the acts through which truth manifests itself (etymologically, ‘manifestation of truth’).

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Afterword

This book started as a critical reflection on the multiplication of discourses on LGBT human rights and asylum. In a way, the original impulse was one of doubt: what are these discourses? Who produces them, and in which conditions? What are their consequences? Looking at the trajectory of many asylum cases in public arenas and at advocacy discourses, it became clear that many discourses talk about and in the name of that Other which is the LGBT asylum seeker. Voices of asylum seekers are simultaneously very present in public arenas, and very much instrumentalised by enunciators with strategic positions of relative power: media outlets, NGOs, well-known advocates, individual politicians. Concerns surround the discourses reusing the voices of Others: the way they may disempower, objectify and subjectify those about and for whom they talk in public arenas, whether to help their cases or to condemn them. From this premise, the project followed the course of proposing a discourse analysis of LGBT asylum: that is, a critical investigation of the way asylum is understood, represented, politicised and made into a social problem that the state and civil society endeavour to solve. This discursive approach has its limitations in comparison to the legal approaches that have been used in many works on the topic: in particular it is not as precise in giving an account of the strategies and tactics (both textual and of social actors) that are deployed from within the state in relation to the management of LGBT asylum seekers. It also has limitations in relation to what can be achieved through ethnography, that is to say that it does not produce as many additional discourses on and by the asylum seekers themselves, in the hope that the language games and enunciative structure of the sociological or anthropological sciences open up for asylum seekers new ways of representing themselves. Instead, what discourse analysis offers is a deconstruction of LGBT asylum as an object of knowledge and a category of public action. This book has thus directed this critical gaze on three nexuses: nationhood and civilisation, biopolitics and governmentality, and testimony and affect. Some issues were recurring and denoted particularly intense power relations, in particular temporality, history, suffering, identity, recognition and truthfulness. These investigations have shown that LGBT asylum is organised around a 150

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series of contradictions, the central one being that of a hospitality articulating the profession of LGBT rights with the endurance of exclusionary practices. Around this central conundrum are configured a series of other contradictions: concerning recognition, for example, where the state does not have the tools to practically recognise the unrecognisable (deserving claimants) and yet must make decisions based on credibility in order to enact hospitality. Or concerning suffering, where asylum is presented as a way to right the wrongs of homophobia in countries of origin, while at the same time fetishising the wounds of refugees in the context of a queer liberalism whose political identities are based on injuries that must simultaneously be erased (narratives of queer inclusion in the polity and the nation) and reasserted (narratives constituting queer identity around past and present suffering). Looking critically at these contradictions always presents a difficulty: how can one produce a critical discourse of rights such as LGBT asylum when these rights are not even respected by the state? What is the scope of a criticism of the promise of happy futures when this promise is not even actualised, and remains only a chimera to most applicants? Is there a danger of forgetting and even erasing the very concrete difficulties that asylum seekers encounter when making their claim? What can an asylum seeker do about the questionable assumptions of discourses on asylum and nationhood? There are several ways to think about these reflexive interrogations. The first concerns the way that some of the promises contained in asylum in fact prevent claimants from being included – this is the logic of the cruel queer optimism discussed in Chapter 5. The same can be said of homonationalist discourses in relation to recognition and the faciality of LGBT refugees, which exclude claimants when they do not conform to certain narratives of liberation. In other words, the critical outlook developed in this book is not an interference in the practical issues of asylum, but follows the same political aims as legal analyses in the pursuit of fairness. The second way to think about this critical outlook follows the insights of bell hooks in her preface to Feminist Theory, From Margin to Center, where she talks about the daily experience of coming from the margins of the town, on the other side of the rail tracks, to its centre to work there in a service capacity. Such daily experiences, she says, have shaped a specific way of looking at the world, an oppositional mode of seeing the world at both its margin and centre, which sustains the oppressed and helps them transcend poverty and despair and strengthen their sense of self and their solidarity (1984: ix). What hooks tells us here is not only that oppression is multifaceted, and that (when applied to the case of LGBT asylum) one must be attentive to all the forms of political and personal subjection. She also asserts that a properly critical, liberatory and revolutionary outlook can be created from these spaces, in the margin. This is where the value of these spaces lies, and they extend to the crevices in public arenas that have been mobilised and used by asylum seekers to talk more freely than in 151

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the dominant channels – in projects such as Staying, which offer the place for a re-invention of the self. Looking at the complex, multidimensional narratives in Staying, one realises not only that a critical perspective on asylum rights is necessary for such critical and non-conforming spaces in public arenas to exist, but also that queer asylum seekers themselves are the ones who, once given the space to produce discourse, can find empowering modes of expression and self-understanding, as well as means to think about and practise hospitality beyond good sentiments. What, therefore, are the changes in the structure of public discourses about LGBT asylum in the UK that could empower asylum seekers, allow for a greater fairness in decision making, and decolonise queer hospitality? Politicolegal analyses have produced many insightful propositions which have often shown to be efficient in practice: from works on discretion to those on credibility and the suitability of the state in adjudicating matters of sexual ontology discussed in Chapter 3. This book’s approach calls for concluding remarks of a different order, insofar as they are linked to the structure of public discourses on asylum. The first remark concerns the fragmentation of race and queerness in asylum discourses (and, it could be argued, in much of LGBT human rights). This fragmentation starts at the level of the conceptual networks that configure political narratives, with the idea that anti-racism, anti-sexism and anti-homo- and transphobia pursue necessarily divergent political agendas (through questions of ‘culture’ or ‘religion’, for example). Beyond this opposition of agendas, the main consequence of the queer/race fragmentation is that it makes it harder for the voices that do not articulate their politics on the dominant liberal or universalist modes to be heard and disseminated in public arenas. The second remark concerns restoring the temporalities of queer refugee experiences. The practice of self-narration, because it is so central to the state’s biopolitical apparatus of management of asylum, is subjected to these constraints: the need to prove oneself, the focus on past trauma and suffering, the imperative to show specific liberal becomings. The hermeneutical function of self-narration enables asylum seekers to start a process of self-crafting that eschews the impossible pasts and futures of homonationalist narratives. Freer practices of self-narration should thus be fostered, such as that of Rebel With a Cause, whose future in the UK does not rely on homonormative longings but on the reconstruction of a past of anti-colonial struggle and a future of activism. The third and last remark comes as a partial response to the previous two: how can such paradoxical discourses be supported in public arenas? Opening up these arenas to more varied testimonial forms could be a beginning. Despite the critical perspective taken in Chapters 5 and 6, testimonials need not be thought of solely as inherently flawed avenues for the politicisation of the social problem. Having public arenas that are less deaf to the complex and often challenging stories that queer asylum seekers have to tell is a way to 152

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enable the emergence of political propositions that are anti-racist, anti-homoand transphobic and also attentive to the particular challenges of migrant experiences at the nexus of political and administrative subjection, ethnoracial, gendered and sexualised violence. The UKLGIG’s work is an inspiring example of strategies for the deployment of such speeches in public arenas. Their theatre and performance activity, where asylum claimants participate in elaborating stories and performing them before audiences, aims to offer platforms for the self-expression of experience in a safe space that abolishes as much as possible the power relations of most public arenas. Some of the projects, such as the theatre production of Babel, were performed in front of large audiences who were not all there to hear about LGBT asylum; and although Babel contained fictional elements and was not solely made up of personal stories, its itinerant form (the audience could walk freely in a park where performers were doing a variety of activities, from dancing to conversation) put the audience into direct contact with the participants. Likewise, the format of Staying is designed to be transportable and usable in many different contexts, as a reading, as material for reference or intervention within court cases and as alternative quotable material. These art projects show powerful ways to think about how resistant narratives can emerge in public arenas because they achieve three things: (1) they create spaces for the production and enunciation of such resistant discourses; (2) they offer interfaces with larger public arenas where these stories can be shared and disseminated; and (3) they go beyond these functions by offering tentative ways for audiences to reshape their engagement and kinship with LGBT asylum seekers. Indeed, these projects do more than offer safe spaces, they also arrange such spaces to become, or to be integrated within, public arenas where the polity can come into contact with these self-narratives and experiences. Such encounters can play a role in the decolonisation of the queer liberal imaginary. These strategies can challenge the consensus and open up a more dissensual space for the discussion of who ought to have protection, and what forms this protection should take: what kind of hospitality we need, and how to put it into practice.

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Agamben, Giorgio 26, 116 Ahmed, Sara 2, 42–3, 108, 112, 121, 129–30 Amnesty International 55, 95 API see asylum policy instruction Arendt, Hannah 26, 28, 85, 108, 124 Ashery, Oreet see Staying asylum policy instruction 82, 84, 85, 96 authenticity 66, 68, 75, 105, 121–2, 138–9 see also credibility; recognition; veridiction Babel 135, 153 see also theatre Babi see case Bauman, Zygmunt 23, 129 Berlant, Lauren 66, 101, 103, 108–10, 127 biopolitics 14, 71, 76–8, 86, 89–92 critics 84–5, 135–42 Blair, Tony 62, 64–5 body 26, 84–5, 104–7, 120, 140 morally legitimate suffering 77, 116–17 see also Fassin, Didier; Ticktin, Miriam Boltanski, Luc 17, 23–4, 35–6, 111, 124, 143 see also suffering: distant Border Force 134, 146–8 Bourdieu, Pierre 5, 100 Brenda see case Brown, Gordon 51, 56–7, 61–2 Brown, Wendy 55–6, 60, 119, 122 Butler, Judith 19, 26–7, 60, 62, 135 case Babi 18, 19, 41



Brenda 18, 20, 50–9, 61, 113, 115, 141 case-by-case 29, 31–3, 62, 117 Mehdi 29–38, 61, 107, 121 Chouliaraki, Lilie 20–1, 24, 29 citizenship 2, 26, 55, 67, 96–7, 110, 119, 132, 148 sexual 12–14, 38, 52, 111, 114, 118– 21, 126–7 Cixous, Hélène 136, 145 class 17, 48–9, 65, 104, 108, 128–9 COIS see country of origin: information service colonial 14, 40–1, 50, 119, 122, 144 postcolonial 42, 60 precolonial 58 compassion 1, 14, 29, 32, 65, 97, 107–12, 118–22, 127, 144 see also pity; sympathy country of origin 3–4, 18, 22, 41, 44–5, 54–5, 74, 77–8, 83 information service 9, 16, 86–9 see also under individual countries of origin credibility 14, 70–3, 76–85, 88–9, 91–2, 129, 133 see also authenticity; recognition; veridiction Das, Veena 111–12 Deleuze, Gilles 6, 90–1 deportation 18–20, 23, 32, 52–4, 59, 88, 113, 140 Derrida, Jacques 42, 63, 80–1, 145 detention 11, 18, 44–5, 48, 79, 110, 113, 120, 128, 131 fast-track 4, 72–6 discipline 7, 71, 80, 83, 135, 137 discourse analysis 4–10, 42

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see also Fairclough, Norman; Maingueneau, Dominique; Quéré, Louis discretion 3, 71–6, 91–2, 152 discrimination 37, 44–5, 64 dissensus 1, 27–8, 43, 66 Dublin II regulation 30, 32, 35 Duckie see Border Force

EU see European Union European Union 25, 39, 72, 75, 85 exclusion 14, 21–2, 29, 33, 46, 65, 70–8, 88–90, 92, 147–8 faciality 89–92, 118, 127–9, 142, 144, 147, 151 Fairclough, Norman 5, 7–9 Fassin, Didier 99, 115–18 Foucault, Michel 6, 15, 98, 134, 137, 149 future 14, 17–22, 37, 41, 49, 60, 65–6, 92, 121, 126–7, 133–4, 141–2, 151–2 see also happiness; optimism; temporality Guattari, Felix 90–1 happiness 13, 43, 45, 97, 114, 127 duty 131–2 exhortation 133–4 promise 126, 128–31, 147 HJ & HT v Secretary of State 3, 93 Home Office 3–4, 6, 9–11, 18, 20–2, 29, 32, 34–5, 45, 53, 72, 74–5, 78–85, 89, 91, 103–5, 109, 118, 120, 127, 133, 141–3 see also asylum policy instruction; May, Theresa; Smith, Jacqui; UK Border Agency homonationalism 6, 14, 28, 33, 42–5, 50, 52–3, 60–1, 63–6, 70–2, 91–2, 97, 113–15, 120–2, 126–8, 131–4, 142, 144, 151–2 see also nation; Puar, Jasbir homonormative 12, 42, 47–8, 59, 70, 80–4, 91–2, 119, 127, 133–4, 142, 152 homophobia 14, 16–17, 22, 27, 37–8, 40–5, 48–59, 64–6, 99, 102, 104–5, 108–9, 121–2, 142–4, 151 hooks, bell 10, 151 hospitality 2, 12–15, 19, 28–9, 31, 33, 42–3, 52–4, 59–66, 80–2, 114, 120,

134, 136, 144–6 hospitable stages 145 see also Cixous, Hélène; Derrida, Jacques HRW see Human Rights Watch human rights 6, 23–4, 33, 40–3, 54, 61–2, 71–2, 75, 88, 92 LGBT 1, 9–10, 14, 16–17, 24–9, 30–1, 36–8, 47, 50–1, 50–6, 63, 74, 105–6, 119, 144 see also Agamben, Giorgio; Arendt Hannah; Bauman, Zygmunt; Rancière, Jacques Human Rights Watch 38, 40, 50, 87, 95

interdiscourse 6–7, 28, 30, 50, 52–3, 56, 58–9, 61, 74 intersectionality 12, 37, 66, 92 Iran 1–2, 16, 20, 22, 27, 30–8, 40–1, 44, 81, 86, 93, 95, 103, 106–8 Iraq 61–2, 86 Islam v Home Secretary 3 Jamaica 45, 86–7, 94–6, 102, 123 Jihad For Love 22–3 justification 23–4, 61–2 regime 27–8, 44–5, 60, 63, 65–6, 71–2, 74 Laé, Jean-François 98, 100, 116 Legal Aid 4, 79 liberal queer 11–15, 28, 38, 60, 64, 71, 78, 92, 97–102, 105–8, 112, 114, 119–22, 126, 129–32, 134, 140, 143–4, 148 state 13, 21, 37–8, 65, 76, 121 subject 17, 29, 31, 37, 98, 102, 106, 113 see also neoliberal London 40, 46–9, 79–80, 89, 120, 128, 133, 142 Luibhéid, Eithne 12, 43, 70, 126 Maingueneau, Dominique 5–7 May, Theresa 1, 54, 72, 115 Mbembe, Achille 21, 26 Mehdi see case Millbank, Jenni 3, 72, 75–6, 81 Murray, David 131 nation 2, 19, 42, 43, 59, 63–6, 76, 112, 122, 127–8, 132, 148

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nationalism 2, 56–9, 65, 92 see also homonationalism necropolitics 19–23, 26 neoliberal 13, 15, 24, 46, 49, 71, 73, 78–80, 84–5, 122, 126–34 optimism 6, 13–15, 19, 23, 70, 122, 138–9, 148 cruel 97, 126–8, 132–4 failure 132 Out There 20, 26–7, 40–1 persecution 18–19, 21–2, 34–5, 41, 44–5, 48, 50–1, 70, 74–5, 102–5, 141–2 pity 21, 27–8, 36–7, 107, 110–11, 118, 143–5 see also compassion; sympathy Puar, Jasbir 12, 42, 62, 67, 119 Quéré, Louis 5, 15–16 race 3, 14, 43–4, 46–8, 56, 65–6, 132, 142, 152 racism 90, 92, 108, 142–3, 152 Rancière, Jacques 2, 26, 28, 66 recognition biopolitics of 21–2, 48–9, 71, 76–84, 86–92, 142 and happiness 129, 133–5, of rights 25, 29, 38, 46, 66 see also credibility; faciality Ricoeur, Paul 8, 18, 99, 100–1, 137 self-narrative 6–7, 78, 91, 98–100, 104, 108–9, 118, 122, 134, 136, 139, 153 see also testimony; veridiction Smith, Jacqui 26, 30, 32–3, 35–6, 107 social problem 1, 8–9, 12–19, 21, 28–9, 34, 37, 40, 43, 45, 53, 59–63, 66, 70, 97–9, 105, 116, 119, 126, 145, 152 Staying 10, 22–3, 134–46, 152–3 Stonewall 1, 17, 19–20, 44, 64–5, 69, 72, 74, 76, 82, 84, 89, 93, 102–6, 108, 116, 121, 123–5, 129–30, 133, 146, 148 Stychin, Carl 23, 64 subjectivation 10, 13–14, 23, 28, 36–7, 43, 50, 55, 61, 81, 90, 97–102, 105, 114, 116–22, 134–7, 143–5

suffering appropriation 15, 102, 117, 119–23, 145–7 distant 21, 29, 35–6, 53, 59, 61, 143 spectacle 13–14, 24, 26, 28–9, 100, 102, 107, 111–12, 116, 119–20, 143 sympathy 14, 31, 98, 105–7, 113–14, 118–20, 127, 134–5, 143, 145, 147 see also compassion; pity teleology 38, 60, 62, 114 temporality 14, 17–19, 21–3, 34, 41, 60, 131 testimony 4, 20, 33, 45–6, 77–8, 87, 97– 106, 109, 111, 116–23, 127–38, 144 economy 104, 119, 122, 137–8, 143–4 see also self-narrative; veridiction theatre 120, 135–6, 139, 142, 145 and suffering 24, 27–8 Thévenot, Laurent 17, 23–4 Ticktin, Miriam 77, 116 trans 11–12, 94 transgender 12, 95, 130 transphobia 41, 152–3 Uganda 1, 20, 41, 44, 50–9, 86, 113, 117, 128 UKBA see UK Border Agency UK Border Agency 11, 30, 33, 35–6, 44–5, 72, 74, 80, 89, 93, 104, 123 see also Home Office UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group 3–4, 44, 65, 72–5, 78–9, 82, 85, 89, 93–4, 96, 107, 110, 112, 124–5, 128, 133, 135, 142–3, 149, 153 UKLGIG see UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group UN see United Nations UNHCR see UN High Commissioner for Refugees UN High Commissioner for Refugees 11, 23, 38, 85–6 United Nations 25, 75, 96 veridiction 6, 71, 76–8, 80, 85, 87, 91–2, 100, 104, 135, 137 White, Melissa 19, 59, 66, 79, 132, 134 Yogyakarta Principles 17, 24, 28, 38

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