Journal of Language and Sexuality - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014

In this paper I explore how adjudicators in the Canadian refugee determination system assess sexual orientation refugee claims. By focusing on discourse and terminology of questions utilized in the hearing (in which the refugee claimant answers questions posed by the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) Member), I will outline how these questions contain predetermined social knowledge and thus operate as a cultural formation through which particular arrangements of sexual and gendered practices and identities are privileged. However, documents and interviews with IRB staff reveal the presence of a ‘gut feeling’ or ‘sixth-sense’ in determining the credibility of a claimant’s sexual orientation. While some may argue that these feelings represent a level of sensitivity that humanizes the decision making process, I argue that they reveal adjudicators’ application of their own understandings and feelings about ‘authentic’ sexual identities and relationships derived from specific cultural, gendered, raced and classed experiences, which, in effect, re-inscribe a homonormative mode of gatekeeping that may have profound consequences for a claimant whose narrative and/or performance fails to stir the appropriate senses.

To be granted status, refugee claimants have to testify at the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB). This liminal space is charged with both the promise of liberation and the threat of deportation. Adding to the challenge are the governmental measures that constrain the right to asylum. This paper suggests answers to the question: What language and other discursive features do LGBTIQ claimants have to use to be recognized as refugees? This ethnography is based on fieldwork conducted in Toronto and Vancouver. I will present two vignettes of claimants I accompanied to their hearings. Contrary to heterosexuals, queer asylum seekers have to prove their sexual orientation and/or their gender identity. Truth about their sexuality and persecution is evaluated through the lens of legal technologies, and stereotypes are still common. However, extralegal forms of communication also come into play. New avenues for justice are being fostered by grassroots organizations.

In this essay, I draw on ethnographic research with South Asian Muslim American gay men of Pakistani descent in Houston to explore everyday negotiations of religion, race, sexuality and transnationalism. The essay highlights three intersecting registers that situate gay Muslim American sexual cultural formations in local, transnational and cultural contexts. Drawing on participant observation and oral life history interviews, this essay examines: (a) culturally constructed male sexualities that are informed by the scripts, language, and cultural idioms of homo-sociality and same-sex eroticism, love and relationships in the homeland; (b) the increasing centrality of belonging to a transnational Muslim ummah; and (c) the appropriation of western terminologies and categories of sexuality in constructing a gay identity. The narratives examined in this essay contribute to cultural analyses of transnational sexual cultures, and ethnographies of Muslim Americans and LGBTQIA immigrant communities in the West.

Coming out of the shadows is a powerful strategy of the undocumented youth movement, yet there has been little analysis of the ways that young immigrants have adapted lesbian and gay speech. This article examines three key language developments of this movement that intersect with LGBTQ language: (1) coming out of the shadows; (2) coming out as both undocumented and LGBTQ; and (3) use of the term “undocuqueer.” This analysis is based on observation and discourse analysis of coming out rallies and other activities of Mexican origin members of Chicago’s Immigrant Youth Justice League (IYJL) and other immigrant youth organizations in Illinois between 2010 and 2013. These linguistic innovations reflect the leadership of women and queer people in undocumented youth organizing. Armed with language, activists are developing a confrontational queer youth politics of immigration that challenges both “homonormativity” (Duggan 2002) and citizenship orthodoxies. Queer Latina/o immigrant youth use the language of sexuality for self-realization, political mobilization, and coalition-building. As more LGBTQ youth of color publicly embrace their non-normative sexualities, they may creatively use language for social justice centered in their intersectional experiences.

This article uses a linguistic anthropological approach to map and analyze the relationship between constructions of gayness vis-à-vis xenophobia and media discourses around it. This article is part of a broader research study that looks at the life strategies of the Ecuadorian Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community in New York City in the face of exclusion resulting in xenophobia. This community’s Ecuador-New York trajectory is marked not only by their identities as immigrants but also by other forms of diversity — race, class, ethnicity, migrant status and citizenship. The story of Renato, one of the Ecuadorian gay men interviewed is used as a backdrop to flesh out how language “acts” within this particular situated context.

Each of the articles included in this special issue of the Journal of Language and Sexuality asks us to imagine queer im/migration, asylum and sexual citizenship in multiple dimensions and to probe the discursive operations that establish the parameters of sexual subjectivity. This review article argues that these processes are illustrative of “sexual adjudication:” the discursive coordinates, legal logics and linguistic sensibilities that produce the category of the sexual migrant, the sexual refugee and the sexual asylum seeker. The discussions featured here engage questions of how sexual epistemics work in both sending and receiving countries, as well as the role of borders in constituting narratives of sexual subjectivity. In addition to analyzing the theoretical overlaps and reciprocal conversations between the articles included in the special issue, this essay provides a historical, comparative context by situating these discussions within larger theoretical and terminological questions regarding queer im/migration, asylum and subjectivity.