Real Queer?: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus

by David A.B. Murray

“How do I prove I’m gay?” This is the central question for many refugee claimants who are claiming asylum on the basis of sexual orientation persecution. But what are the inherent challenges in obtaining this proof? How is the system that assesses this predicated upon homonormative frameworks and nervous borders? What is the impact of gender, race and class? What is an ‘authentic’ sexual or gender identity and how can it be performed?

Real Queer? is an ethnographic examination of the Canadian refugee apparatus analysing the social, cultural, political and affective dimensions of a legal and bureaucratic process predicated on separating the ‘authentic’ from the ‘bogus’ LGBT refugee. Through interviews, conversations and participant observation with various participants ranging from refugee claimants to their lawyers, Refugee Protection Division staff and local support group workers, it reveals the ways in which sexuality simultaneously disrupts and is folded into the nation-state’s dynamic modes of gate-keeping, citizenship and identity-making, and the uneven effects of these discourses and practices on this category of transnational migrants.

Genres: Gender Studies

194 pages, Hardcover

First published November 16, 2015

Reviews

[Sabrarf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this book!
This book is looking at the sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) refugees and the process they go through in Canada! David Murray also looks at homonationalism in a refugee process and the ways it affects the experience of each refugee.
Below there's a quote from this book which I think sums up everything!
"The silences, gaps and omissions in the homonational queer migration to liberation nation narrative found in multiple segment of the refugee apparatus allow for collective transnational violence to continue without the dots between persons identified as 'refugee',immigration bureaucracies, and national and transnational political, economic and military actions and policies to be connected, but the narrative also shifts the focus away from ongoing local inequalities and new, sometimes different experiences of economic, racialized and/or socio-cultural marginalization and vulnerability in the 'liberation nation', resulting in strategic or 'ambivalent homonationalisms' (White 2013) and fluid belongings to multiple homes that make life bearable for those who are moving within, through and beyond the refugee apparatus."