Learning to be LGBT

Sexual Orientation Refugees and Linguistic Inequality

Authors

  • David A.B. Murray York University

Abstract

This paper explores how adjudicators in the Canadian refugee determination system assess sexual orientation refugee claims. I outline how predetermined social knowledge in adjudicators' terms and questions about a refugee claimant’s sexual identity operate as a cultural formation through which particular Western normative arrangements of sexual practices and identities are privileged as social facts. These assumed 'social facts' reveal adjudicators’ application of understandings about ‘authentic’ sexual identities derived from guidelines and/or 'common-sense' assumptions reflecting a privileged set of cultural, gendered, raced and classed experiences. The imposition of this arrangement re-inscribes a homonationalist mode of gatekeeping that may have profound consequences for a refugee claimant whose answers do not satisfy the adjudicator's expectations. 

Author Biography

David A.B. Murray, York University

Murray is Professor of Anthropology and Sexuality Studies at York University, Canada. His most recent book is "Real Queer?: Sexual Orientation and Gender Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus" (2016, Rowman and Littlefield).

Downloads

Published

2018-08-31

Issue

Vol. 6 No. 1 (2018): Languaging as Refuge: Practice Meets Theory

Section

‘Social Facts’ and Other Assumptions

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

  3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).