Homonationalist/Orientalist Negotiations: The UK Approach to Queer Asylum Claims

Abstract

By bringing together the theoretical lenses of homonationalism and orientalism, this paper is intended to help the understanding of how tensions were negotiated between representations of the UK as a protector of LGBTI rights and its policies on (queer) asylum. Through a discourse analysis of the Supreme Court decision on HJ (Iran) and HT (Cameroon) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (2010) and subsequent sexuality-based asylum tribunal decisions, I unveil the discursive work performed by these interventions. I argue that the judgment put forward homonationalist/orientalist discourses representing non-Western societies as homophobic, fundamentalist, traditional and backwards, while Western countries were repositioned as their mirror: secular, progressive and modern—founded on the principles of sexual liberation and tolerance. Whilst such representations are not a novelty, I contend that this homonationalist/orientalist framing was instrumental in performing a double work of simultaneous inclusion/exclusion, whereby the narrative of the UK as a homonational benevolent state could be regenerated. It addressed a long-standing controversial element of the UK asylum policy on sexuality-based claims by asserting that the UK would no longer require queer asylum seekers to go back to their countries and ‘repress’ their sexuality. However, whilst the decision presumably includes sexual others who fit into a predetermined Western homonormative narrative, at the same time, it projects ‘repression’ onto racialised queer bodies, thus effectively recreating a reasoning to legitimately exclude them from the refugee entitlement. Although nearly a decade has passed since this seminal ruling, its Othering effects have endured and continue to embed asylum decisions in dangerously harmful ways. This is illustrated by the ways in which some queer asylum seekers have their cases overturned based on arguments that depict them as sexually repressed, discreet and family oriented, as opposed to Western ‘liberated gays’—marked by specific norms of visibility, individualism and consumption practices.