Lawful Performance and the Representational Politics of Queer African Refugees in Documentary Film

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores lawful performance in documentary film representation of queer African refugees. Lawful performance is a framework I develop to identify a performative structure in which cultural production and everyday performances internalize and reproduce legal paradigms, such that legal logics remain the central paradigm against which to measure belonging, legitimacy, and value. I argue that Getting Out, a 2011 film produced by the Uganda-based Refugee Law Project demonstrates how documentary aesthetics, asylum policy, and international human rights parallel and reinforce one another. I interrogate the implications of using documentary to represent the experiences of LGBTIQ African asylum seekers to ask: how, if at all, a medium so focused on documenting and visualizing can intervene upon political frameworks that themselves are founded upon visualizing and documenting? I then look at a series of short films, the Seeking Asylum Series, produced by the queer African digital storytelling project None on Record, identifying how these films offer representational strategies that propose opportunities for refashioning queer asylum seekers’ relationships to dominant structures and how viewers might imagine queer asylum seekers within and beyond those structures.