Proving gender and sexuality in the (homo)nationalist Greek asylum system: Credibility, sexual citizenship and the ‘bogus’ sexual other

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse and critique Greek authorities’ expectations for a ‘credible’ account in queer asylum claims. As some of the caseworkers’ accounts portray, through 16 semi-structured interviews, in order to be deemed ‘credibly queer’ applicants are expected to have passed through a painful, discursively narratable process of self-realization and have suffered enough in their ‘queerphobic and oppressive’ countries of origin. At the same time, they are supposed to find safety and protection in Greece, following a linear ‘affective journey’ from oppression to liberation, happiness and pride. However, as this research argues, decision-makers do not always comply with normative expectations but, simultaneously, through their performative assessments, they go beyond them. This way, they do not only reproduce but they often resist the homonationalist discursive framework that governs intelligibility in the asylum process; a framework founded on Eurocentric and white-centred presumptions of the ‘good and happy sexual citizen’ and the ‘bogus sexual other’. By drawing on this situated, from below critique, as well as on postcolonial feminist and queer theory, this article seeks to open up racialized, classed and gendered, normative definitions of queerness to different possibilities that do not conform with neoliberal sexual politics and urges for a more critical interpretation of the Refugee Convention.