Real Queer? Sexual orientation and gender identity refugees in the Canadian refugee apparatus. By David A.B. Murray

Abstract

In recent years the experiences of LGBT refugees and the political debates they arouse have taken increasing space in public forums from North America to Western Europe and Australia. Murray’s book Real Queer? critically addresses, from an anthropological perspective, the situation of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) refugees in Canada. Based on a wealth of interviews with claimants, officials, consultants and support workers, the author methodically analyses each stage and aspect of the refugee status determination process. The book moves from migration to the writing of support documentation in the form of detailed self-narratives, to expert documentations and hearings at the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board. Precise but accessible, this book will be of interest for students and researchers alike working on queer migration and LGBT asylum. Murray examines the ways that the refugee apparatus sets up a structure that solicits what he calls ‘the queer migration to liberation nation narrative’ – a form of homonationalist narrative where the refugee is submitted to a ‘happiness duty’ (Ahmed 2010) that reproduces imperialist dichotomies between the civilised and the barbaric, the tolerant and the intolerant (Puar 2007). Murray shows that, in order to be legible SOGI refugees, claimants must learn how to perform an identity that follows homonationalist assumptions as well as forms of homonormative expectations (which are, he reminds us, always raced, gendered and classed). This demonstration leads him to explore asylum narratives (Chapter 1), the question of authenticity (Chapters 2 and 3), the use of documents and the interview process in the production of authenticity (Chapters 4, 5 and 6) and finally the way home is used and conceived of in the SOGI refugee determination process (Chapter 7).