Silencing queer asylum seekers within the French reception system

Abstract

In this chapter, I take into consideration two different institutional spaces – the State and asylum support organisations – and argue that they form a continuum of institutional violence, shaped as a form of silencing directed towards queer asylum seekers. I wish to underline the implication of the uses of vulnerability, both as a category of social action and as a tool for categorising asylum seekers. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a support organisation based in Paris, I show that at the State level, the recognition of vulnerability is subjected to a validation by support organisations, thus depriving migrants of their ability to speak for themselves. At the organisational level, I show how vulnerability, rather than being a fixed category, is in fact a debated feature of asylum seekers. Both removable and thought of as paradigmatical, its use reveals the impossibility of thinking of asylum seekers as political subjects. Wishing to contribute to a problematisation of the reception of queer migrants that takes into consideration how different forms of violence stem from different places, I try to think of them as connected, rather than separate or opposite.