Exhortations of happiness: Liberalism and nationalism in the discourses on LGBTI asylum rights in the UK

Abstract

The concept of homonationalism has proven useful to analyse the political problematization of LGBTI human rights in the UK. This article analyses discourses on LGBTI asylum in the UK, and focuses in particular on the relationship between liberalism, nationhood and hospitality. Using the methods of discourse analysis it demonstrates that, with asylum, queerness becomes a porous frontier in and out of the nation. Looking firstly at narratives of asylum cases, the article shows how they create a specific temporality, where queer futures are deemed impossible outside of the UK. Then, it looks at how the tropes of the domestic homophobic past and the homophobic elsewhere interact in discourses to produce a unique type of politicization of asylum, whereby British liberal queers can be invested in defending the rights of LGBTI asylum seekers. Finally, the article unpacks what constitutes the promise of ‘happy queer futures’ in the UK. Doing so, it shows that homonationalism is more than a collusion between certain gay and lesbian subjectivations and the liberal state, but rather that it provides complex ways of understanding and articulating sexuality, nationhood and homonormative practices. The article will thus argue that happiness works as an exhortation as much as a promise in asylum, and that the queer futurism offered by homonationalist discourses on asylum perpetuate a dream of the good life – albeit a homonormative conception of it, where happiness, individual freedom and autonomy on the market are closely intertwined.

Keywords

asylum liberalism migration nation queer

Since asylum rights were granted to LGBTI people in the UK in 1999,¹ academics and activists alike have expressed a significant amount of unease. Asylum seekers face institutional disadvantages due to their legal position, for example in terms of access to housing or means of subsistence, as well as prejudice and misunderstanding from the state, the general public and occasionally activists too. Certain discourses on LGBTI asylum rights have objectified their plight while providing very limited platforms for asylum seekers to freely express themselves. Indeed, asylum seekers’ voices (especially testimonial speech) are often subordinated in public discourse by enunciators with greater access and legitimacy to public arenas, such as journalists or experts. There are notable exceptions, including art projects mounted in collaboration with the UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group (UKLGIG), such as Staying, a performance with Oreet Ashery; Babel, a participatory play with Wildworks; and Prisoners of Words Unsaid, a collection of poems published by the UKLGIG.² More generally, asylum holds a central position in a larger multiplication of discourses on LGBTI human rights in the UK. There is growing concern about the relationship between certain formulations of LGBTI human rights and the reproduction of dominant discourses on the nation, hetero- and homo-normativities, familialism and the logics of neoliberalism.

Social and academic criticism has questioned the assumptions behind certain forms of LGBTI assimilationist politics, including concerning marriage and family-making, the dominant subjectivation of LGBTI individuals as consumers and workers, and the progressive inclusion of some gay and lesbian subjects in discourses about the nation (in countries such as the UK, France, the Netherlands, or the USA). This criticism has emphasized that each of these progressive discourse obfuscates and erases the experiences of certain queer subjects, in particular in relation to economic capital, and that LGBTI politics can be ‘complicit’ (Rouhani, 2007) in discourses producing racialized distinctions between more or less ‘advanced’ cultures and civilizations. These criticisms take place in a context where the pursuit of certain LGBTI rights is concurrent with less progressive discourses concerning immigration, race and international relations, such as the war on terror in the USA, or the failure of multiculturalism in the UK (Lentin and Titley, 2011; Puar, 2007). Going further, Jasbir Puar proposes that ‘the ascendancy of queer is not just coincidentally occurring in relation to certain racial politics but is contingent upon them’ (Puar, 2008: 2). A critique of homonationalism has been crucial in the formulation of this unease, and asylum certainly has a close relationship with the representation of nationhood in the UK. The concept of homonationalism, as a specific form of queer complicity whereby ‘heteronormative ideals pivotal to nation-state formation are now supplemented by homonormativities’ (Puar, 2008: 1), can be used in discourse analysis to describe the way asylum is problematized by various social actors, in particular in the political narratives found in the news and in advocacy. Following Puar, this article also contends that the discursive interface between nationhood and queerness is not restricted to homonormativities, but encompasses a variety of positions: homonormative, queer liberal, or queer diasporic (Puar, 2008). While the criticism of these complicities is important, the necessity for LGBTI asylum seekers to become, or at least be recognized as, an acceptable and assimilable subject remains essential for their survival, hospitality being conditional on the ability of the guest to speak the host’s political language of identity (Derrida, 2000). Asylum seekers themselves do not have the option to disidentify with the nation.

This article analyses LGBTI asylum rights in the UK in relation to the issues of nationhood and queer liberalism. Following Joane Nagel’s concept of the ethno-sexual frontier, this paper will claim that, in asylum, queerness is a porous frontier allowing passages in and out of the nation (Nagel, 2003). In other words, there are ways of being queer and of being recognized as queer that condition the hospitality offered to asylum seekers. Studying asylum shows that homonationalism has broader implications than the mere collusion of specific queer interests vested in assimilation and reproduction of the nation. Rather, through asylum, the nation is imagined as an exceptional, tolerant haven – a haven that relies on specific sexual ontologies in relation to what it means to be a liberal LGBTI subject in the UK, and conceptions of tolerance which, as this article will show, correspond to a depiction of the queer, happy futures afforded by liberalism.

Looking at homonationalism in relation to LGBTI asylum also warrants the reminder that the discursive context within which LGBTI asylum is deployed in the UK is bound to the country’s imperial history. As a consequence, LGBTI asylum is commonly understood in relation to post- (and neo-) colonial interpretative frames in the public sphere: for example, the retention of British sodomy laws in former colonies is regularly mentioned by news and human rights organizations alike.³ This indicates a difficulty in the formulation of LGBTI human rights discourses, insofar as they sit precariously between the global pursuit of LGBTI equality and an ongoing civilizing mission. Indeed, the sodomy laws that now brush up against LGBTI human rights discourses act as a reminder that sexuality still constitutes a standard of distinction between the civilized and the barbaric. In other words, the structure of the civilizing mission remains in place, yet it now focuses not on sexual propriety but on sexual tolerance and LGBTI human rights.⁴

This article draws from a large corpus of UK discourses on LGBTI asylum, ranging from media narratives to administrative policies, and uses the methods of critical discourse analysis, and narrative analysis in particular, to study this heterogeneous corpus.⁵ It begins by looking at media narratives of LGBTI asylum cases and the support statements asylum-seekers are asked to write about their lives. Analysing these narratives, it shows that queer refugee temporalities are understood and conceived in relation to a teleology of sexual modernity central to homonationalism (Mepschen et al., 2010; Puar, 2007). Using the concept of homonationalism to analyse LGBTI asylum would start by seeing what there is to gain, especially for governmental social actors, in welcoming LGBTI refugees: in particular, gains in political legitimacy, especially as the state displays its commitment to equality and the project of LGBTI human rights, thus setting itself apart from all the countries of origin of asylum claimants. However, it has been shown that LGBTI claimants are routinely excluded, being asked to be ‘discreet’ about their sexual orientation in their country of origin, or being disbelieved about their identity.⁶ The third section analyses this apparent contradiction between professing LGBTI human rights and practising exclusion. The article then discusses a report by Stonewall called No Going Back, and argues that ‘not going back’ is an imperative for both queer refugees for whom queerness is an impossibility outside of the UK, and for liberal queers who rely on the hospitality given to persecuted queers to actualize their own position as protected sexual citizens in the UK. Finally, the article questions the promise of a happy future contained in LGBTI asylum and looks at how asylum is crucial to the integration of queer liberalism in the nation.

Broken pasts, impossible futures

Asylum has the particularity of being a domestic issue (claimants are in the UK, needing help) that draws on international legal provisions and finds its origin in an unreachable elsewhere (the place of persecution). Distant suffering is characterized by the spectacle of an unfortunate who requires our help if we are to think of ourselves as compassionate. For Luc Boltanski, one of the possible answers to this spectacle is for the spectator to become indignant. This indignation is characterized by a focus on the persecutor, since indignation ‘presupposes precisely a redirection of attention away from the depressing consideration of the unfortunate and his sufferings and in search of a persecutor on whom to focus’ (Boltanski, 1999: 57). Asylum narratives tend to identify two types of persecutor: homophobes in the country of origin and the reluctant UK state in the country of arrival. This dynamic is well illustrated by the case of Iranian claimant Mehdi Kazemi in 2008 that generated many news articles over several months, and involved successful public appeals to then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and discussions in the House of Lords. The case was also notable for arousing protests not only from activists but also from MPs and Lords.⁷

The Independent published a series of articles about the case, and followed its development quite closely. There are two steps in the newspaper’s narrativization of Kazemi’s case: indignation about sexual persecution in Iran, and accusation of the British state for doing too little for asylum-seekers. Asylum narratives generally rely on the trope of rescue: the typical asylum narrative is about giving a safe haven to persecuted people – and identifying in the process, as Makau Mutua suggests, victims, savages and saviours (Mutua, 2001). The use of rescue narratives is made even stronger here by the presence of an interdiscourse between Kazemi’s case and the hanging of two young presumed gay men in Iran in 2005. Indeed, the newspaper narrates that before claiming asylum, Kazemi was a student in the UK, and that it was the arrest, questioning and execution of his boyfriend in Iran that had prompted him to claim asylum. For Rahul Rao, the 2005 hangings saw the establishment of such rescue narratives in the way LGBTI human rights are conceived in Britain (Rao, 2010: 180). In his discussion of the hangings, he compares these narratives to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s discussion of the British abolition of Sati in India as white men saving brown women from brown men, and states: ‘something similar seems to be at work in the contemporary eagerness of white gays to save brown gays from brown homophobes’ (Rao, 2010: 182).

The consequence of the conflation of the asylum narrative with the rescue narrative is that no article in the national press questioned the legitimacy of Kazemi’s claim. It is unanimously agreed that persecuted gay men should want to escape Iran or Uganda, and that the UK is a safe place for them to stay. This consensus about the intolerability of Iran for gay men materializes on the widespread insistence that ‘we’ must not let people from Iran be deported back – as the titling of the articles covering Kazemi’s case shows.⁸ Another use of the interdiscourse was the inclusion in some articles of an anecdote involving president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being jeered at by an audience of students during a speech at Columbia University in New York, when he asserted that there were no gay people in Iran. The newspapers thus weave interdiscursive links between the asylum case and other stories in order to propose more or less well-defined persecutors to the readers: from particular politicians to the vaguer entity of the Iranian state.

The articulation of this first step (the accusation of Iran’s repressive policies and culture) to the second step (the accusation of the UK, and in particular then Home Office secretary Jacqui Smith) is central in the formulation of the social problem of LGBTI asylum. It coincides with the contradiction in hospitality between the universalist principles central to the civilizational discourses of homonationalism, and the biopolitical management of the populations of refugees. Social problems are based on the idea that unfortunates consider themselves and are considered by others as victims and that, as such, they can identify culprits and call for reparation (Cefaï, 1996). However, in asylum cases, the punishment of culprits is impossible as they are out of reach. As far as the persecutor constituted by the Iranian state is concerned, the suffering presented in the narratives cannot be turned into a claim for reparation from either the victim or the benevolent reader: the stories of suffering remain at the level of a spectacle, where one cannot do anything about it apart from being moved or affected. However, the combination of this narrative strand with one where the British state is identified as guilty of reluctance solves the problem of the impossibility of reparation. Indeed the hardships of the asylum claims process present clear culprits (an uncooperative Home Office) and call for solving a series of problems including the Home Office’s expectation of discretion from claimants.⁹ Asylum thus becomes a political problem, where institutions need to change and a claim for reparation can happen. This two-step process, once united to form one congruent narrative, opens up the possibility that asylum in the second part could become the reparation for the persecutions suffered in the first. The homogenizing power of narrative thus allows for the juxtaposition of persecution in the asylum seekers’ home country with the asylum process in the UK. This juxtaposition means that it is in the name of the original suffering, for which justice is unattainable in the country of origin, that reparations must be achieved in the UK. The possibility of reaching reparations in the form of a fair treatment of asylum claims thus places the moment of claiming as one that articulates two temporalities: broken pasts make sense in the light of the possible queer futures offered by the UK.

The temporality of LGBTI asylum is also illuminated by the support statement that claimants must produce during the process of claim-making. This document is the main tool for the examination of LGBTI asylum cases; it consists of a long self-narrative (more than 20 pages) detailing the process by which the claimant realized that they were LGBTI, the problems or fears thereof they have encountered in their country of origin, etc. With this document, claimants must convince the decision-makers that they are indeed LGBTI,¹⁰ and that they have good reasons for fearing persecution, were they to be sent back to their country of origin. In other words, the aim of this document is for the narrative to be deemed plausible: to convince the decision-maker that the LGBTI identity presented is the truth of the subject. Indeed, all types of asylum consist, to a certain degree, of a discursive production of the self as ‘a refugee other’ (Barsky, 1994).

Crafting oneself as a LGBTI subject in this narrative has a hermeneutic implication for claimants, who may reinvent themselves in the act of telling their personal stories, homogenizing them in a series of events, causalities, chronologies, etc. (Ricoeur, 1983, 1991). This Ricoeurian act of self-understanding is also a disciplinary one, to the extent that, to be recognized as truthful, one must be recognizable as LGBTI.¹¹ This discipline relies on writing skills, the transmission of which is an important part of support organizations’ work. This narrative work also incidentally reconciles its disciplinary function (conforming one’s story to expectations of identity based on specific sexual ontologies, civilizational representations of sexuality, etc.) with the biopolitical definition of the contours of ‘LGBTI refugees’ experiences.

These narratives produce a queer refugee temporality at several levels. Firstly, in the narratives themselves, the stories establish temporalities of queerness articulating sexuality, persecution and migration. But this forced act of narration itself also produces a queer refugee temporality: it asks claimants to think of their queer futures in the future perfect, presenting the persecutions that can be predicted if they were to remain in their countries of origin. The broken trajectories of the asylum seekers’ queer becoming take place in this future perfect, which ‘reopens the question of the future in a settled past’ (Eng, 2010: 63). Their queer past is written up (a disciplined act of writing as a technology of the self) and at the same time written off (they must come to the conclusion of the impossibility of queer futures in the countries of origin to be plausible). In conclusion, the support statements articulate a queer refugee temporality to the extent that the act of writing the self for the state about their past as a broken queer trajectory is oriented towards the need for queer futures.

Professing human rights, practising exclusion

A critique of the homonationalist formulation of asylum must insist on the blind spots of apparently inclusive and queer-positive discourses – in this case how ‘queer futures’ are imagined for asylum seekers. However, before this, very tangible exclusionary practices in asylum decisions must be examined and linked to these homonationalist discourses: the first one is the concept of discretion, and the second is credibility.

The insistence that LGBTI claimants be ‘discreet’¹² about their sexual orientation upon their return to their country of origin, in order not to elicit potential persecutions, has been used effectively as a means to refuse asylum. The notion has been considerably criticized and challenged, and was the subject of a Supreme Court decision in the UK in 2010, which decreased the possibility of this argument being mobilized.¹³ However, important limitations have been identified by practitioners and scholars alike. Some argued, for example, that the judgement did not do away completely with a reasoning based on discretion, and that it ‘slips in again through the back door of “voluntary discretion”’ (Wessels, 2013: 75). Others, like Jenni Millbank, have shown that even when discretion becomes a less important hurdle, claimants tend to be rejected instead due to disbelief of their sexual orientation by the decision-makers (Millbank, 2009).

The unfairness of the discretion requirement, as well as its focus on homosexual acts (that, it presumes, could be discreet) rather than on questions of identity, are both at odds with most conceptualizations of sexuality in LGBT human rights discourse.¹⁴ This seems in turn to contradict the effects of homonationalist discourses. Indeed, if asylum can be part of homonationalist discursive and political strategies, then there should be a clear interest in displaying hospitality for LGBTI claimants. This hospitality exists in tension with the configuration of asylum as a social problem. Asylum is represented through the image of excess in public arenas, arriving asylum-seekers signifying an ‘overabundant multiple’ (Rancière, 2004). Asylum has thus often been theorized in relation to the question of bare life, the camp dispositif, the idea of wasted lives, sovereign power, and the heritage of colonial infra-humanity (Agamben, 1998; Bauman, 2003; Farrier, 2013; Mbembe, 2003). LGBTI asylum is no stranger to being assimilated to human excess, as is best exemplified by The Sun’s reaction to the 2010 Supreme Court decision, expressing fear over the number of gays worldwide who could potentially seek refuge in the UK: ‘62 million more gays doesn’t add up’ (Kelvin, 2010). In the specific context of UK asylum policies, this discursive environment has a tangible role in contributing to the exclusionary politics of asylum. Vicki Squire has, for example, shown how the narratives of control that permeate the public sphere have a strong influence on EU governmental, press and party political discourses on asylum. Squire analyses the way technologies are mobilized to enact restrictions while being depoliticized and remote from public scrutiny (Squire, 2009: 15) Consequently, a critique of the homonationalist discourse of asylum must be attentive to two simultaneous forms of nationalist exclusion: one that sees asylum seekers as objects of fear and danger for the national body (the plethoric others), and one that creates effects of exclusion through civilizational discourses making tolerance a product of ‘our’ British culture (as opposed to the barbaric others) (Brown, 2006; Lentin and Titley, 2011). Professing human rights while excluding LGBTI claimants can therefore be understood less as a contradiction than as the tense coexistence of two modes of exclusion.

This tension is also central to the question of credibility. Legal analysis has shown how the practice of assessing claimants’ credibility is fraught with difficulties, such as in the case of occasional same-sex attractions without self-identification as LGB,¹⁵ of internalized conflicting values, of a disjunction between sexual behaviour and personal identity, or of self-identification as LGB without having pursued same-sex activities (Middlekoop, 2013: 155–6). Likewise, the ability to perform according to certain stereotypes can help a claimant, and (non-)conforming gender performances can also influence decision-making – even though case workers are advised in the Asylum Policy Instruction not to hold expectations in terms of gender performance (Hanna, 2005; Home Office, 2011). Berg and Millbank have also shown that there often was an expectation of a Western type of narrative of realization and coming out, and that failing to provide one could be detrimental to a claimant’s credibility. This expectation disregards the possibility that claimants might make sense of their lives and experiences in a way that does not follow narratives that are premised on subject formations and political contexts specific to the UK, Europe or the US (Berg and Millbank, 2009). The question of recognition is central to the practical problems posed by credibility: how do we recognize LGB people, and is it even possible? The question of recognition is perceived by all social actors as central to the process of asylum because of the two inherent risks of misrecognition: letting in undeserving refugees and excluding those who deserve protection.¹⁶

Assessing credibility acts thus as a safeguard creating the condition of distinction between the deserving and the undeserving among LGBTI claimants. In this context, credibility can be conceived of as a biopolitical tool for their management: it combines, like a Deleuzian machine of faciality, a function of recognition (the state is able to recognize claimants according to certain traits and features) with a function of exclusion (that which is not recognized is undeserving of protection) (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004). In this double action of discerning and deciding, this biopolitical management combines several intertwined effects: (1) a veridictional¹⁷ effect, for the aim of the process of recognition is to assert and regulate the truth about the claimants’ sexuality; (2) a decisional effect, for it provides a rationale for the function of hospitality and exclusion; and (3) a population effect, for by recognizing (and welcoming) certain types of claimants, it draws the limits of what constitutes the LGBTI population of ‘morally legitimate suffering bodies’ that deserve care (Ticktin, 2011).

Critics of the way credibility is assessed have emphasized the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of carrying this biopolitical function – to the point of questioning the appropriateness of the state deciding whether claimants are LGB or not (Middlekoop, 2013). On the one hand, support organizations and advocates have tried, with relative success in the UK, to foster good practice at the Home Office.¹⁸ On the other hand, some also propose to shift to an assessment of the plausibility of an LGB claimant being perceived as such in their country of origin: this shift eschews the problem of having the state decide on ontological matters of sexuality, in order to examine instead ‘whether elements in the narrative indicate that the actors of persecution perceive him to be gay’ (Middlekoop, 2013: 169). In either case, the state exerts a biopower that objectifies a certain type of subject and relies on specific representations of suffering, liberalism and queerness mobilizing a certain formulation of homonationalism, which the rest of this article will analyse.

No going back

For refugees and asylum-seekers, queer futures are deemed impossible outside of the UK. Their narratives make sense only when their migratory journey is located in relation to their settlement in the UK. Failing to link their queerness with their life in the UK can be read by the administration as a sentence of inauthenticity of the queer subject: for example, a certain expectation for a narrative of ‘liberation’ can sometimes make a narrative more credible in the eyes of Home Office decision-makers.¹⁹ Conversely, impossible futures are interpreted by support groups as a future life of inauthenticity in the case of unsuccessful claims: having to conceal one’s sexuality in the country of origin, or as Kenji Yoshino puts it, reverting back to ‘covering’ (Yoshino, 2002).

Stonewall, an LGBTI advocacy group with a strong focus on lobbying work and the production of information, published a report in 2010 about LGBTI asylum that was covered and quoted from widely in newspapers. Part of its mission as a public enunciator is to engage with different social actors, from local and national government, media outlets, civil society, private companies, etc. The title of the report, No Going Back, gestures towards the possibility of queer futures for those who have left their countries of origin (Stonewall, 2010). The report is divided into several sections, which are simultaneously argumentative (they explain and criticize the process of decision-making at the Home Office) and narrative (each part follows the story of an asylum-seeker claiming asylum, from persecution in the country of origin to the appeal process, etc.). The phrase ‘No going back’ echoes the title of the report’s last section, ‘I can’t recover: Being sent back’, which states:

When asked what life would be like if they were returned to their country of origin, most asylum-seekers replied that this would simply never happen because they would commit suicide in the UK before they were returned to face the persecution they had fled. (Stonewall, 2010: 30)

It also quotes asylum-seekers: ‘How can I live in Iran? I’m an openly gay person here. How can I be openly gay, then go back to my country and be “discreet” at age 34? (Youness, Iranian asylum-seeker)’ (Stonewall, 2010: 30). The report also recounts suicides, such as this one quoted from an Observer article:²⁰ ‘In September 2003, Israfil Shiri, a gay Iranian asylum seeker, died six days after pouring petrol over his body and setting himself alight in the offices of a refugee charity in Manchester. He had fled Iran after the authorities obtained documented evidence of his sexuality’ (Stonewall, 2010: 31). In these examples, going back to their countries of origin is simply not possible for asylum seekers – an absolute absence of queer future epitomized by suicide. In this configuration, temporality and spatiality run parallel.

In the report, queer futures are only possible in the UK; there is thus a coincidence in these discourses between going back ‘there’ (to a space void of tolerance) and going back ‘then’ (to a time of persecution), which allows for an extended interpretation of the imperative of ‘not going back’. For British liberal queers, ‘not going back’ can be interpreted in a temporal manner, through the teleology of sexual modernity. In this teleology, queers follow a path of emancipation starting from the civil rights era to today. For liberal queers, ‘not going back’ means not reversing progress, refusing that the British state should still display homophobia in its treatment of LGBTI refugees. This equation between a homophobic elsewhere and a domestic homophobic past is also present in a remark about discretion that Stonewall’s Ben Summerskill made during the Kazemi case: ‘You only have to listen to people who were terrorized by the Metropolitan Police in the 1950s and the 1960s to know that telling gay people to live discreetly is toxic’ (Verkaik, 2008a).

This equation between LGBTI refugees and liberal queers offers modes of engagement for UK-based organizations. Indeed, it becomes unacceptable for liberal queers to let refugees go back, for it would imply they would themselves experience a reversal through the loss of a queer-positive state upon which their sexual citizenship and liberal subjectivation rely. In other words, the mobilization of liberal queers for the cause of LGBTI refugees is imperative to the extent that a liberal queer mode of subjectivation relies on the existence of a liberal queer-positive state. Therefore, the establishment and the perpetuation of this queer-positiveness is crucial to liberal queers, whether or not they are the direct recipients of this positiveness – in this case, it allows for the emergence of a form of solidarity that sees LGBTI organizations take on the plight of LGBTI refugees. ‘No going back’ is thus an order that engages both queer refugees and liberal queers; the next section will explore this relationship in more detail and discuss it in relation to nationhood and the promise of happiness.

Happy futures

The idea of a queer future in asylum can be read in two ways. Firstly, as a promise: the idea of the safe haven relies on the UK promising queer happy futures to claimants who are persecuted in their countries of origin. Following Sara Ahmed’s terminology, this promise orients subjects towards specific objects and goals (Ahmed, 2006, 2010: 21–49) – the realization of one’s sexual orientation, the freedom to love and establish public forms of intimacy, etc. A second interpretation is to see asylum’s queer futures as exhortations of happiness: that is, the idea that in order to be recognized as an LGBTI refugee, claimants must conform to a certain extent to representations of queer happy futures. Being able to produce, for example, a partner met in the UK can help the credibility of a story. The difference between the promise of happiness and the exhortation of happiness is that LGBTI asylum works from within a conceptualization of sexuality where happiness comes from a freedom afforded by liberalism, and where freedom is understood in a restricted manner as a matter of choice between a series of (homonormative) consumption practices (Duggan, 2002; Newfield, 2002). The same phenomenon can be noted in the way Home Office case owners have sometimes assessed claimant’s gayness by testing their knowledge of the commercial gay scene in London, such as describing the layout of Heaven, a large club in central London with multiple rooms:

You have to ask, what is his behaviour in the UK? If you were a gay man and you had been repressed or ostracised in your home country, then presumably coming to London would give you the chance to go to Soho or Heaven and enjoy the kind of lifestyle and bars and opportunities that that presents. (Nicholas, UKBA senior caseworker, in Stonewall, 2010: 16)

Alongside such assumptions that claimants are part of a commercial scene, other examples of questioning on cultural tastes have included a ‘First Tier Tribunal [that] could not accept that a Ugandan lesbian woman was not more familiar with lesbian books and magazines’ (Spijkerboer and Jansen, 2011: 58). While this type of question is now less likely to be asked, since Home Office staff have been trained to avoid such questions, the UKLGIG’s latest report shows that problematic lines of questioning are still being followed (UKLGIG, 2013: 13–14). This type of questioning simultaneously reveals assumptions about the identification of sexual freedom as freedom to consume, and obfuscates the heterogeneity of the ‘gay scene’ by identifying it solely as a specific commercial arena. It abstracts indeed how such a scene works through distinction and social relations involving in particular, in the case of asylum-seekers, economic capital and ethnicity. In other words, the exhortation of happiness contributes to the reproduction of dreams of the good life and of queer optimism only insofar as LGBTI asylum seekers are recognizable as oriented towards liberal queer subjectivations. With asylum, a homonationalist framework does not simply mean praising the sexual modernity of Britain, but it also means offering hospitality as a restrictive queer future comprising liberal and normative identities and experiences.

Asylum does not simply contribute to the reproduction of liberal queerness but is an essential component in certain formulations of queer liberalism. Existing scholarship on the boom in discourses about LGBTI human rights seen in the past decade offer two convincing explanations: (1) the co-optation of LGBTI human rights discourses by both the liberal state and liberal and conservative gays and lesbians; and (2) the identification of LGBTI human rights as a cause that can replace a vacuum left after domestic advances, and the subsequent direction of some advocates towards culturalized representations of tolerance and worldwide sexual freedom (Brown, 2006; Rao, 2010).

Homonationalism involves the production of (certain homonormative, liberal) queers as being ‘closer’²¹ to the nation than other subjects, both queer and non-queer – as most obviously demonstrated by the inclusion of gays and lesbians in the reproductive futurism of marriage, or the acceptance of LGB people in the army (Edelman, 2004; Puar, 2008). With LGBTI asylum, the nation is re-imagined according to new founding myths of tolerance and openness, which reconfigure nationalism in such a way that the exclusion (or distancing) of certain subjects is based on a discourse extolling the virtues of inclusion and tolerance (Stychin, 1997). Acts of tolerance are thus central to the togetherness of queers and the nation – a centrality that sits precariously with the history and endurance of homophobia in the UK. This issue is neither novel nor specific to queers and homonationalism, and Ernest Renan had already emphasized the role of forgetting in the building of the nation: to imagine ourselves together in the community of the nation, we forget what might distance ourselves from each other, what might create dissension (Anderson, 2006; Renan, 1990: 10–11).

Asylum discourses are typical of such acts of forgetting: the representation of the safe haven cannot exist outside of a representation of the UK as tolerant. In turn, refugees can become the benchmarks for the demonstration of the UK’s advancement on sexual tolerance, as demonstrated by a certain unanimity about the moral rightness of LGBTI asylum.²² Indeed, following Jacques Derrida’s conception of hospitality, the host often needs the guest for its own existence: in other words, the relationship of dependence between the two can be thought of as a need for a guest, a victim actualizing the UK’s new founding myths of tolerance and sexual modernity (Derrida, 2000). Renan’s act of forgetting takes place in this context, and represents the condition for an act of hospitality that is central to the self-imagining of the nation as sexually modern and tolerant. However, at the same time as asylum amounts to forgetting homophobia in the UK, it also triggers an explosion of discourses on homophobia: the victim status of asylum seekers being produced through self-narratives of homophobic violence. Public arenas are thus awash with tales of woe from LGBTI asylum-seekers. Therefore, at the same time as asylum performs the homonationalist act of producing the UK as an exceptionally tolerant civilization, it also fosters and multiplies discourses on homophobia.

Consequently, asylum links queerness, liberalism and nationalism by simultaneously forgetting old discourses on homophobia and fostering new ones. The coexistence of narratives of homophobic suffering with acts of forgetting British homophobia can be interpreted in two ways. The first has to do with sympathy, which, as it is conceptualized by Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville, is a result of the spectacle of suffering and revolves around the spectator’s ability to take the place of the sufferer. This process, which Fabrice Wilhelm calls a projective identification (Wilhelm, 2007: 75), makes Smith asserts that ‘[b]y the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him’ (Smith, 2009). Sympathy is thus central to the phenomenon demonstrated in earlier analysis of ‘no going back’, in that it allows for such a comparison between queer refugees’ current suffering and liberal queers’ past suffering to be made.

Acts of forgetting can also be analysed following Nietzschean criticisms of ressentiment – a feeling where the focus lies on the punishment of persecutors rather than on the empowerment of sufferers (Boltanski, 1999). For Wendy Brown, there has been a problematic investment in the wound in subaltern politics; in particular she talks of the fetishization of a wound which comes to stand for an identity (Ahmed, 2004: 32; Brown, 1995). A fetishization of LGBT refugees’ suffering can be read in the context of the continuous assimilation of certain forms of gay subjectivations, in particular homonormative ones whose representations are disseminated in public arenas to stand for sexual modernity and, of course, to serve those who have an interest in proclaiming the fight for LGBTI rights officially over. In this context, liberal queers can be represented as having two positions: on the one hand they are part of rescue narratives, thus absorbing queer subjects in colonial imaginaries; and on the other hand, LGBTI refugees reactivate the wound of being queer when it becomes harder to stand against counter-discourses in public arenas claiming that the battle for gay rights is over. In other words, queer suffering can be reintroduced in public arenas with LGBTI refugees’ stories, at the cost of reinforcing discourses on sexual tolerance that claim that LGBTI people do not suffer so much in the UK.

This allows for a reappropriation of the pain of others; as Ahmed puts it, others can be envied for their enjoyment as well as for their lack thereof, in particular ‘for the authenticity of their suffering, their vulnerability and their pain’ (Ahmed, 2004: 162). In the case of LGBTI asylum, what she calls the ‘pleasures of being charitable’ take a special significance within the teleological narrative of sexual modernity: if homophobia is a thing of the past and queer positiveness a thing of the future, as well as being a frontier between the West and the non-West, then non-Western queer subjects can represent the past of the liberal queer subject. An investment in the lack of enjoyment of LGBTI refugees is thus also an investment in a wound that is ‘ours’ but read as past. Suffering thus becomes a universalism where all suffering is equivalent, and ‘their’ suffering can be compared to ‘ours’ and be re-appropriated likewise. When discourses on LGBTI rights produce the state as benevolent, activism that bases itself on this premise can find ways to reactivate wounds that are coded as past, and LGBTI asylum and its victims enable this process to happen.

To conclude, this article has explored some of the links between asylum, nationhood and queer liberalism. It has claimed that asylum discourses produce representations of nationhood that place tolerance and a teleological vision of sexual modernity at their centre. This conceptualization has tangible consequences for asylum seekers, who must present – and, to a certain extent, reinvent – themselves as liberal queers in order to be recognized as LGBTI and be offered hospitality. Finally, the article has shown that in asylum, homonationalism is not merely a discourse on British exceptionalism and sexual modernity. Rather, it proposes that homonationalism can designate an understanding of the nation that allows for the production of a certain type of queer futurism: one that is conflated with a liberal optimism that promises the good life to asylum seekers and liberal queers alike. But to what extent are the promises of the good life accessible to queer refugees – especially when considering that they may be economically disadvantaged and socially marginalized, and thus have little purchase to the market autonomy that constitutes this promise? Homonationalist queer optimism might perhaps be, then, in Lauren Berlant’s terminology, a form of cruel optimism to the extent that the very object of happiness promised by asylum (market-based, homonormative assimilation) denies the multiple ways in which asylum seekers and refugees are unable to reach it.

Footnotes

Notes

Thibaut Raboin is Teaching Fellow in French at University College London. His research interests include migration and sexuality, French politics, the radio, political emotions and the politicization of suffering. He is the author of Discourses on LGBT Asylum in the UK (Manchester University Press, 2016).

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