A new materialist exploration of Sexual and Gender Minorities asylum seekers and refugees’ experiences of the UK’s asylum process
This research is a new materialist exploration of sexual and gender minority asylum seekers and refugees lived and embodied experiences of the UK’s refugee status determination process. It explores specifically experiences of sexual minorities who were forced to flee their homeland to the UK where they later sought sanctuary on grounds of Sexual Orientation and/ or Gender Identity (SOGI), as per UNHCR guidelines on International Protection no.9, because their countries outlawed consensual same-sex activities. This study captures participants’ pre-flight and post-flight personal stories. Twenty asylum seekers and refugees from nine countries were interviewed for this study using semi-structured interviews. Data were also collected through photovoice, whereby participants provided self-generated images, ephemerally capturing their experiences. These images were analysed alongside interview data, using materialist analysis to generate the most significant intensities (“themes”). A significant number of the 20 research participants fled from former British colonies, where Britain introduced criminalisation of consensual same-sex activities starting in India from 1800s. I draw on and extend the new materialist notion of assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) as an overarching theory in conjunction with a conceptual assemblage of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2013), slow death (Berlant, 2007) and slow violence (Nixon, 2011) as lenses to explore participants’ asylum migratory experiences. Assemblage theory acknowledges that multiple bodies- both animate and inanimate interact and merge at specific points to assemble the most salient affects. Affects are what is produced from relational encounters with diverse bodies. From participants’ interviews and photovoice, the most significant salient affects produced in the process, were identified. My subjectivity was acknowledged, and how it affected the study because I am part of the research-assemblage. Through materialist analysis some findings included multiplicity of persecutions, internal displacements, intimate encounters and connections, allyship, assembling the intangible, navigating welfare un/certainties, agentic ways of challenging asylum brutalities, mechanics of transformation and desire to belong and longing to belong among others. In materialist terms, participants’ production of contemporary asylum migratory experiences can be (historically) linked to 1290- 733 years to be exact, when the first known English law criminalising consensual same-sex activities was recorded. This thesis established that violence was heterogeneous, boundless, recurring and metamorphosised and rooted in necropolitics which demarcated who was disposable or not. Violence was also a productive force. I found that participants developed creative ways of resisting the violence through, for instance, using silence, intimate encounters and connections, and reclaiming previously criminalised and stigmatised identities. More so, in both pre-and post-flight segments, participants contributed to the production of complex, messy and unique sexual identity subjectivities. Overall, this research established that the refugee status determination process does not end after an applicant has been granted asylum- even though this is the ultimate aim of the application where they had to prove their sexuality. In conclusion, therefore, this research has implications for policy makers regarding SOGI immigration interviews which essentialise sexual identities, yet sexuality is not static, it is produced in an ongoing basis. For practice, the implication would be the development of an anti-oppressive model to support sexual minority asylum seekers and refugees, and also embed these findings in practice, practice educators at placement and social-worker producing institutions, including researchers concerned with SOGI refugee and forced migration studies.
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