Volume 3 issue 2 December 2015

Logics of Citizenship and Violence of Rights: The Queer Migrant Body and the Asylum System

Mariska Jung​
Border and migration studies document how states produce migrant subjectivities via bio-political practices, which are plotted against the figure of the ‘undeserving’ migrant. However, there is little research on the politics of the recent but growing tendency in Western states to include the category of ‘LGBT’ in their asylum policies. Furthermore, there has been little attention to the role of activists in border regimes. Hence academia fails to fully grasp the violence of rights-based migration politics and to understand the dispersed sexual politics of borders. This article examines the relation¬ship between LGBT emancipation, border enforcement and migration activism in the United Kingdom. It appears that asylum policies construct hierarchies of migrants, currently with the LGBT asylum seeker towards the top of the pecking order. Activists contest, but simultaneously perform, the sexual and ter¬ritorial border. The save-ability of the queer migrant is construc¬ted at the same time that immigration violence is conducted, through indefinite detention and the Detained Fast Track system. Law turns out to be a violent governmental tech¬nology when gender and sexuality rights are used to further close the border.