Queering refugee law: a study of sexual diversity in asylum policy and practice in the United Kingdom

In 2016, the Home Office issued a new Asylum Policy Instruction on Sexual Orientation. The policy has been heralded as a move away from conduct towards identity in the Home Office’s institutional conception of sexual diversity. However, the merits of this shift have received limited critical attention, with most scholarly work focusing on the failures of implementation surrounding this move and the ongoing procedural and substantive issues in asylum claims by sexually diverse people. This thesis draws on eight semi structured interviews with sexually diverse refugees—and, therefore, former asylum seekers—to offer a queer critical analysis of the 2016 Asylum Policy Instruction: Sexual Orientation in Asylum Claims. The thesis then explores the wider cultural sources of our knowledges and discourses around sexual diversity, with a view to understanding how both the 2016 Asylum Policy Instruction and the narratives of sexually diverse refugees and asylum seekers arise are likely to be read and interpreted by decision-makers. The analysis utilises a framework of lived experience to detect mismatches between the heterogenous self-conceptions of sexual diversity held by sexually diverse refugees and asylum seekers and the forms of sexual diversity recognised within both the 2016 Asylum Policy Instruction and contemporary “western” culture. Employing a benchmark standard set around protecting the full heterogenous span of sexual diversities from human rights abuses, the thesis then offers critical considerations for future policy and research regarding sexually diverse refugees and asylum seekers