WAITING IN TRANSIT: IRANIAN LGBTQ REFUGEES IN TURKEY AND THE SEXUALITY OF (IM)MOBILITY

440 pagesThis dissertation is an ethnographic study of queer asylum from the Middle East to North America. It draws on two years of fieldwork in Turkey with Iranian LGBTQ refugees awaiting resettlement to the United States and Canada. As these countries have closed their borders since 2015, refugees remain stuck small Turkish towns with uncertain legal status. My dissertation explores how the carceral politics of asylum are shaped by uncertain waiting, spatial confinement, and precarious material conditions, and how refugees develop everyday tactics to cope with violence, precarity, and uncertainty. This study makes three theoretical contributions. First, it extends the scholarship on asylum and humanitarianism beyond nation-state and legal frameworks. Tracing refugees’ interactions with various state and non-state actors at national, international, and diasporic scales, I demonstrate how categories of ‘authentic’ and ‘deserving’ refugees—and accompanying forms of care and control—are produced and governed transnationally, on the one hand, and negotiated through social encounters between refugees and decision-makers in informal and quasi-legal zones, on the other. Second, as opposed to dominant representations of queer asylum as a journey from violence to safety and freedom, my dissertation reveals the ubiquity of violence in the transnational asylum system. I analyze how North American countries’ restrictive border policies, international humanitarian organizations’ indeterminate resettlement practices, and Turkey’s securitization of refugees’ mobilities and labor create multiple forms of economic, sexual, and emotional violence in refugees’ lives. Third, rather than treating waiting merely as a governmental tool or an empty time, my dissertation demonstrates that refugees turn waiting into an active time-space in which they refashion their subjectivities, establish ethno-sexual economies, form queer kin structures, and cultivate a queer ethics of everyday life based on shared practices of love, care, and support. While refugees’ creative and resilient work of self-making, kin-making, and community-making help them cope with the violent conditions of waiting, the same conditions also compel refugees to invest in the structures of competition and gatekeeping to facilitate their access to scarce resources. This paradoxical dialectic both manifests the productive and violent nature of asylum and disrupts idealized narratives of community, solidarity, and queer ethics.2023-09-1