Discourses on LGBT Asylum in the UK

This book examines the way asylum is conceptualised at the crossroads of nationhood, post-colonialism and sexual citizenship through analyses of fifteen years of debate, activism and media narrative. Asylum has become a key site for the formulation and critique of LGBT human rights, reshaping forms of sexual belonging to the nation. This study intervenes in the ongoing discussion of homonationalism, sheds new light on the limitations of queer liberalism as a political strategy and questions the prevailing modes of solidarity among queer migrants in the UK.

Raboin employs discourse analysis to study a large corpus encompassing media narratives, policy documents, debates with activists and NGOs as well as counter-discourses emerging from art practice. This study illuminates the construction of the social problem of LGBT asylum and, in doing so, shows how our understanding of asylum is firmly rooted in the individual stories of migration circulated in the media. The book also critiques the exclusionary management of cases by the state, especially in the way the state manufactures the authenticity of queer refugees. Finally, it investigates the affective economy of asylum, assessing critically the role of sympathy and challenging the happy goals of queer liberalism.

Discourses on LGBT asylum in the UK will be essential for researchers and students specialising in refugee studies and queer studies.