Refugeeness

In the last few years, asylum claims based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity (SOGI) have received increased attention within migration and queer studies. Mostly focusing on the refugee status determination process, these works have emphasized how the expectations of asylum institutions about "genuine queer refugees" lead to the exclusion of many applicants from SOGI asylum. This paper aims at shifting the analysis perspective from the legal categorization process to the impacts of everyday experienced categories of "asylum seekers" or "refugees" on queer migrants in the Parisian area. Using a three-year long ethnographic fieldwork, completed through interviews with queer asylum seekers and refugees, this paper investigates how refugeeness, understood as the objective and subjective effects of migration and asylum policies on individuals, contributes to shaping lived experiences of sexual and gender minorities in France. By drawing attention to the ways that the multiple power relationships queer asylum seekers and refugees have to face are spatially grounded, this paper discusses how an intersectional understanding of sexuality, gender, and refugeeness allows us to emphasize the role played by migration status in the negotiation of hetero-and cisnormativity. This paper also argues that far from remaining passive toward the categorization process they are subjected to, queer asylum seekers and refugees strategically appropriate the administrative categories with which they are associated. Such an analysis of lived experiences of queer asylum seekers and refugees in the country of arrival thus highlights the complex reshaping of social location caused by migration.

"This thesis will discuss the limitations and possibilities of sustainable citizenship and hospitality in the refugee camps of Grande-Synthe, France. It will contribute to a two-fold theoretical debate on border politics and humanitarian politics. Both European border policies and humanitarian aid organizations focus on the here and the now and ignore the shared histories and future dreams of full (legal) and bare (illegal) citizens. They reduce the last group to an anonymous mass of either criminals or suffering victims and stimulate thinking in terms of exclusion, enlarging the gap between us and them . Having spent one month in camp Basroch (the Jungle of Grande-Synthe ) and two months in camp La Linière ( the first official refugee camp of Europe ), I will draw on my own ethnographic experiences and daily conversations as a volunteer in the camp to illustrate the complex and nuanced ways in which both refugees and volunteers question the concepts of statelessness and national belonging and in negotiation (re)construct citizenship and care in relation to each other. It s a story about the numerous challenges that limit their hospitality and their powerful attempts to cross the borders that hold them apart."

The experiences of Syrian female refugees in Turkey are strongly characterized by a multifaceted quality of violence, which intersects with discrimination and other difficulties stemming from a lack of education, a lack of financial means, ethnicity, and the precarious situation of being a ›guest‹ in Turkey. In the scope of my master thesis research, I went to¸Sanlıurfa in order to find out more about their situation. I realized that the omnipresent violence certainly limits the field of possibilities that Syrian women in¸Sanlıurfa can move within. However, their narratives also showed that these limitations are not deterministic, they are breached and modified through eigensinnige (willful) interpretations that open up possibilities to act. They are active willful agents that develop strategies in their everyday life to circumvent violence, to protect themselves from it, and to resist.