Queer kinship and the rights of refugee families

Abstract

Over the past decade, the refugee protection regime has supposedly become more inclusive of queer and trans* people. Much literature has focused on the expansion of refugee status determination and the inclusion of LGBTQ asylum seekers. However, there are many areas of refugee policy that remain dependent on cisheteronormative assumptions and therefore exclude the queer and trans* forcibly displaced. This paper considers the concept of ‘the family’ and how it is used and understood in refugee protection. We make the normative argument that queer and trans* family units ought to qualify for refugee family reunion and group status determination. We do so by considering the concept of queer and trans* ‘chosen families’, arguing that these queer articulations of kinship are functionally and morally comparable to cisheteronormative conceptions of the family. We contend that considering the cisheteronormative underpinnings of the family in this way opens up the potential to queer other areas of refugee policy, and therefore paves the way to a more inclusive refugee protection regime.

Increasing Isolation of LGBTQI+ Asylum Claimants During Covid-19 in the UK

“…Instead, queer migration scholarship predominantly focuses on the legal marginalisation of queer legal subjects within heteronormative asylum regimes (i.e. Giametta 2017;Luibhéid 2008;Rehaag 2008;Ritholtz and Buxton 2021;Shakhsari 2014;Tschalaer 2021Tschalaer , 2020a with only a few studies highlighting the social dimension of their marginalisation (Wimark 2019(Wimark , 2020Held 2021).…”

What is wrong with persecution

“…36 The persecuted individual's country of origin has repudiated their membership (Owen, 2020, 32). 37 Denial of membership-understood as the loss of effective citizenship-can be worrisome for at least two reasons (Buxton, 2021). 38 First, it violates an individual's prior claim to be recognized and protected within a particular community.…”

“…46 Such expulsion also often includes targeted harassment, hate campaigns, and ensuring that the individual does not have access to any friends or family members for support. 47 For LGBT people fleeing persecution, the family is often the first locus of harm (Buxton and Ritholtz, 2021). 48 Along with all the other wrongs committed in such an expulsion (the wrongs that we mentioned in the previous section), such families have also violated their pre-existing obligation towards this family member as a family member; they have changed who is part of the family and violated their prior associative obligations to them.…”

“…This can potentially be seen more clearly in the case of family‐based persecution. To take a contemporary example, many young people are expelled from their families after they come out as non‐straight or gender non‐conforming (Ritholtz, 2022). 46 Such expulsion also often includes targeted harassment, hate campaigns, and ensuring that the individual does not have access to any friends or family members for support 47 .…”

Mononormativity and Related Normative Bias in the UK Immigration System: The Experience of LGBTIQ+ Asylum Seekers

“…This kind of critical reading is in line with the queer legal approach of questioning the normative bias in legal systems. Examples include Zelada and Neyra-Sevilla's (2019) work on trans identities in Peru, which involved examining the discourse of plaintiffs and judges in such cases, and Ritholtz and Buxton's (2021) analysis of queer kinship in refugee status determination. They describe the idea of queering in relation to the law as 'a form of academic inquiry that takes on the structure of sexuality as it looms large in society and challenges its ontological application' (5).…”