The Challenge of Home for Sexual Orientation and Gendered Identity Refugees in Toronto

Abstract

Research on refugees and asylum seekers often focusses on the fraught and complex relations between homelands or nations of origin, and the new home or country of refuge, and asks important questions about the meaning(s) of home and its relationship to practices of identity, space, and belonging. The Canadian refugee determination system, however, requires a narrative where Canada plays the role of the “liberation nation.” For sexual orientation and gendered identity (SOGI) refugee claimants, this narrative focusses on homo/transphobia in their former home spaces, and movement towards a new national homeland where their sexual or gendered orientation is accepted and protected. In interviews with SOGI refugee claimants in Toronto, the “migration-to-liberation nation” narrative is articulated by most claimants, which may be due in part to their investment in articulating a narrative that meets homonormative definitions of SOGI refugee identity produced in and through the refugee determination system. Despite the possibly strategic claim to be grateful for a new home where one’s gendered or sexual orientation is accepted and protected, most interviewees also continue to communicate with friends and family in their countries of origin and have intense, complex feelings about their former homeland(s). This essay explores these diverse discourses, experiences, and meanings of home for SOGI refugees; it argues for a fluid conceptualization of homing that recognizes simultaneous, complex attachments to multiple homes constituted across transnational fields and resists homonormative discourses that forge privileged chains of attachment between nation, desire, and identity.

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