Queering Refugee Settlement in Canada


Sarah Vanderveer, York University

SOGIE (sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression) refugee claimants, protected persons, and permanent residents who have recently been granted PR status face many challenges as they adjust to a new life in Canada. Significant research has been produced that addresses claimants experiences within the Canadian refugee apparatus, the role of homonormative beliefs and practices within determination processes and relational interrogation of non-cisheteronormative bodies and identities (Brotman and Lee, 2011; Kinsman, 2018; LaViolette, 2004, 2014; Murray, 2014, 2015; Masoumi, 2019; Mulé and Gates-Gasse (2012); Mulé and Gamble, 2018); but there is less research focusing on post-claim life. This research project addresses the need for a processual study of SOGIE settlement by focusing on everyday life for SOGIE claimants/post-claim refugees in Toronto. The objective of this research is to study the challenges and intersectional vulnerabilities experienced by SOGIE RCs, PPs and PRs as they make claims, access eligible supports, and engage in settlement. These questions investigate whether intersectional vulnerabilities are reproduced through settlement supports/programs, and if so, how supports designed to assist settlement may at the same time contribute to reproducing vulnerabilities and re-traumatization. To do so, this study centres on participant dis/engagement with support services/settlement programs, and ask the following research questions: How are SOGIE RCs, PPs and PRs navigating settlement challenges? Do participants perceive their queer identity/social location impacts access to supports, if so, in what way(s), and is this impacting their settlement? Are the support services/settlement programs they know of/access a source for dis/engagement? Do they understand/support participant’s SOGIE (and potentially other intersectional) identities? Do support services for SOGIE RCs, PPs and PRs in/directly foster, pathologize, or diminish non-heteronormative and/or non-homonormative bodies and identities? This research raises questions about the subjugation of non-cisheteronormative identities within support services, the role and impact of policies, processes, and perspectives in the sustaining of normative queerphobia within the settlement services and broader Canadian culture. These questions present an opportunity to investigate whether services designed to support SOGIE newcomers are reinforcing homonormative, homonationalist, and/or queerphobic beliefs, potentially retraumatizing and/or producing new trauma(s) to a vulnerable population as they navigate a new environment of ‘safety’. This study engages with theoretical framework advanced by Butler (1999) who identifies the “heterosexual matrix” (p. 208) as necessitating the integration and ascription of dominant heterosexual characteristics onto queer bodies and identities as a process for naturalizing homonormativity by making them non-cisheteronormative sexualities and genders intelligible though compulsory of sex, gender, and sexual characteristics. Puar’s (2017) construction of homonationalist ideologies wherein gender and sexual identities are simultaneously inscribed by race, ethnicity, gender, and class reinforcing discourse(s) of tolerance, benevolence on the part of ‘Western’ nations, thus reinforcing racist ascriptions onto Othered nations. Combined with accompanying intersectional differences of race, ethnicity, class, and ability, queer bodies and identities are rendered increasingly vulnerable to necropolitical power relations that categorize acceptability and authenticity along homonormative, homonational, and necropolitical lines, delineating who is ‘legitimately deserving’ of protection or abandonment (Haritaworn et al., 2014, p. 5). This requires queer bodies and identities to be made visible, interrogated, classified, assessed, and legitimized. When compounded with insecure refugee claimant or residency status, the presence of formalized state-controlled de/legitimization re/produces structural violence, legal liminality, thereby validating protection or erasure. Applied to the Canadian context, integration of homosexuality into sociopolitical and cultural norms, and its gradual progression towards “naturalizing” LGBTQ+ identities and bodies in national identity is a gradual transition of absorbing some characterizations of queer identity. It is a process that simultaneously presents sociopolitical notions of ‘tolerance’ and beneficence, while reinforcing queerness as the non-cisheteronormative Other (Haritaworn et al., 2014, p. 5). This study focuses on the lived, experiential knowledge of participants, the exploration of inherent biases within systems, policies, and social supports, and the social implications of un/intentionally re/producing trauma. This multi-sited study includes research connected to several community-based organizations in Toronto, each providing social support services for SOGIE refugees. Data collection includes in-person, open-ended, semi-structured interviews, policy and processual analysis. This research is in-process, and my presentation will summarize theoretical frameworks and methodologies, followed by a discussion of preliminary findings.

This paper will be presented at the following session: