Sexual and gender minorities asylum seekers and refugees' experiences of the UK's refugee determination process


Paschal Gumadwong Bagonza, De Montfort University

This research is a new materialist exploration of sexual and gender  minority asylum seekers and refugees lived and embodied experiences of the UK’s refugee status determination process. It specifically explores experiences of sexual minorities forced to flee their homeland to the UK and later sought sanctuary on grounds of Sexual Orientation and/ or Gender Identity (SOGI), because their countries outlawed consensual same-sex activities. Twenty asylum seekers and refugees from nine countries were interviewed for this study using semi-structured interviews. Data were also collected through photovoice- participants submitted self-generated images, capturing their ephemeral experiences. These images were analysed alongside interview data to generate the most significant intensities. A significant number of the 20 research participants fled from former British colonies, where Britain introduced criminalisation of consensual same-sex activities starting in India from 1800s. I draw on and extend the new materialist notion of assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) as an overarching theory in conjunction with a ‘conceptual assemblage’ of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2013), slow death (Berlant, 2007) and slow violence (Nixon, 2011) to explore participants’ asylum experiences. Assemblage theory acknowledges that multiple bodies- both animate and inanimate interact and merge at specific points to assemble the most salient affects. Some of these salient affects include multiplicity of persecutions, internal displacements, intimate encounters and connections, assembling the intangible, navigating welfare un/certainties, agentic ways of challenging asylum brutalities, and mechanics of transformation. In materialist terms, participants’ production of contemporary migratory experiences can be (historically) linked to 1290- 733 years ago, when the first known English law criminalising consensual same-sex activities was recorded. This thesis established that violence was heterogeneous, boundless, recurring and metamorphosised and rooted in necropolitics which demarcated who was disposable or not. Violence was also a productive force. More so, in pre-and post-flight segments, participants contributed to the production of complex, messy and unique sexual identity subjectivities. Overall, this research established that the refugee status determination process did not end after participants got sanctuary, they moved beyond victimhood and participants becoming something else. 

This paper will be presented at the following session: