The Language of Sexual Imperialism: Queer Refugees and Language Interpretation in Canada


Azar Masoumi, Carleton University

This presentation examines the role of language in naturalizing and advancing global sexual imperialism through the process of language interpretation for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and Expression (SOGIE) refugees in Canada. Language is a necessary tool in determination of SOGIE refugee cases. Indeed, the ability of queer refugee claimants to secure protection relies on successful communication of credible stories of desire and persecution to Canadian state officials, lawyers, service providers and community support workers. For claimants who are not fluent in English or French, language interpretation remains the only means of communicating their need for protection. In other words, cross-lingual interpretation, which is often assisted by a third-party speaker, is critical to refugees’ ability to secure access to safety. As this presentation will suggest, cross-lingual communication is also a site of involved geopolitical and intercultural dynamics and inequalities. As post-colonial translation studies scholars have long argued (Niranjana 1992; Spivak 1993; Bassnett and Trivedi 1999; Wolf 2000; Rao 2006), translation is not a neutral vehicle for transmitting content between languages, but an active and power-ridden process that commonly involves intricate forms of cultural subjugation. In the case of SOGIE refugees, cross-lingual interaction occurs under conditions of remarkable inequality: in a context of unmistakable desperation and power imbalance, SOGIE refugees have no choice but to make their stories, including their accounts of gender and sexuality, intelligible to the reigning Euro-American-centric cultural frameworks of adjudicators. This is while a large scholarship on transnational sexualities has documented the rapid erosion and intensified subjugation of diverse local indigenous sexualities in the Global South due to colonialization and ongoing neo-colonial sexual imperialism (Murray and Rosecoe 1998; Findlay 1999; Najmabadi 2005; Horswell 2005; Slater and Yarbrough 2011; Human Rights Watch 2008; Gunkel 2010; Kaoma 2018; Rao 2020). This presentation draws on these insights to argue that cross-lingual interpretation furthers sexual imperialism by naturalizing and advancing Euro-American-centric sexual and gender discourses and terminologies through the SOGIE refugee claim adjudication process. I draw on research interviews with refugee language interpreters across Canada (Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver) to show that the practices of language interpreters commonly ignore or flatten distinctions between disparate cultural understandings of gender and sexuality in order to conform them to the cultural frameworks of Canadian actors and adjudicators in the refugee claim adjudication process. While this subjugation is largely un-noticed and unintended, the work of interpretation remains a fraught site in which questions of “appropriate” and “real” terms of identity and experience are one-sidedly decided, and even used to train the refugee in adopting Euro-American-centric frames of sexual and gender identification. The presentation concludes by suggesting an alternative approach to language interpretation that displaces the assumed primacy of Euro-American-Centric discourses and disrupts or minimizes the impact of sexual imperialism in determination of SOGIE refugee cases.

This paper will be presented at the following session: