March 21st 3pm to 5pm, there will be a seminar at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School (M15 6BH) in Room BS 3.20 (N Atrium)
The event will present current research into the intersections of discourses on sexuality, race/ethnicity and the law. The main focus is on problematic assumptions which guide the construction of ‘LGBT subjectivities’ in legal processes that have been designed in laws meant to ‘protect’ people with non-normative genders or sexualities from persecution and hate crimes. Topics discussed at the event will include discussions of asylum process (in the UK and beyond) and hate crime legislation in Catalonia. The focus is on tensions, paradoxes, limitations and gaps in the construction of ‘rights’ and other legal measures, which create systemic exclusions that narrow how queer lives can be lived, articulated and understood, often with deadly consequences for some groups concerned.
There will be three 20 minutes presentations followed by Questions and Answers and a Discussion.
· CHRISTIAN KLESSE (Manchester Met) ‘Bisexuality, Asylum Law and the Biopolitics of ‘Bisexual Erasure’.
· KAREN McCARTHY (Manchester Met) ‘When I was an asylum seeker I was in bondage. I was captive. Something is holding you and want to strangle you to death’
· NÚRIA SADURNÍ (University of Girona, Catalonia), ‘Queer necropolitics and the Catalan law against LGBTphobia’
Attendance is free of charge. Tea, Coffee and Sandwiches will be provided.
The event has been sponsored by RAH! (Research in the Arts and Humanities! Manchester Metropolitan University)
Abstracts and Bios
CHRISTIAN KLESSE
Bisexuality, Asylum Law and the Biopolitics of ‘Bisexual Erasure’
Christian Klesse (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Research into asylum case law in many countries (including the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK) suggests that bisexuals are at serious risk of having their claims dismissed, because their stories and identities are cast as non-plausible or non-consequential. The legal claims of non-heterosexual applicants have been meet with ignorance and excessive scrutiny in the legal apparatus of many countries for a very long time. While positive case decisions of gay male and lesbian claimants are increasing in some jurisdictions, bisexuals are still likely to find their claims on the grounds of persecution because of their sexuality rejected. While the “discretion requirement”, i.e. the expectation that lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans* applicants have to live “discrete” lives (or, in other words, to “stay in the closet”) to prevent persecution, has been successfully challenged in many jurisdictions, bisexuals are still alleged to being able to “pass” without hassle, if they only entered heterosexual relations. Bisexual claimants often find it impossible to prove their membership in a ‘particular social group’. The fluidity bound up with bisexuality and the lack of acceptance for bisexual identities is at
odds with the ‘immutability’ assumption of sexual orientation models. The common discrimination of bisexuals in asylum law is a direct outflow of what Kenji Yoshino calls the ‘epistemic contract of bisexual erasure’. The hurdles against making bisexual experience intelligible in the field of law and against materialising a right for asylum for bisexual claimants is part and parcel of the regulation of the sexuality of migrants’ bodies through biopolitical acts of government with all too often necropolitical consequences.
Biographical Note
Christian Klesse is Reader in the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research interests include the politics of bisexuality, non-monogamy and polyamory; race/ethnicity and racism, and transnational activism around gender and sexual politics. He is the author of The Spectre of Promiscuity: Gay Male and Bisexual Non-Monogamies and Polyamories (Routledge) and co-author of Heteronormativität: Empirische Studien zu Geschlecht, Sexualität und Macht (Heteronormativity: Empirical Studies of Gender, Sexuality and Power) (VS Verlag). His work has been published in a number of journals including Body and Society, The European Journal of Women’s Studies, The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Sexualities, Sociology, and The Sociological Review.
KAREN McCARTHY
“When I was an asylum seeker I was in bondage. I was captive. Something is holding you and want to strangle you to death”
To win recognition as a refugee and become ‘documented’ most people seeking asylum on the grounds of their sexuality, and persecution because of it, have to fight for recognition of their sexuality first. ‘Proving’ sexuality is key, with the majority of sexuality based cases refused on credibility, i.e. that the claimant is not believed; the incidence of disbelief has increased since case law in 2009 limited the ability of courts to send people recognised as LGBT back to their countries of origin to live ’discretely’. The experience of the Lesbian Immigration Support Group members and volunteers is that claimants feel pressured to conform to Western, racialized, homonormative notions of what lesbian sexuality looks like, having spent most of their lives ‘pretending’ NOT to be lesbian, for their own safety. Most members of LISG are escaping from, often extremely violent, persecution in countries which were once British colonies and where British imposed, homophobic laws still exist. The impact of this colonial , and continuing, biopolitical governance creates a legacy of necropolitical results both in the UK and globally. “and I don’t give a shit about HO and they can’t change that and they can’t force me to do things. I have a partner and a life and a family, and people who know that. What do they want?”
Biographical Note
Karen McCarthy is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research interests include migration, asylum and sexuality; migration and immigration; the experience of refugees and asylum seekers in further and higher education; reflective practice and well-being and health in communities. She is the co-author of Nina Held / Karen McCarthy (2017, forthcoming): “They like you to pretend to be something you are not”: An exploration of working with the intersections of gender, sexuality, ‘race’, religion and ‘refugeeness’, through the experience of Lesbian Immigration Support Group (LISG) members and volunteers, in Nayak, Suryia/ Robbins, Rachel (eds.) The Activism of Intersectionality in Social Work. London: Routledge. Also, forthcoming co-author with Janet Batsleer of On the Future of Youth Work with Young Women in Youth Work: Global Futures. Rotterdam: Sense Publications. (forthcoming)
NÚRIA SADURNÍ
Queer necropolitics and the Catalan law against LGBTphobia
The folding back of certain queer subjects into life and its effects is an issue which has been addressed by a myriad of scholars. From Lisa Duggan’s notion of homonormativity to more recent work on homonationalism building on Jasbir Puar’s work, many
analytical tools have been developed to interrogate how the supposed queer inclusion has taken place and which are the consequences of such a biopolitical movement.
Throughout Europe and North America, current debates on queer issues are moving towards the framework of hate crimes and hate speech, frequently engaging in necropolitical logics. Such movement is also gaining momentum in the Catalan queer arena, where a comprehensive law on LGBTIphobia was passed in 2014. The analysis of the aforementioned law, within the context of this broader trend, arises several questions that this paper aims to address: What kind of life does the Catalan law produce? What kind of life does it reinforce? What life does it create for queer people? In this movement, what changes and what remains? Which exclusions does it generate? And, finally, does it produce death, either deferred or directly?
Bio
Núria Sadurní is a lesbofeminist activist and a PhD student on social psychology at the University of Girona (Catalonia). In her PhD research she interrogates queer inclusions in Catalonia, particularly focusing in biopolitics, queer necropolitics and homonationalism.
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