David A.B. Murray, professor of Anthropology and Sexuality Studies at York University, Toronto, Canada gives an open lecture during the conference "Migration and Discipline: Civic Fostering of Gender, Sexuality, and the Body".
David A.B. Murray
Professor of Anthropology and Sexuality Studies at York University, Toronto, Canada
David is the author numerous books and edited volumes including "Real Queer? Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), and “Living with HIV in ‘Post-Crisis’ Times: Beyond the Endgame” (Lexington Books, 2021).
How does the queer refugee both trouble and reinscribe discourses about citizenship and the nation-state? More generally, how are national borders and citizenship formations organized through and transformed by terminologies and discourses pertaining to the queer migrant? In my research examining the experiences of sexual orientation and gender identity expression (SOGIE) refugee claimants moving through the Canadian refugee determination apparatus, I observed the powerful impact of particular linguistic assemblages of gender, sexuality, race and class as they are applied to the assessment of SOGIE refugee claims. However, rather than view these assemblages as fixed constellations of socio-sexual terminologies that buttress particular nationalist identifications, in this paper I argue for a more flexible definition of homonationalism that recognizes the dynamism of state bureaucratic apparatuses in charge of regulating national borders as they continuously adapt to shifting nationalist sentiments of ruling governments, data produced from the surveillance and tracking of migrants, and new discourses about and definitions of queer migrants. This dynamism is often framed through an official narrative emphasizing the progressive justice of the nation-state, but I argue that what results is a merely a re-arrangement of gate-keeping mechanisms, with detrimental results for claimants who do not ‘fit’ these re-arrangements.