Camminga, ‘Where are all the Intersex Asylum Seekers?’, 2024

B. Camminga, ‘Where are all the Intersex Asylum Seekers? Active Absenting or the Citational Chain of an Idea’, Feminist Formations, vol. 36 no. 2, 2024, p. 189-202

Excerpt

The acronym LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex) or the term “queer” are commonly used to describe participants in what has loosely begun to be considered the field of queer migration studies. In recent years, there has been a growing push for this field to recognize the historical privileging of the voices and experiences of gay men (Spijkerboer and Jansen 2011) as somehow emblematic of these terms and the adverse impact this has had on understanding the challenges of asylum beyond cisgender men and sexuality. As a result, a growing body of scholarship has begun to address the particular needs and experiences of lesbians (Tschalaer 2021; Hucke 2022), bisexuals (Rehaag 2008) and transgender people (Camminga 2022b). However, despite calls from scholars and activists for further research (Nandi, Ritholtz, and Bradley 2022; Dawson and Gerber 2017), there remains a glaring absence of published scholarly work focused on the specific experiences of intersex individuals within asylum contexts. This knowledge gap is underscored by reports from various regions emphasizing the need for more information and training on intersex asylum needs (ORAM 2013). Despite the increasing visibility of intersex migrants and asylum seekers, as noted by B Camminga and John Marnell (2022), there remains a concerning lack of attention towards these issues. Indeed, to date, there is not a singular published scholarly article which takes intersex asylum seekers as its sole concern (Nematy, Namer, and Razum 2023).

Rather than attribute this to the low visibility of intersex asylum seekers, Thomas Spijkerboer and Sabine Jansen (2011) suggest the inverse: that it is this absence of focus that has precipitated the limited visibility of intersex asylum [End Page 189] seekers. Put another way, it is not that intersex people are not seeking asylum, but rather that the lack of attention and available information on the specificity of intersex asylum challenges has precipitated limited understanding, and thus, intersex asylum seekers remain marginalized in migration scholarship and research. In this paper, drawing on Amanda Lock Swarr’s (2023) Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine, in particular her theorization of citational chains, “references that build on each other to create truth claims despite fundamentally flawed foundations of the original works cited” (3), I intend to show how this has happened. Swarr explains that “chains can include bibliographical citations of publications or citations of ideas that become repeated norms” (3, emphasis added). In this paper, I offer a brief exploration of the citation of an idea, one that has been “repeated so often and circulated so widely that … [its] origins” and its impact have been “masked” (Swarr 2023, 3). This is the idea that the numbers of intersex asylum seekers are so few as to warrant almost no attention, investigation, or consideration. Framing this as an “active absenting,” it is my argument that this absenting or “low visibility” is not the result of the low numbers of intersex people, but rather the way in which intersex issues have been approached and framed in the core documents which extend The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to LGBTI people beginning with the Yogyakarta Principles (YPs).

This citational chain is made more curious when one considers the available scholarship and reporting on intersex asylum and the growing media visibility of individual intersex asylum seekers such as Zimbabwean refugee and activist Tatenda Ngwaru. Drawing on Ngwaru’s extensive digital media archive (Camminga 2022a), I illustrate how she, as an intersex asylum seeker, has experienced and responded to this absenting. Emerging from the same school of activism that Swarr outlines in her book, I show how Ngwaru’s “self-representations on social media and film … starkly contrast the anonymity” (2023, 19) and absenting that currently characterise intersex asylum narratives. In my work, I am very much interested in the use of digital media by those forced to flee the African continent due to homo/transphobic related persecution (Camminga 2022a; 2024a). In this writing, I take up Ngwaru’s narrative, showing how she is…