Dasgupta, ‘Sexual and Gender-based Asylum and the Queering of Global Space’, 2020

Sudeep Dasgupta, ‘Sexual and Gender-based Asylum and the Queering of Global Space: Reading Desire, Writing Identity and the Unconventionality of the Law’, in E. Cox, S. Durrant, D. Farrier, L. Stonebridge, & A. Woolley (Eds.), Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, pp. 86-102

Abstract

The politics of sexual asylum expands, and displaces the queer critique of the human subject and its purported sexual identity, while offering a queer reappraisal of the Humanities-based critique of sexual regulation (Foucault). The essay first analyzes the writing in of the asylum-seeker through law which produces a queer subject shuttling between the poles of normalization and critical destabilization. This dialectic of sexual normalization and deregulation Building on crucial work around the global traffic in women and the rights of child asylum-seekers (Bhabha), the essay argues that the politics of sexual asylum is a potential operator for rethinking sexual identity. Secondly, the queer figurations of the sexual subject in asylum cases are analyzed in relation to the anti-normative critiques of sexual identity offered by queer theory. The essay argues that the vantage point of contemporary globalization, in particular forced migration and asylum advocacy, provides a powerful supplement to queer theory’s critique of sexual normativity. The displacement of sexual identity from biology to performance, and from self-understanding to social perception in sexual asylum cases provide a far queerer and more interruptive reformulation of sexual identity than the “good homosexual” (Stychin) produced for example by laws governing same-sex marriage in the context of migration.