Jung, ‘Logics of Citizenship and Violence of Rights’, 2015

Mariska Jung, ‘Logics of Citizenship and Violence of Rights: The Queer Migrant Body and the Asylum System’, Birkbeck Law Review Volume 3(2) 305-335, December 2015

Abstract

Border and migration studies document how states produce migrant subjectivities via bio-political practices, which are plotted against the figure of the ‘undeserving’ migrant. However, there is little research on the politics of the recent but growing tendency in Western states to include the category of ‘LGBT’ in their asylum policies. Furthermore, there has been little attention to the role of activists in border regimes. Hence academia fails to fully grasp the violence of rightsbased migration politics and to understand the dispersed sexual politics of borders.

This article examines the relationship between LGBT emancipation, border enforcement and migration activism in the United Kingdom. It appears that asylum policies construct hierarchies of migrants, currently with the LGBT asylum seeker towards the top of the pecking order. Activists contest, but simultaneously perform, the sexual and territorial border. The save-ability of the queer migrant is constructed at the same time that immigration violence is conducted, through indefinite detention and the Detained Fast Track system. Law turns out to be a violent governmental technology when gender and sexuality rights are used to further close the border.