Singer, ‘”How much of a Lesbian Are you?”‘, 2021

Sarah Singer, ‘”How much of a Lesbian Are you?” Experiences of LGBT Asylum Seekers in Immigration Detention in the UK’, in Richard Mole (ed.), Queer Migration and Asylum in Europe, London: UCL Press, 2021, pp. 238-260

Abstract

This chapter explores the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) asylum seekers who have been subjected to immigration detention in the UK. While much research has focused on the legal barriers that immigration detainees experience (Costello 2015; De Bruycker & Tsourdi 2016; Wilsher 2011; Hailbronner 2007), on how detainees deal with the uncertainty that immigration detention presents and on the impact of detention on their physical and mental health (Bosworth 2014; Hasselberg 2016; Griffiths 2013; Turnbull 2016; Rotter 2016), little to date has focused specifically on detained LGBT asylum seekers as a discrete and particularly vulnerable group. That which does exist primarily concerns immigration detention in the USA (Zitsch 2015), particularly the treatment of transgender detainees (Anderson 2010; Resendiz 2018; Collier & Daniel 2019), or explores the question of the detention of LGBT migrants more broadly (Tabak & Levitan 2014). Research on LGBT(QI) asylum seekers has tended to focus on questions of ‘credibility’ in the asylum process and the difficulties such persons may have in establishing an asylum claim (Millbank 2009; Tobin 2012; Hathaway & Pobjoy 2012; Bennett 2014; Berg & Millbank 2009; LaViolette 2009; Wessels 2011; Murray 2014), rather than on experiences in and of detention. This chapter seeks to bridge the gap between these bodies of literature, drawing on interviews conducted with LGBT asylum seekers detained in immigration removal centres (IRCs) in a number of locations across the UK, to explore how they, as LGBT- identifying persons, experience immigration detention.