The Affective Politics of Queer Migration: On Affective Ambivalence, Truth and Queerness

This thesis constitutes a novel and nuanced examination of the ‘affective politics of queer migration’, bringing together feminist, queer and anticolonial conceptualisations of affect with critical migration studies. It explores the affective structures of queer migration in Denmark by centring narratives of both queer asylum seekers and immigration officials, assessing and evaluating their cases. In combining qualitative interviews, fieldwork and documents, it seeks to ground an analysis of affect within the political present by unpacking some of the embedded social, cultural and historical norms contained within Danish spaces of queer migration. In principle, the legal framework enabling queer asylum seekers to obtain asylum in Denmark is established by the UN Refugee Convention and the Danish Aliens Act, Section 7 (1). This convention acknowledges sexual orientation and gender identity as valid reasons for persecution and as a basis for seeking asylum. The state’s assessment of queer asylum seekers’ ‘truth’ is twofold, whereby one aspect is about the ‘truth’ of sexual and/or gender identity, and the second is about the ‘truthfulness’ of asylum seekers’ fear of persecution due to their sexual and/or gender identity. Questions of ‘truth’ in queer asylum cases are assessed through feelings of desire and fear, thereby fundamentally intertwined with their affective lives. This thesis analyses how the affective politics of ‘truth’ affect both queer asylum seekers and immigration officers, and how the governance of queer migration is produced, maintained and resisted through affects. Thus, this thesis contributes new knowledge by analysing what affects do and how they shape subjects, positions and policies in queer imigration.

First, it explores how constructions of truth and credibility condition the politics of queer asylum claims, allowing some to be recognised while leading others to be deemed illegitimate for state protection. Here, I introduce a tension between ‘truthful’ requirements from the state and queer asylum seekers’ ambivalent affective evidence. I argue that the affective politics and governance of ‘truth’ are based on racial, sexual and gendered ontologies that (re)produce certain forms of queerness and fear as true.

Second, it analyses the necropolitical processes of queer migration, attending to the manner in which death and dying are affectively woven into the fabric of everyday life within the asylum seeking process. I argue that temporal and spatial liminalities affect queer asylum seekers in intensified, specific and intersectional ways. Furthermore, I highlight how queer asylum seekers hold on to life through affects of rage, anger and hope to insist on a queer future.

It further explores the affective traces of governance at work by analysing Danish
immigration officers’ experiences of fear, ‘epistemic anxiety’ and empathy in their efforts to uncover the ‘truth’ about queer identities. Situated within contemporary anti-immigration discourses and politics of fear surrounding asylum seekers in Denmark, I argue that affects also govern immigration officers, who are responsible for enforcing an affective governance on queer asylum seekers. In this sense, immigration officers are, too, affected by their roles,
decisions and their complex relationship with the state. Through affects of fear, anxiety and empathy, I also argue that there is a potential for transformation and ruptures within the regulation and assessment of queer migration. Finally, this thesis analyses how queer asylum seekers establish alternative networks of love and affective solidarity, despite encountering multiple forms of affective governance and necropolitical power. Here, I argue that love arises both as an affect and as an agent of resistance, functioning as a tool for survival and an impetus for introducing change. In tracing the affective productions of truth, death, fear and love in queer migration, the thesis makes a claim to understand the dominant affective asylum structures as social and historical forces that reproduce (homo)national, racial, sexual and gendered hierarchies. Moreover, it highlights the potential for new forms of affective resistance and ambivalence to emerge through the queer migration process. Overall, the work represents a novel empirical contribution to an understudied field in the Danish context