Waiting in Transit: The Sexuality of (Im)Mobility and Iranian LGBTQ Refugees in Turkey 

Abstract:   This talk offers an ethnographic exploration of transnational queer asylum from the Middle East to the North America. Based on two years of ethnographic research in Turkey with Iranian LGBTQ refugees awaiting resettlement to the United States and Canada, I develop an understanding of migration that foregrounds experiences of waiting and immobility, rather than movement, in the contemporary context of closed borders. As North American countries have cut their refugee quotas and tightened their asylum policies since 2015, the prospects for Iranian LGBTQ refugee resettlement have grown increasingly dim. Even applicants who have completed necessary asylum procedures and are formally eligible for resettlement remain stranded in Turkey with insecure status for an undetermined period of time. Moving between asylum interviews, NGO offices, refugee protests, informal workplaces, and homes, this colloquium explores how North American countries’ tightening resettlement policies, combined with Turkey’s strict control of refugees’ mobility and labor, leave LGBTQ refugees vulnerable to multiple forms of violence. It also examines how LGBTQ refugees respond to violence and uncertainty by cultivating a queer ethics of love, care, support, and solidarity. They develop and uphold novel practices of self-making, kin-making, and community-making in spite of the ways in which the transnational asylum system pits them against one another in competition for access to limited rights and resources. 

Elif Sari is a PhD student in Anthropology at Cornell. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, borders, immigration, asylum, and humanitarianism in the Middle East. Her current research project explores the practices and processes of LGBTI asylum from the Middle East to the US and Canada via Turkey, as well as the lives and experiences of Middle Eastern queer refugees waiting in Turkey.

Email Liz Kirk at ek61@cornell.edu to register.