This talk focuses on the experiences Iranian LGBTQ refugees awaiting in Turkey for resettlement to a third country. Until recently, the transnational asylum system had considered Iranian LGBTQ refugees a ‘prioritized’ group whose case-assessment and resettlement were conducted on a faster track than other Middle Eastern refugees. However, as the United States and Canada have cut their refugee quotas and tightened their asylum policies since 2015, the prospects for Iranian LGBTQ refugee resettlement have grown increasingly dim. Even those refugees who have completed necessary asylum procedures and have been formally eligible for resettlement for years are still stranded in small Turkish towns with insecure legal status. My talk investigates this critical time period in which ‘temporary transit’ has turned into a condition of ‘indefinite waiting.’ I approach ‘indefinite waiting’ as a lens through which to analyze both the transnational configuration of queer asylum and refugees’ lived experiences in the current era of immigration retrenchment, growing xenophobia, and anti-Muslim racism. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in Turkey, I explore how the growing securitization of borders of the Global North have brought Iranian queer refugee resettlement to a halt, and how refugees have responded to these emerging structures of confinement, immobility and uncertainty.

This talk focuses on the emergence of Syrian LGBT refugees as the most recent “prioritized” refugee group within UNHCR’s resettlement scheme in Turkey. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Istanbul at the height of the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2014 – 2015, I explore the relationship between Syrian LGBT refugees and UNHCR as well as the resettlement countries’ migration and asylum policies. On the one hand, I explore how the UNHCR’s prioritization of Syrians has negatively affected the resettlement chances of other LGBT refugee groups—whose cases are now de-prioritized. On the other hand, I argue that although the ongoing war in Syria is what gives Syrian refugees a new kind of “priority,” Syrian LGBT refugees are simultaneously expected to produce escape stories and narratives of sexual injury that are completely detached from the ongoing war, and rather anchored in a “culture” of homo- and transphobia. After unpacking this contradiction and its multi-layered consequences for other LGBT refugee groups in Turkey, I offer some reflections on the need for and importance of more critical-political engagement with UNHCR and resettlement, which remain some of the most under-researched areas within queer migration/refugee studies.

The use of “true self” in western media coverage of queer Middle Eastern refugees is a contradictory, unattainable identity for queer Middle Eastern refugees. This “true self” suggests that queer Middle Eastern refugees are only able to live out their essential queer selves after recieving asylum and moving to the west. This narrative of true selfhood ignores the rupturing, transformative process of refugeehood, as well as the geographical-historical conceptions of identity, and relational, place-based making of self in which refugees become refugees. True selfhood, disguised as western freedom, serves as merely another normative script in which queers in the west must present their identities as legitimate to a heteronormative, cisnormative society that does not conceptualize of other formations of self. Here, the contradiction between true selfhood and queer Middle Eastern refugeehood becomes a site where the logic of political asylum regimes breaks down, and where other understandings of queer Middle Eastern refugee selfhood may start to emerge.