Sexulaity and Refugee Status: Narrative Construction of Sexual Minority Asylum Seekers in the United States

Since the 1990’s, sexual minority status has been recognized as a basis for refugee/asylum claims in certain countries. In the United States, as seen from the recent governmental guidelines for those specific cases, the so-called LGBT asylum is now drawing attention. This study attempts to analyze the issues of gays, lesbians, and transgenders who are seeking asylum in the U.S. from the perspective of narrative construction regarding to the dominant notion of sexuality in the host society appearing in legal procedures. Previous studies have shown that since the credibility and objectivity of those claims are legitimized within a US-centered notion of homosexuality, it marginalizes those individuals who fall outside of this paradigm. However, studies based mainly on legal documents have yet to develop an understanding of sexual minority asylum seekers’ experiences and of the degree to which they follow the dominant picture of sexuality.

To further understand this phenomenon, interview research was conducted in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. In order to define asylum seeking process as a system which connects the concept of sexuality to past events in the narrative construction, this study explores the experience and perspectives of the asylum seekers themselves. Although, in most cases applying for asylum is taken as an option they find as a choice to legalize their status, a comparison of two different areas tells us that the strategies and discourse of their advocates and caseworkers, access to local queer and ethnic communities, and practices of border crossing have impacts on how they form the narratives. For example, the asylum seekers in New York City tend to use human rights discourse while those in the San Francisco Bay Area do not. Instead, a common practice of multiple border crossing characterizes the latter as an actor within the asylum-migration nexus.