What Counts as Violence?

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the coercive power exacted by the frames of care offered by GBVAW (gender-based violence against women) as sexual humanitarianism in the international refugee regime. Centering the experiences of Iranian queer and trans asylum seekers trapped in the refugee borderland of Turkey, the chapter shows how they navigate the rigid norms and procedures that adjudicate both refugee and LGBTI recognition and eligibility for rights of asylum or citizenship. Queer refugee applicants must repeat essentialist notions of gender identity to qualify. Their narratives, their material conditions, and their complex subjectivities must be reduced to match the homonormative identity sanctioned by refugee law and reified by some diasporic queer organizations. The regulatory practices of the refugee regime trivialize the epistemic and material violence of the everyday, of the long term economic sanctions on Iran, and of the homophobic and Orientalist tropes of “forced surgeries” and “state torture” that define the worthiness of the Iranian trans refugee.