Queer Perspectives on Narrative Practices in Asylum Politics

This chapter explores the uses and abuses of narratives in asylum politics and practices and their political and ethical implications. The author discusses how Western hegemonic narratives and identity categories render women and queer asylum seekers vulnerable to intrusive questioning and deportation. In addition, the author explores the potential of nonviolent narrative practices as an ethical and compassionate way of encountering asylum narratives, arguing that narrative hermeneutics allows theorizing narratives in their complexity, analyzing both their oppressive and transformative power. By bringing together queer migration studies and narrative hermeneutics, the author analyzes the uses of narrative practices in asylum politics from two interrelated perspectives: seeing narratives as socially and culturally conditioned performative practices that enable one to identify and dismantle hegemonic asylum narratives, and seeing narratives as non-subsumptive practices that enable one to imagine nonviolent narrative practices for interpreting queer asylum narratives, in both research and asylum hearings.