INDICADORES DE VIABILIDAD

Most of the academic focus on sexual orientation refugees has been on the laws that regulate them.80 This dissertation will take a rhetorical approach through a turn toward the institutional discourses surrounding these asylum cases and an analysis of the ways citizenship is discursively imagined for queer refugees. In order to assess the ways citizenship is imagined in the discourse surrounding sexual orientation asylum cases, my methodology relies on Robert Asen’s notion of public imagining as a “tool that may inform critical investigations of the ways in which included and excluded people appear in public spheres.”81 Asen argues that inclusion and exclusion in the public sphere occur not only through the vocalization and embodiment of a

80 _{United States and Canadian law journals have extensively discussed the legal aspects of sexual}

orientation-based persecution. Some articles to note include Alan G. Bennett, “The ‘Cure’ that Harms: Sexual Orientation-Based Asylum and the Changing Definition of Persecution,” Golden Gate

University Law Review 29 (1999): 279; Julia Blanche Meister, “Orientation-Based Persecution as Grounds for Refugee Status: Policy Implications and Recommendations,” Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, & Public Policy 9 (1995): 275; Venice Choi, “Living Discreetly: A Catch 22 in Refugee Status Determinations on the Basis of Sexual Orientation,” Brooklyn Journal of International Law, 36 (2010) 241. One notable exception to the claim that most of this attention stems from legal research is the work of Eithne Luibhéid whose book Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border discusses the history of the relationship between sexuality and immigration in the U.S. and offers specific insights on the ways performances of certain sexual identities are called for through the asylum process for sexual orientation refugees.

person or population, but also through the imagining of others.82 For Asen, such “representing is not a disinterested process, but one that implicates social judgments and relations of power.”83 Following Asen, I will look to the tension between what is made present in the news articles and official documents of support for queer refugees and what is left out – what is made positive and what is made negative. Through political imagining, the images and documents that surround queer asylum cases hold the potential to impact legislation, and they present an enduring legacy that shapes cultural understanding of LGBTI migrants and refugees as they seek citizenship in the United States.

Even when citizenship is granted, one is not guaranteed equal status among the citizenry. Robert Asen finds that the process of imagining often reveals important information about who is included or excluded within public spheres. By invoking “public sphere” here, I refer not to actual publics, but to the shared idea of the public as discussed by scholars like Jürgen Habermas and Michael Warner.84 Specifically, I turn to the concept of counterpublics as described by Warner as “an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation.”85 Although Warner addresses the need to create a literal space for queer counterpublics, the needs of LGBTI refugees move beyond the desire for a literal space and instead work toward literal access to citizen identity.

82 _{Asen, “Imagining,” 347}

83 _{Asen, “Imagining,” 353.}

84 _{Studies of the public sphere emerging from the work of Jürgen Habermas have had untold influence in}

the field of rhetoric, however, critiques of Habermas and public sphere theory in general note its neglect of gendered privilege and the struggles of subaltern populations. Studies of counterpublics have helped bring forth these issues in a way that allows discussion of the political (and of publics) while still acknowledging the masculinist power structures at play in the world. For example, Nancy Fraser suggests that Habermas’s conception of the public sphere is fundamentally “masculinist.” For more, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed., Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1994), 117.

In addition to Warner’s attention to counterpublics, his insight that imaginaries develop and circulate through the sharing of texts further augments Asen’s concept of imagining. For Warner, “the circulation of texts among strangers” enables a reflexive conception of identity; addressed as a “social entity” within a network of circulating discourse, it allows readers to imagine themselves a public of a particular sort.86 _{Warner’s emphasis on circulation is important} to my analysis because of the ways that individual news stories about refugees are printed, re- printed by other sources, or used as fodder for commentary on other web sites or as

representative anecdotes in NGO and U.S. government documents addressing asylum issues. The movement of this discourse and its framing and re-framing over time contribute to a particular image of citizenship in the United States. Tracing this helps account for what Asen refers to as the “multimodality” and multidirectionality of political imaginaries.87

From these conceptions of a public imaginary informed by theories of counterpublics and circulation, I work to understand how an act of public imagining can queer dominant notions of citizenship. Because of this, I supplement Asen’s iteration of imagining with a perspective that accounts for my cases’ embodiment (and legislation) of queer identities. Much of the queer theory work being done in the rhetorical discipline relies on Warner and particularly on his notion of queer counterpublics. However, Warner is only one piece of the queer rhetoric

puzzle.88 The term “queer” may seem to be interchangeable with other sexual-orientation terms

86 _{Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 11-12.}

87 _{Asen, “Imagining,” 357, 359.}

88 _{In addition to a reliance on Warner (and Eve Sedgwick), queer rhetorical theories have deep roots in the}

work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. Foucault’s notion of the fluidity of power and resistance, in combination with his writing on the socially constructed nature of sexual categories, offer rhetoricians a means of dealing with the relationship between power and sexuality. Butler relies on and critiques Foucault throughout her work, but in addition, she contributes the notion that there are always meanings already embedded in the language we use, that gender is performative, and that the performativity of gender is citational – it always refers to other performances of gender that we have knowingly or unknowingly witnessed. See: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction,

like “gay” and “lesbian,” but it differs because it brings with it a new consciousness regarding sexuality and gender norms. “Queer” serves an important role in the LGBT civil rights

movement. Terms like “gay” or “lesbian” function within (and/or are deployed within) dominant institutions, and queer theorists argue that they function to uphold seemingly stable categories of sexual orientation. Although their usage can help one to assimilate with the dominant social force, it cannot help to complicate or problematize those forces. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains, queer is “transitive – multiply transitive.” 89 Sedgwick uses “transitive” to emphasize the ways in which queer is not meant to exist only in opposition to something – it functions across spectrums and boundaries, and it is meant to be a disruptive and integrating force. For Sedgwick, and others following her path, queer provides a way to both rupture and maintain; it is an embodied, material both/and. Addressing the capacity of LGBTI asylees and refugees to queercitizenship means not merely to alter it, but to re-shape and re-imagine what it can be for this population and all other people existing under its umbrella. I am interested in the ways sexual orientation has traditionally precluded certain people from the material benefits of citizenship and how the discourse surrounding and produced by LGBTI asylees and refugees might complicate ideas of proper sexual and rhetorical citizenship.90 Attention to queer

trans., Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978); Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the

Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” GLQ: Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies 1, no. 1 (1993): 17-32; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, (New York: Routledge, 1997); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (New York: Routledge, 1990).

89 _{Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), xii.}

90 _{In her book addressing the intersection of sexual citizenship, the law, and popular culture, Brenda}

Cossman claims that citizenship “…is a process of becoming. It is about the process of becoming recognized subjects, about the practices of inclusion and membership.” While I wholeheartedly agree with this premise, my project departs from the remainder of her argument, which places sexual citizenship in a strict good citizenship/bad citizenship dialectic and focuses on the production of what she calls “bad or failed sexual citizens.” Cossman, Sexual Citizens, 2-3.

perspectivesallows for a critical reading of texts that embraces and engages the relationship between sexual orientation, gender identity, and the citizen status sought by LGBTI refugees.

The theories described above fit together in a way that will allow me to thoroughly and conscientiously address my diverse and sensitive texts. Discursive identifications and divisions are at play in the news stories about LGBTI refugees and the documents used to facilitate their trials and resettlement. Theories of counterpublics and queer identity performance combine to provide a framework for considering queer citizenship, refugee status, and the social imaginary. For Asen, drawing here from Sarte, the imagining is a process of “connecting consciousness to objects through mental images.”91 Visual and verbal representations of people or groups

contribute to the enduring understandings of these people or groups. That is, the discourse about citizenship in these cases and the actual images that become part of that discourse function to create a collective understanding of what citizenship itself means. The imagining of citizenship in these cases takes place through a variety of means – both visual and verbal; therefore, I analyze visual and verbal texts related to the process of sexual orientation asylum.

Although Asen’s concept of rhetorical imagining provides a rationale and framework for analyzing the discourses that shape cultural, and ultimately legal definitions of citizenship, he leaves it to subsequent scholars to establish a method for analysis. This is beneficial because it allows others to read for imagining in a variety of texts. However, it can present a challenge when attempting to fashion a methodology for investigating the process of public imagining. Specifically, although Asen puts rhetorical representation at the center of the process of public imagining, he does not explain how this process works, or provide a method for analyzing it. Fortunately, rhetorical scholarship suggests a variety of methods for analyzing the processes of rhetorical representation. In the chapter outline that follows, I explain how other theories that

complement this approach to rhetorical representation will be used to uncover the ways citizenship is imagined in each set of texts I analyze.