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Article published In:
Queering borders: Language, sexuality and migration
Edited by David A.B. Murray
[Journal of Language and Sexuality 3:1] 2014
► pp. 6–27

To feel the truth

Discourse and emotion in Canadian sexual orientation refugee hearings

| York University, Toronto, Canada

In this paper I explore how adjudicators in the Canadian refugee determination system assess sexual orientation refugee claims. By focusing on discourse and terminology of questions utilized in the hearing (in which the refugee claimant answers questions posed by the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) Member), I will outline how these questions contain predetermined social knowledge and thus operate as a cultural formation through which particular arrangements of sexual and gendered practices and identities are privileged. However, documents and interviews with IRB staff reveal the presence of a ‘gut feeling’ or ‘sixth-sense’ in determining the credibility of a claimant’s sexual orientation. While some may argue that these feelings represent a level of sensitivity that humanizes the decision making process, I argue that they reveal adjudicators’ application of their own understandings and feelings about ‘authentic’ sexual identities and relationships derived from specific cultural, gendered, raced and classed experiences, which, in effect, re-inscribe a homonormative mode of gatekeeping that may have profound consequences for a claimant whose narrative and/or performance fails to stir the appropriate senses.

Keywords: refugee, sexuality, emotion, terminology, discourse
Published online: 10 March 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.3.1.02mur
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Cited by 3 other publications

Afzal, Ahmed
2014. “Being gay has been a curse for me”. Journal of Language and Sexuality 3:1 ► pp. 60 ff. DOI logo
Canut, Cécile & Mariem Guellouz
2018. Introduction. Langage et migration : état des lieux. Langage et société N° 165:3 ► pp. 9 ff. DOI logo
Chossière, Florent
2021. Refugeeness, Sexuality, and Gender: Spatialized Lived Experiences of Intersectionality by Queer Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Paris. Frontiers in Human Dynamics 3 DOI logo

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