so I guess I'm not going to give any
introduction I just leave it in your own
all right
thank you kamran Jaan, can you hear
me? yes thank you so much for having me
to be part of your event I'm very
much looking forward to see what comes out of it
there's no need for introduction I am sima shakhsari, I teach at the University of Minnesota
in department of gender and sexual history
My current research is on Iranian
queer and trans refugees in Turkey and
the politics of life and death and my 
paper that I'm going to read from today
is part of that project and and it comes
out of basically the ethnographic
research that I've done among Iranian
queer and trans refugees in Turkey and
it's an ongoing project I will be think
of some more ethnographic work in the US and
Canada among refugees who have been
resettled in the US and Canada so if
that let me just go ahead and read from
the paper and I will be open to
hear your comments and questions at the
end. "When we are called upon to defend
When we are called upon to defend refugees in the face of xenophobia, securitization, increased militarization
and wars that compel people to move across or within borders of the nation states
to seek refuge, we resort, not at all surprisingly, to sympathy and narratives
of refugee vulnerability. At the core, it is the subtracted human of refugee rights
and the liberal juxtaposition of autological subject (of freedom) and the genealogical
subject (of constraint)  that move us, the sympathizers, with refugee suffering.
There is a story that by now is widely known in Iranian queer circles in diaspora. The story
of a trans woman named Sayeh (or Atrian) who killed herself in Toronto in 2008.
During her life time, Sayeh was the subject of several documentary films
about what is depicted to be the horrible living condition of transgender people in Iran. Screened at
international film festivals, distributed through YouTube, or
broadcast on diasporic television programs, most of these films juxtapose
a repressed life in Iran to a free life in North America and Europe.
The suffering of working-class Iranian trans women, who are ostracized by their families
and subjected to social discrimination, is showcased, rendering it visible to the mostly non-Iranian audience.
Sayeh’s statement ‘I know that I am’ became the
title of an award-winning Canadian
documentary film that represents trans
Iranians as victims of the fundamental
state, in need of rescue by the ‘free world’.
The film repeats a narrative that Anne-Marie Fortier has aptly called ‘queer homecoming’,
the familiar story of queer flight from the home of oppression to seek refuge in
the home of freedom. While transgender Iranians are constructed as powerless
victims, the white Canadian immigration attorney in this film is depicted
as a saint-like figure in a slow-motion caption, where her image is juxtaposed to subtitled
lyrics that interpellate her as ‘a savior angel’. Not surprisingly, the
image of a cleric is accompanied with lyrics that construct him as the unsympathetic enemy.
it is interesting
because literally.. basically..
queers opens their hands and in a slow
motion
is interpreted as  saviour angel
and clearly whose image is juxtaposed to basically
"here, nobody hears my
voice"  is Hojjat-ol-Islam
karimininia whose dissertation was basically upon
making so-called sex reassignment surgeries
sanctioned by Islam so he's
known among some people as a trans rights activist in Iran
While in these films, Sayeh’s life was represented as an example
of the horrific situation of trans people in Iran, her story in Canada was never
publicized in queer or mainstream media. Neither did her story of death in Canada
make it to any documentary films. It was as if her suicide disrupted the usual narrative of
refugee flight and rescue, pointing to the failure of the promise of freedom in a
cosmopolitan gay destination. It took 5 years for her death to be mentioned in
another documentary, only to become a spectacle of suffering in Iran again.
it was titled "out of Iran" it was in 2015 when it shot. It was this silence around
Sayeh’s death that compelled me to ask which lives are representable
and which deaths are unspoken. Which queers are folded into life and which ones
are left to die. My ethnographic research about necropolitical practices of refugee
regimes in Turkey, where Iranian queer and trans refugees wait for the UNHCR
to verify the truth of their refugee claims, is as much about death as it is about life.
By telling stories otherwise, I hope to draw attention to the lack of proper
healthcare, mental health services, and economic resources under the protection
of rights in refugee destinations. These stories disrupt the usual narrative of leaving
the home of oppression to arrive in new homes where freedom and prosperity
seemingly about. Of course as Kamran has
mentioned this in their project:
Sayeh was not the only one who committed suicide in Turkey, several other queer
and trans refugee applicants or refugees
have lost their lives whether it is
because they committed suicide because
of lack of health care and that
continues to be the case.. What happens in Turkey, the in-between zone that
demarcates Europe and its Asian underdog, the ambivalent space of rightlessness and
rightfulness where refugee claims are processed and refugee applicants reside
temporarily, is haunted by the ghostly presence of refugees that maintain the
“two’s” of rights. “Oppression and freedom,” “homophobia and gay rights,”
“backwardness and progress”, and “rightlessness and rightfulness” are maintained
through the figure of the transgender and queer refugee who stands between life and death,
seemingly moving in the progressive time of rights towards the future time and space of freedom
freedom in the “first world,” where the forward-looking and right-seeking desiring bodies are fixed
into timeless and immutable identities that legitimate their claims for refuge.
The geographical in-between-ness of Turkey,
where non-European refugee applicants reside and are managed by refugee rights regimes, maintains the
the boundaries that separate the “east” from the “west.” Paradoxically, becoming
European in an ambivalent future, a desire that informs the immigration and
human rights policies of the Turkish state and its compliance with the disciplinary
measures of the European Union does not
render Turkey
a safe haven for transgender and queer people. And even after a lengthy and
exhausting period of waiting in transition in Turkey, the promise of
rights and freedom in teleological narratives of refugee discourse are not quite achievable
for queer and trans refugees who arrive in the “third country of asylum” , which is more often North America or Europe.
The story, of course, is not that different for racialized
queer and trans people in final refugee destinations such as the United States
Yet, it would be unimaginable for the UNHCR to grant refugee
status for example to black Trans women and
citizens of the United States or also
targeted by violent and numerous murders
in the US and according to the
definition of refugee, the state fails to
protect its citizens
and yet yes when we are is unlikely to
recognize people of colour and women of
color particularly for a trans woman of
color as refugees. The act of remembering
and mourning queer and trans death may disrupt the erasure of bodies that do not
matter in the heteronormative division of lives
into valued versus disposable ones. However, living with specters of the past
is not just to live with the memory of the dead, but with the ghostly presence of living
refugees who haunt the refugee regime, without being organized into the realm
of documentation.  To conjure the specter of the refugee then compels one to
narrate how conditions of queer and trans refugee life in Turkey or the third
country of asylum engender a tempo of rights that lead to slow death in the
the in-between zone of, as Laurent Berlant puts is, “ongoingness, getting by, and living on,
where the structural inequalities are dispersed, the pacing of their experience intermittent,
often in phenomena not prone to capture by
a consciousness organized by archives of memorable impact.” 
To that end, in this
talk, I focus on temporality in the refugee rights discourses and practices, and explore
the way that refugee rights as a temporally and spatially contingent concept normalizes
refugee subjects while managing the lives and deaths of different populations. I argue
that temporality is deployed in two distinct, yet related ways in the refugee
rights discourses: First, the progressive movement of time in teleological
narratives of freedom is contingent on the timelessness and immutability of
queer/trans refugee’s identity. Second, the progressive time of rights comes
to a halt in the in-between zone of “temporary refuge” in processing zones,
where refugees live a slow death in the sluggish tempo of rights. And lastly, the
paradox of refugee rights, wherein refugees move in a linear
progressive time while their sexual identities and their rights come to a halt,
, is connected to the spatial designation of rights and the
geopolitical production and reception of refugees...[excuse me]... so let me tell you a little
about the refugee process of refugee
admission and recognition process
according to the UNHCR between 2011 and
2017 Turkey received over  387,000
non-Syrian asylum applications, mostly from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran.
Turkey extends protection under the
1951 United Nations Convention relating
to the Status of Refugees only to persons originating in Europe. However,
the Turkish government allows non-European asylum seekers to remain in
Turkey temporarily while their refugee recognition and resettlement cases are
pending with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Most non-Syrian refugee applicants in
Turkey are resettled in a third country of asylum such as Canada, the United States,
Australia and sometimes European
countries. The significance search in the
number of non-Syrian asylum applications
in Turkey and recent years — in comparison to
to 77,000 applications received between 1995
is mainly due to sectarian violence in Iraq and the economic
sanctions on Iran. The 2009 tightening of the economic sanctions on Iran has
affected many working-class Iranians citizens and 2.5 million Afghan refugees
who have resided in Iran for decades.
tightening of sanctions in 2009 and
again... you know the way that
Trump administration has reinstated
those sanctions the Iranian state is not
as generous...of course... especially to people who are
in the margins of the society: for
example Trans people
(but for queer people particularly) but
trans people who used to get subsidies
for their surgeries basically lost a
significant amount of those
subsidies and that is the main reason
for many trans refugees to come to turkey
because basically they often say that
they had no future in Iran
it is exactly because of the sanctions that
many people were forced to leave,
including Afghan[instani] refugees are also
targeted or affected mostly by the
sanctions, economic sanctions in Iran. So
a lot of people are actually economic
refugees and the UNHCR knows that there
is no category that recognized economic
refugees they increased number of asylum
applications has resulted in a backlog
of pending cases in the UNHCR is in
Turkey the significantly lengthening
the bureaucratic process. Upon registration with the UNHCR, the applicants are assigned to
small satellite cities where they are registered by the Turkish Police and are
required to stay during the time they are interviewed by the UNHCR and
the embassy of the country of asylum. If approved as refugees, they are allowed to
apply for resettlement to a third country of asylum. Due to the case backlog,
registration and assignment to small satellite towns by the UNHCR’s partner
NGO (ASAM), interview with the Turkish
government’s immigration office, interviews with the UNHCR for refugee
status determination, and interviews with the third country of asylum take several
years. During this long waiting period, asylum seekers who often cannot work
legally, are required to pay for their own housing and living expenses. While in
While in the recent years the Turkish government has changed its policies to provide basic
medical services to refugee applicants, these services
are often difficult to access and do not respond to needs such as hormone
replacement therapy, mental health services, and costly medical procedures.
More recently, the Muslim ban in the US has made resettlement for Iranian asylum
applicants even harder. so people can't even come to the US. So even the people who
had their ticket in hand, they had gone
through years of interviews with UNHCR with
, with US embassy,  doing their medical
exam and so on and so forth and finally
had gotten their exit permit from the
Turkish state, their flight were basically cancelled.
because of the Muslim ban, they couldn't come here.
Canada's same thing because of the
number of Syrian refugees, that the
Canadian government admitted, of refugees
were not admitted for a long time in Canada.
The harsh living conditions for
many queer and trans refugees and the
long and uncertain waiting period it has
access to basic right resulted in
several suicide and health related
deaths among queer and trans refugees as
I said earlier
ironically it is under the protection of
Rights that asylum seekers are stripped
up rights and in the in-between zones as
I mentioned refugee applicants are not
allowed to work in Turkey but some find
so-called illegal work, for those
who cannot work and live and have to
live under savings from Iran, the dropped value of the Iranian currency due to
the sanctions makes life unaffordable
for many refugee applicants in Turkey as
it is the case in a bit undocumented
people in most parts of the world, refugees who
work "under the table" are often
exploited by their employers who
received low wages than most citizens.
Most available jobs for refugee men involved
operating heavy machinery or
construction work, so this means that
for trans men, many of whom have smaller
bodies and assessment, that work is very
difficult and a couple of trans men whom
I interviewed in Denizli for
example where talking both how they work on this construction site, where
there were no bathrooms, no toilets, most workers basically would urinate on
the site but trans men have walk to Macdonalds
3 or 4 blocks away and that in a sense also
kind of outs them as trans men and make
them vulnerable to violence. One of the
trans men who basically did not have the
money to have top surgery in Iran
but just enough for his mastectomy, he had to wipe his chest tightly during the work
and he had sort of really bad case of skin
rash. So the situation of work is very
difficult, for several cases of sexual abuse 
at work as well. and as I said think of
people are not getting their wages, the
situation for trans women is
often even more difficult, there were several Trans women that I interviewed while
I was in Turkey, who were subjected to
sexual assault and they would not
basically report it to the police, because whatever is their cases, they would be the ones who
will be blamed for it. Also many refugees do not seek medical
and mental health risk with UNHCR
referral because of the reporting
requirements.Immediately after UN-referred medical visits, refugee’s medical
report is submitted to the UNHCR and subsequently to the “third country of asylum”.
This often prolongs refugees’ resettlement processes, as the third
countries of asylum expect refugees with health issues to receive a
“reasonable” number of treatment sessions before they are admitted. A UNHCR
staff member told me that many Iranian queer and trans refugees suffer
from mental health issues and depression because of the trauma that they have
suffered in Iran. The UNHCR randomly orders medical and psychological evaluation
by “experts” for some queer and trans refugee applicants to verify their claims.
While queer and trans refugees are pathologized as those suffering from
depression because of an assumed repressed sexuality (which can be
set free upon arrival in the third country of asylum) the conditions of refugee life
(both in Turkey and the “third country of asylum”) which might lead to depression,
suicide, and death from lack of healthcare and social services are often erased in the
refugee discourse. Frustrated with waiting for so long for his
case to be processed, Ali, a gay man in Nevsehir, told me,  “I am not depressed
because I am gay. I am depressed because I have been waiting for so long without
any support. My interview is not for another six months."  That was
after two years of having waited. "and I
don't even know if I will pass.
Nobody cares about how I am going to make it here. I would be happier if I was dead.”
The UNHCR’s insistence on unraveling the “truth” of
one’s identity may, in fact, be the reason for some applicants to fabricate stories,
in order to “pass” the test of authenticity. Pejman, an Iranian gay man who has
“passed” the UNHCR refugee test, told me, “I left because I
was fed up with the situation in Iran. I knew that you could become a refugee for
being gay. Many of my friends had left. I didn’t have problems with the state
for being gay. So, I made up a story in my interview, just to make sure that the UN
would not reject me. But it doesn’t mean that I didn’t have a good reason to leave. In fact,
the way that this [the economic situation in Iran] is going, all 70 million Iranians
have legitimate cases to become refugees!”
This is of course not to say that queer
Iranian refugees, or refugee applicants lie. Or the situation for queer and trans folks in Iran is
glorious. but I'm trying to say here is
that the refugee regimes produces limited
categories of refugees and queer people who fit their stories into these available
categories in order to pass these
interviews. the UNHCR in Turkey processes
the LGBTI cases relatively faster (after Bahaii refugee cases) which is a political category
with a low rejection rate. This has given asylum based on sexual
orientation the “golden case” reputation, while at the same time making these
cases prone to allegations of fraud. Although the UNHCR staff members I
interviewed acknowledge that “fake cases” are rare,
according to queer and trans refugees, some interviewers cross-examine refugee
applicants, insinuating that they are lying about their sexuality.
The UNHCR evaluates LGBTI claims based on the “truth” of applicants’
sexual identity. The purpose of the main interview is to decide whether one is
is really “gay”, “lesbian”, “trans”, or “bisexual”. In order to test the
truthfulness of one’s claim, the UNHCR assesses the consistency of the applicant’s story, the
the alignment with the “country profile” (the accumulated
knowledge about human rights violations in the applicant’s home country), and the
authenticity of one’s sexual identity. While the UNHCR officers are no longer
supposed to ask intrusive questions, the “right questions” are about an applicant’s
personal life history and childhood, when the applicant started to “feel different,”
he applicant’s family reaction, and the applicant’s experiences with the police
and authorities in Iran. The assumptions of inherent homosexuality underlie the
questions about childhood memories. 
Ali, a gay man who I told you about, in Nevsehir
who had been waiting for couple of years to hear about the result of his interview
was worried that his reluctance in remembering his childhood memories might
might have given the interviewer the impression that he was not gay, He said:
“How am I supposed to know how I felt about my sexuality as a child? Does
everyone know from the time they’re born that they are gay? Well, I didn’t
and I still don’t know how I felt as a child.”   UNHCR is the only
entity that prescribes
essentialized LGBTQ identities. NGOs and
refugee applicants themselves participate in this process, thus keeping
intact the normative notions of gender, sexuality, and desire. For example, the
Organization for Refuge and Migration (ORAM), an advocacy group that
that has trained the UNHCR officers about homophobia
and transphobia, relies on the UNHCR’s interpretation of  co called“membership
in a particular social group."Membership in a  particular social group is interpreted by the UNHCR
as either sharing a characteristic that is and I quote:
“immutable or so fundamental to human dignity that [one] should not be compelled to forsake it”,
or “a characteristic which makes a group cognizable or sets it apart
from society at large. The characteristic will often be one which
is innate, unchangeable, or which is otherwise fundamental to identity,
conscience, or the exercise of one’s human rights”. this is according to "Unsafe Haven"
which is basically based on the
definition by ORAM for the UNHCR.
ORAM explains that gay men have the immutable characteristic of being sexually or emotionally
attracted to men, and lesbians to women. Transsexual individuals’ gender identity,
rather than their sexual orientation, ORAM explains, is viewed as immutable and
fundamental to the person’s identity. The assumptions of refugee’s “immutability”
in the essentialist juridical discourses of asylum produce the refugee
as one with a fixed, timeless, and universally homogenous identity. It is inevitable that
queer refugee applicants repeat essentialist notions of identity in order
to fit the “immutability of character”, the criterion that qualifies gays, lesbians, and
trans people as refugees. Applicants’ narratives, their material conditions, and
their multiple and complex subjectivities are reduced to rational and
linear definitions in order to match the acceptable immutable identity, defined and
sanctioned by the refugee law, and reified by some diasporic queer organizations
that coach queer refugees in proper ways to be “degarbaash” (queer). Some of these
organizations produce material to
educate refugees on what constitutes authentic queerness (based on of course Eurocentric
notions of identity) and what counts as an egalitarian and healthy
queer relationship. They go as far as sending “verification” letters to the UNHCR to
validate or refute an applicant’s claim to queerness. Perpetuating and advocating
homonormativity, these organization often consider
sexuality in Iran to be backward, repressed,
Refugees also participate in the regulations of
sexuality, accusing those who do not fit the normative sexual and class
conventions of fraud. Of course, the nature of the refugee
rights process that “tests” refugees in order to separate the
“deserving” from the “undeserving” and the limited number of refugee resettlements
lead to this sense of mistrust and competition. At times, refugees send
letters to the UNHCR to report what they consider to be a “case taghalobi” (fraudulent case)
because they believe that fake claims jeopardize their chances of
passing, and exploit their right to be granted a refugee status. this is also
a very class concept. For example one of the refugees whom I interview was not just a
very "hip" or "butch". there were all these
rumours about him, having presented a fake
case but it was a different concept of
what it means to be queer. Conversations
over legitimate and illegitimate queerness highlight the way that
particular sexual identities are produced and regulated according
to normative notions of race, class, and gender, in a nexus that includes
UNHCR, queer NGOs, queer refugees, and states. These are not the only conventions that queer
refugee applicants have to repeat convincingly and without contradictions in multiple
interviews. In order to present a successful and legitimate claim to
asylum officers, applicants often repeat stories that inevitably demonize the
“home-country,” thus reproducing the Third World backwardness and
barbarism vs. First World freedom narratives.        Sherene Razack had
made a similar argument in discussing
the case of refugees in Canada.
Linear progression from the past to future is integral to the recognition of LGBT
refugee identities with immutable characteristics that, paradoxically, are expected
to move forward in the tempo of progress. 
there's a paradox here on the one hand
identities are fixed in time, they are
immutable and the other hand there is
this kind of progress
from backwardness to freedom
The articulation of difference between self and other in the refugee rights
discourse works to erase difference (thus universalizing sexual identities) while
emphasizing difference (third world versus first world). The fixity of the
universal notion of refugee and its simultaneous temporal and spatial
contingency give way to an aporia where the particular and the universal have to be
reconciled through normalization. What remains constant is the fixed universal sexual
identity of the refugee, whose authenticity is measured against the
universal normative sexual categories.
So far, I have discussed that the progressive time
of refugee rights rely on the fixity of refugee’s identity and the dead time in
the processing zones. Let me turn now to the inconsistency of the value of life
and the disposability of queer and trans refugees in temporal terms. As Elizabeth Freeman argues,
the chronopolitics of development 
extends beyond local conﬂicts to the management of entire
populations: both the state and the market produce biopolitical status relations
not only through borders, the establishment of private and public zones, and other
strategies of spatial containment, but also and crucially through temporal mechanisms.
Some groups have their needs and freedoms deferred or snatched away,
and some don’t. Freeman’s notion of chronopolitics is
quite useful in thinking about the refugee discourse. The recognition of one
as a refugee who deserves protection and rights changes according to the temporal l
expansion and restriction of rights. Insofar as the time and space of rights
are in tandem with the geopolitical clock and the interests of the international
human rights regimes, the “right refugee” passes the test of recognition. The
double movement of spatial difference and temporal deference of rights bring
the abstract notion of rights into crisis. For Afghan refugees who were
once recognized as deserving the “protection” of rights, have changed
they are now denied recognition as they have became the excess of the rights
humanitarian subject and as time of rises
other stories. The UNHCR has stopped (these are going on
for several years now) They have stopped
processing refugee cases altogether
because the assumption is that: [..] is liberated and you can go back home
now and that is the concern the case
like as I said most certain Afghan[instani] refugees
they are the ones who are actually coming
from Iran
because of the sanctions, because
their lives are no longer livable
because of the economic situation so
they need to look to a third country
of asylum to start a better life.
There is a vast difference between Afghan, Iranian, Iraqi
or Syrian refugees and asylum seekers in Turkey. This is not to point to
the obvious difference in nationality, but the temporal and spatial constitution of
refugee categories in the international human rights regimes. Granted that the US
is a major contributor to UNHCR’s programs, it is likely that the
decisions on refugee recognition are contingent on the relationship between
the “country of origin” and the United States at any given time. Just the
way that the recognition of one as a refugee who deserves rights is contingent
sometime. as afghan [refugees]  were considered to be legitimate refugees at some point and
they are no longer considered to be legitimate refugees the location of violation is
a determinant in refugee recognition decisions. The same violation in the
territory of the liberating state may be dismissed as a “crime” committed by
one individual against another (for example, cause I mentioned, transgender murders and anti-refugee
violence in North America and Europe), it
seems individual price.
they are not seen as indicators of
the “violation of human rights” according to indices that divide the
states into violators and protectors of rights. In practice, the 1951
Refugee Convention and the UNHCR definition of a refugee as
omeone who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted
for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group
or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is
unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to
avail himself of the protection of that country,” does not apply to
queer and transgender refugees (or citizens) who are subjected to police violence, economic violence,
and racism in the U.S. or Canada.
The spatial designation of rights is
further complicated in Turkey as an in-between processing zone, where the
binaries of West/East, freedom/oppression, civilized/backward come to
an uneasy tension. In order to prevent “illegal” entrance of refugee applicants to Europe, most Iranian queer
and transgender refugee applicants and
most refugees from Iran, Iraq, Syria for
refugee applicants in general are
assigned are to Denizli, Kayseri,
Eskisehir, Nevsehir, and other small towns that are far from cosmopolitan centers or
in Turkey, so they are also far from major ports near Europe. A UNHCR officer
told me that the Turkish government sends queer and transgender refugees
refugees to conservative cities in order to expose the local population to queers
in order to “open their minds”. Considering Turkey’s pending case with the European
Union, where being gay-friendly marks progress, this strategy is a normalizing move
to regulate and manage both the local population and the queer and trans
refugees. Queer and trans refugees become the guinea pigs of civilizational
projects that measure progress according to neoliberal tolerance for queerness
in a desire for proximity to European-ness. The placement of queer and trans refugees in
conservative cities (paradoxical to claims of protection of rights of
queer refugees) thus serves to prevent queers from crossing lines of public “indecency” and
behaving “normal” in order to avoid tensions in conservative towns, to
train the “homophobic locals” in the regions of Turkey that are less “European”
in being “gay-friendly” by exposing them to foreign queers, and to keep
the boundaries of Europe from the dangers of non-European refugee influx
through Turkish borders.  So.. almost done..
The everyday lives of refugee applicants
who are stalled in the time warp of rights disrupt the linear movement of the
progressive time of rights, pointing to disruptions, dead time, and life-as-death
that many queer and trans refugees experience in the process of recognition and
resettlement. The arbitrary and discretionary nature of recognition and
resettlement of refugees brings into crisis the contradictory claims of
protection of refugee rights, necessitating an analytical shift that
departs from the teleological narrative of moving from the “home of oppression”
to the “home of freedom”; a narrative that erases the contradictions of rights and its
violence. The violence of rights lies not solely in the everyday
experience of rightlessness in the cloak of rights, but in the erasure of the refugee
specter whose presence is absent in the accounts that emphasize oppression in
so called the “sending country” and freedom and opportunities in the so called
“receiving country.” The harmonious flow of refugee rescue is disrupted
when rightfulness and rightlessness come together in a temporal standstill
and where the “protection” of trans and queer refugees under the rhetoric of
rights is tied to the management of life and death of different populations.
Elsewhere, I have named the politics of the unstable life, which is
simultaneously imbued with and stripped of liberal
universal rights, the politics of rightful killing.
Arguing that neither biopolitics nor necropolitics may be sufficient to analyze the global division of
populations into those whose lives are
worth saving and those whose lives are
deemed disposable, I suggest the politics of rightful killing as a form of power
in the contemporary political situation, wherein those whose
rights and protection are used to legitimize war are sanctioned to death and
therefore live a pending death precisely because of those rights. Within
the context of refugee rights, the politics of rightful killing operates
through a suspension of time and fixing of sexual identities in the telos of
progress, wherein the past of oppression “there” is juxtaposed against the future
of freedom “here” through the erasure of the figure of refugee-in-transition
who lives a slow death in the name of rights. Shifting the analysis towards
multiple temporalities, as Jasper Puar has suggested, may open up
possibilities for reconciling the inevitable position of living in the
time of rights. Situating the abstract configurations of
citizen, refugee, and rights within their temporal and spatial production and
regulation, expands the scope of analysis beyond the binary formations
of abstract rights of citizenship (and lack thereof, for an abstract figure of
refugee) and draws attention to the management of different populations/multitudes
in changing temporal framings that are not predictable and do not follow a
teleological logic of rights. At the end, let me say that I am well aware that to
to recount stories of queer and transgender suffering under “the protection”
of human rights regimes poses a paradoxical dilemma, where narration of
misery becomes the condition of possibility of both refugee claims and critical
analyses of refugee rights discourses and practices. On one hand, refugees’
claim to authenticity is contingent on the selective confessions of suffering
(I am persecuted therefore I need protection). On the other hand, stories of
suffering sustain the hermeneutics of miseration that reify
civilizational discourses of rescue and maintain binaries of freedom and
oppression. By miseration I mean the affective politics and the political
economy of production and deployment of misery in the refugee discourse. What is
notable in its etymology of the term 'co-miseration' is the fact that
miseration is not a word on itself, but becomes a word as commiseration.
The “co,” or its older form “com,” in “commiseration” literally makes it into an
act that requires another: one who does the pitying. The “Co” in commiseration
invokes both sameness through an affective register (I feel for you), and
difference through distancing (I feel bad for you because
you're not me but differently who in
miseration aligns the dynamics of power
and the conditions of production of
misery who is focused on elements of
altruism selflessness and charity.The moral superiority of  the one who commiserates
is contingent on the embodiment of the miserable
refugee who deserves feelings of sorrow and compassion. Charity in the form of
refugee protection (whether it is volunteerism, donations, or campaigns
by the human rights regimes, diasporic queer orgs, or Christian and queer
organizations that sponsor refugees) gives ethical superiority to the one who
commiserates by distracting from fundamental inequalities that produce
refugees and misery in the first place. As a form of political “branding” (to
borrow from Patricia Clough), refugee incites the “affective experience of freedom one has
not had yet, but expects in future activation and repetition.” Branding the
refugee as a charitable subjects with a miserable past and a promising future
that “we in the first world” seemingly enjoy; a future of freedom with which we gift
the refugee with elides the role of the human security state, NGOs,
and the neo-colonial and neoliberal technologies of subjectivation that
produce refugees and make their lives disposable in the first place.
Misery moves emotively, haptically, and corporeally. Accounts of
refugee suffering move some in first world locations to form, through refugee
sponsorship applicant bonds that are at
times celebrated as queer kinship and conviviality.
These affective moves through commiseration are predicated
upon the imagination of a shared queer identity in the teleology of progress
(we are family), where the remembrance of a traumatic and miserable past of
“no future” is the condition of possibility of the present and a promise of a utopian future.
Misery moves. It moves the benevolent and exceptional agents of
humanitarianism to save the refugee. And it moves the refugee across borders that
criminalize some bodies and fold others into life. Recognition is the criterion
of moving and being moved. To be recognized is to make oneself visible as the spectacle of misery.
To be recognized by the human rights regimes, the transitory state
of refuge, and the third country of asylum as queer, as transgender, as refugee, rely on
temporally fixed notions of sexual identity that only become intelligible
within a double move of distancing (from a miserable past) and proximity (to a future of freedom).
The dilemma of destabilizing narratives of refugee rescue
lies in the fact that the lines of refugee advocacy and ethnographic
fieldwork are often. The difficulty presents itself when one is faced with the fact that in order to
advocate on behalf of refugees, one needs
to repeat the rescue narratives, 
or at least not critique/refute them
so that refugee cases are not jeopardized. Could it be that, as
long as refugee regimes operate within the framework of rights,
victimhood remains an inevitable strategic element of refugee advocacy and
scholarship? This is a dilemma that points to an impossibility in a time
when refugee regimes fold security, humanitarianism, freedom, corporeal suffering,
market logic, and geopolitics into a global assemblage that moves bodies in and out
of life and death.
Thank you.
(applause)
Thank you so much for your input. One question is  about this identity, this misery which
becomes part of the identity of the queer refugees because you repeatedly have to
just speak about this miserable
situation so how do how do we deal with it?
even not necessarily as a refugee but
as a person, who may standing by [as queer activist] or
supporting them ? that's good question and that's whatI was trying to address at that notice
the fact that as long as we
operate within the framework of Rights
right the person's rights and human rights
are contingent on this spectacles of
misery and suffering so one basically
has to recount stories of suffering in
order to legitimate or legitimize their
case as an authentic refugee so I
don't have a solution you asked for a
solution I think the solution would be
to think creatively outside the
framework of Rights because as I said
you know for several reasons one being
that your political ramifications
because of the way that's basic with the
question of Rights doesn't do anything
to address the inequalities and
structures that produce misery and
suffering and give roles to refugees it
doesn't do anything to undo that yes it's
it only reproduce that. So like I said
I don't have a solution but the only way
that I can think we can move
beyond this, is to step back and see
whether Rights is the solution or the
framework.
anyone has any question? is the text that you read, is it published somewhere, which we have access to?
yes, most of them are publishing in the journal of sexualities. and actually it's a very ethnographical
descriptive piece that I wrote after
coming back from doing filed work in Turkey so
it has part of it called "queer time of death"
in journal of sexualities. the other parts
that I integrated into this paper topics
of rightful killing is actually in my
forth coming book that is come in 2019
and that is about the Iranian population
in general and not just queer and trans
refugees. but the part about misery
will publish hopefully by next year in
glq but each speech in this talk is in a
different publication but the journal of
sexualities is the one that has basically
the bulk of ethnographic work and I
think Kamran you have probably read
that one - thank you so much for your
time and thank you for having me.
