[Postponed] Queer Asylum in Germany: Between Queer Liberalisms and Colonial Sexualities
UPDATE: THIS EVENT IS POSTPONED TO FALL 2020. DATE TO BE ANNOUNCED.
In 2011, an EU directive made prosecution based on sexual orientation and gender identity grounds for asylum in Europe. However, in practice, heternormative and homonormative immigration and asylum policies and practices combined with the ‘war on terror’ perpetuate the insecurity and marginalization of LGBTQI+ Muslim refugees and asylum seekers in Europe, a group that is among the least visible and most vulnerable, with minimal access to social and legal support. In this lecture, Mengia Hong Tschalaer will discuss her work with Queer Muslim Asylum in Germany, a project that provides critical understandings of how rightfulness and rightlessness are produced through the hetero- and homonormative legal immigration frameworks and protectionist asylum and refugee policies and practices that increasingly target Muslims.
Queer Muslim Asylum in Germany uses in-depth interviews with LGBTQI+ refugees and people seeking asylum; digitized asylum court cases available in the online archives of the Administrative Courts in Germany; and frontline news reporting both to examine the manner in which “legitimate victimhood” for gay, trans, bi, intersex, and non-binary people seeking asylum is read through the prism of Western constructions of Muslim sexuality and gender, and to propose concrete legislative initiatives that address the injustices inherent in existing EU policy. Taking several specific case studies as point of departure, the project illustrates the central role of Eurocentric sexual regimes in determining the parameters of asylum the il/legal.
This event is co-sponsored by the Digital Humanities Center.
About the speaker
Mengia H. Tschalaer is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She holds a Ph.D. in law and society and an M.A. in sociocultural anthropology, international law, and East Asian art history from University of Zurich. As a law and society scholar Mengia focuses on the relationship between politics of knowledge production and human rights, sexualities, and religion. Her work is geared towards rendering visible those voices located at the margins that remain silenced – often very deliberately so – in conversations about justice and ideals about the truth. Mengia is the author of “Muslim Women’s Quest for Justice: Gender, Law, and Activism in India” (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and of various articles and chapters on socio-legal resistance, gender, and Islam.