LGBT Asylum Seekers and NGO Advocacy in the United States

The gendered, racialized and sexualized nature of U.S. immigration policies has been well-established in scholarly literature. In this ethnographic study, I focus on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) asylum seekers to explain how civil society organizations replicate and reinforce normative State logics regarding desirable immigrant subjects. Drawing on queer theory, feminist anthropology, Critical Discourse Analysis, and NGO studies, I address NGOs’ discursive construction of “LGBT asylum seekers” as vulnerable, needy and recognizably LGBT subjects. Such narratives frequently privilege a partial, neoliberal and Western-derived understanding of non-normative sexual subjectivity while erasing the diversity of the population they purport to help, and construct immigrants more broadly as dangerously homophobic—in contrast with a caring LGBT community, tacitly imagined as white and middle-class. Monolithic understandings of LGBT asylum seekers further obscure individuals’ complex, varied, and agentive responses to NGO support and to myriad structural barriers to fulfilling resettlement. Countering these limited and limiting narratives, I explore LGBT asylum seekers’ varied ways of getting by, both within and beyond NGO spaces, and with the support of other communities. I consider how culturally and religiously informed views on privacy, respect, and social belonging shape where, when, and how individuals express their sexuality and gender. I then discuss how new social exclusions—most acutely racism, xenophobia, and restricted economic opportunities—further inform individuals’ subjectivities and material realities. I conclude that recognition of such diverse experiences is necessary in order to understand and to address the pernicious, overlapping exclusions that immigrants—LGBT asylum seekers or otherwise—encounter in the United States.