Thomas Brorsen Smidt – Queer Refugees in Queer Utopias

Þjóðarspegillinn 2024

by Thomas Brorsen Smidt

The final event on Icelandic soil for the project Queer Refugees in “Queer Utopias” – Inclusions and Exclusions will take place on Friday, November 1 at the Þjóðarspegillinn 2024 conference at the University of Iceland. This session will feature thought-provoking discussions on the lived experiences of SOGIE (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression) refugees in Iceland, addressing complex intersections of migration, queerness, and systemic support.

The project, which began in 2021 with a grant from the Icelandic Research Fund, explores how queer refugees navigate the challenges of inclusion and exclusion in what are often portrayed as progressive societies. The Þjóðarspegillinn panel marks the closing event of this three-year project, offering a final reflection on its findings and contributions to the field of queer migration studies.

Presentations will include Guðbjörg Ottósdóttir’s research on the narratives of professionals working in Iceland’s social support systems for SOGIE refugees, revealing how legal frameworks and cultural perceptions shape professional approaches. Árdís Kristín Ingvars’ paper introduces “strutting” as a methodological tool in migration research, examining its potential to challenge the confinement of queer identities within national and racial borders. Finally, Linda Sólveigar- og Guðmundsdóttir will present findings from interviews with SOGIE refugees in Iceland, highlighting themes of safety and isolation within the context of Iceland’s growing reputation as a “gay paradise.”

The project has contributed significantly to the understanding of queer refugees’ experiences in Iceland and beyond, emphasizing the need for inclusive, intersectional approaches to both social services and academic research in the field.

Events

European Geographies of Sexualities Conference

by Thomas Brorsen Smidt

The QUEEN research team participated in the 2024 European Geographies of Sexualities Conference (EGSC), held from September 2nd to September 3rd at the University of Brighton’s Moulsecoomb campus. Themed “Uncomfortable Spaces,” the conference delved into the emotional and spatial dimensions of comfort and discomfort in relation to sexuality. Academics from around the globe convened to discuss how marginalization and discomfort intersect with the geographies of sexualities, with discussions ranging from queer migration to identity and the politics of inclusion and exclusion.

Guðbjörg, Linda, Árdís and Maja contributed to the conference with their panel titled Queer Refugees in “Queer Utopias”: Inclusion & Exclusion in Northern Europe. The panel explored the paradox of Northern European countries like Iceland, often portrayed as “queer utopias,” yet struggling to provide genuine inclusion for queer refugees.

Linda Sólveigar- og Guðmunds discussed how Iceland’s image as a “gay paradise” complicates the inclusion of SOGIE (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Expression) refugees, pointing out that factors like whiteness and socioeconomic status determine who truly feels included. Árdís K. Ingvars examined the impact of the Dublin III Regulation on queer refugees, highlighting how many feel forced to hide their sexual identity during asylum processes, resulting in exclusion and criminalization. Guðbjörg Ottósdóttir shared insights from professionals working with SOGIE refugees in Iceland, revealing that social support often frames these individuals as “queer subjects in the making” who are expected to become “out and proud” once resettled. Finally, Maja Hertoghs explored how sexuality is treated as a fixed identity in LGBTQIA+ asylum applications. She argued that asylum seekers must perform their sexual identity convincingly, relying on narrative coherence and bodily comportment, turning the process into a “truth game.”

Events

Open Call for Participants: Queer Utopias: Imagining Futures without…

by Thomas Brorsen Smidt

28–29 November 2024
Athens

Two-day seminar organised by the Institute for Gender, Equality and Différence (RIKK) and the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research (FAC)

It is often imagined that people persecuted for their queerness will find a utopia in liberal Western democracies. The truth is that queer spaces in supposedly progressive countries can be ambivalent for displaced queer people. Not only do neoliberal structures intersect with racism, classism, and oppressive border regimes to make it difficult for displaced queers to find support; they also kill our imagination, and the right to dream and play. In particular, our bordered reality makes it difficult to imagine futures without borders.

Thinking of queerness as something that hasn’t fully arrived yet, that it is always on the horizon, it’s about different forms of belonging that come together as a collective (Muñoz, 2009). Thus, we need to be critical of how utopias are represented. For instance, how LGBTQI+ rights are often portrayed as fitting into mainstream, capitalist, and heteronormative ideals. When looking at issues affecting queer and trans people, especially refugees, we see how racism and economic exploitation are connected with heteronormativity and cisnormativity. Western countries often present themselves as safe havens, but their border regimes erect legal barriers and enact systemic violence against queer people. Moreover, in the anti-gender politics rising in Europe, there is a danger of normative acceptance or apathy forming in relation to border violence, including the legal categories ascribed to queer refugees.

We welcome abstracts that engage critically with the themes of queer utopia, bordering, belonging-in-difference and queer temporality in one way or another.

Read the Call for Participants: https://feministresearch.org/CFP_Queer-Utopias (Link in bio @fac_research )

Call for Participants closes: 16 September 2024 (11:59 pm)

Bek Sultan

Publications

Event(ual) Queer Crafting of Dublin Regulated Sogie Refugees

by Thomas Brorsen Smidt

Our researcher Árdís Ingvars has published a new article in the Italian Sociological Review.

The Dublin regulation requires refugee applicants to submit an asylum request in first European country they enter. Yet SOGIESC refugees often fear disclosing their intimate lives or sexual details in early immigration encounters. In times of nationalistic upheavals and contested refugee laws, queer applications can further be met with distrust. Thus, in fear of repatriation, some move onward to countries where LGBTQI+ rights are nationally celebrated, only to be sent back to the first country.

Árdís’ paper builds on in-depth interviews and walk-along discussions with nine Dublin-regulated SOGIE refugees, as well as documented conversations with eighteen local stakeholders, conducted in Italy and Greece between 2021 and 2023 as part of the ICE-QUEEN project.

Results: By tracing the affective residue of events in interlocutors’ accounts, this article illuminates how SOGIE experiences were repeatedly invaded by violent bordering, affectively recalled through the memory of sounds. This caused them to submerge their life rhythm as irregular subjects, fitting neither here nor there. When denied protection due to the Dublin agreement, they became homeless, dependent on precarious jobs and transactional sex work. When deported, their accounts echo emotional abandonment and lack of recourses to claim queer time, as they discover their cases expulsed from the system.

When re-application was possible, they were put under the stigma of feigning their queer identities and criminalized in prolonged uncertainty. In response, they crafted themselves as event(ual) queer beings or as subjects between temporal events, through naming practices and asserting autonomy over sex time, while also visioning transactions based on emotional dignity and altruism.

Events

AAA/CASCA Meeting in Toronto

by Thomas Brorsen Smidt

On 15-19 November, the ICE-QUEEN team participated in the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and the Canadian Anthropology Society/Societe canadienne d’anthropologie (CASCA) at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto, Canada. The theme of the annual meeting was TRANSITIONS.

On the opening day of the conference, the team hosted the session Transition for Queer Refugees in Northern Europe: In-between Inclusion and Exclusion. The session was chaired by Jen K. AlVarez Hughes. Principle investigator Dr Guðbjörg Ottósdóttir opened the session by introducing the ICE-QUEEN research project. This was followed by researcher Linda Sólveigar- og Guðmundsdóttir, who introduced the project’s preliminary findings from the in-depth qualitative interviews with people seeking international protection in Iceland. Dr Árdís Ingvars then discussed their forthcoming article on queer asylum seekers that have been deported to Italy and Greece due to the Dublin regulation. Then Dr Maja Hertoghs spoke about the results from her PhD project in the Netherlands concerning asylum procedures and how queer people seeking international protection in the Netherlands need to give account of themselves as queer individuals. Finally, PI Guðbjörg Ottósdóttir introduced the preliminary findings concerning social service professional perceptions and experiences of working with queer refugees, focusing on narratives of western exceptionalism and meanings given to queer utopia in their accounts.

Publications

Poetic desirability: refugee men’s border tactics against white desire

by Thomas Brorsen Smidt

ICE-QUEEN researcher Árdís K. Ingvars recently published the article Poetic desirability: refugee men’s border tactics against white desire in NORMA – International Journal for Masculinity Studies. The article explores how former refugee men position their desirability as they un-settle in European countries. The masculine performance of desirability is examined through the intersectional lens of racialization, affective bordering, sexualities, and erotic encounters. The research builds on multi-sited ethnographies, conducted mainly in Greece and Germany between 2012 and 2022. Data collection carried out late in the ethnographic process is built partly on interviews and interactions carried out in Greece in 2022 as part of Dr. Ingvars’ fieldwork for Queer Refugees in Queer Utopias: Inclusions and Exclusions.

While the article is unfortunately not open access, you can easily receive copy of it. Simply write an email to akingvars@hi.is and request it.

Another article built on data collection from this project by Dr. Ingvars with the working title Event(ual) queer crafting in buckled up temporalities of Dublin regulated SOGIE refugees is currently under review at the Italian Sociological Review.

Events

Rainbow Conference 2023

by Thomas Brorsen Smidt

On Thursday, 10 August 2023, the ICE-QUEEN research team along with guest field researcher Maja Hertoghs took part in the Rainbow Conference as part of Reykjavik Pride 2023. The seminar Queer Refugees in Queer Utopias was well-attended and the audience used the opportunity to ask a myriad of different questions to our researchers.

Our researchers

Dr Maja Hertoghs joins the team in 2023

by Thomas Brorsen Smidt

Dr Maja Hertoghs works at the anthropology department of the University of Amsterdam as assistant professor where she teaches in the field of gender and sexuality studies. In September 2019 she defended her dissertation, Intensities of the State, on the bureaucratic infrastructures of the Dutch asylum procedure, especially in the detention center near Schiphol airport. She followed application processes for years and especially focused on the work of the procedure’s professionals – the IND, asylum lawyers and the refugee council – and how their (different) ways of engaging with asylum applicants shapes an asymmetrically intimate and ruthless practice of ‘objective’ decision-making. She is currently working on publishing papers about compassion and suspicion, passionate bureaucracies, state work and affects of objectivity.

In this project, Maja is exploring new research avenues focused on politics of (in)hospitality in relation to queer refugees in Nordic European countries. She is looking into ways in which queer tourists and (illegalized) queer refugees are ‘un/welcomed’ in cities mythologized as gay-paradise like Reykjavik and Amsterdam.

The Research

Information video in Icelandic

by Thomas Brorsen Smidt

Hér má skoða myndband á Íslensku um verkefnið.

Hinsegin flóttafólk (e. SOGIE refugees) sem er á flótta frá heimalandi sínu eða er ríkisfangslaust vegna ofsókna á grundvelli kynhneigðar eða kynvitundar, er sérstaklega viðkvæmur hópur. Markmið þessa verkefnis er að byggja upp þekkingu á málefnum hópsins, sem lið í að bæta úr skorti á rannsóknum á málaflokknum.

Vitneskjan getur nýst til stefnumótunar og þjónustu við hópinn á Íslandi; Landi sem hefur þá alþjóðlegu ímynd að vera hinsegin paradís. Rannsakendur munu kanna reynslu hinsegin flóttafólks af mótttöku, þjónustu og stuðningi og félagslegri aðild og þátttöku í samfélaginu. Í þessu samhengi er einnig er mikilvægt að afla þekkingar varðandi það hvernig hinsegin flóttafólk notar rafræna tækni og samfélagsmiðla, í ferli samskipta, þátttöku og aktívisma.

Rannsóknarteymið er þverfaglegt og þverþjóðlegt og samanstendur af rannsakendum á sviði félagsráðgjafar, félagsfræði, mannfræði og kynjafræði. Rannsóknarsniðið er eigindlegt, tekin verða 40-50 hálf opin viðtöl við hinsegin flóttafólk og starfsfólk á vettvangi mótttöku og þjónustu (útlendingastofnun, landamæraeftirlit, félagsþjónusta sveitarfélaga, félaga- og hagsmunasamtök). Einnig verður etnógrafískri vettvangsathugun beitt sem hluta af viðtölunum.

Niðurstöður rannsóknarinnar verða bornar saman við niðurstöður rannsókna í hollensku samfélagi á málefnum hinsegin flóttafólks, með það að markmiði að varpa frekara ljósi á og auka fræðilegan skilning á hugtakinu “hinsegin paradís.” Gefin verður út rafræn handbók fyrir fagfólk og hinsegin flóttafólk á nýrri vefsíðu og útbúin verður skýrsla með tillögum að bættri stefnu í móttöku hinsegin flóttafólks .

Events

Familiar Face screening and panel discussions

by Thomas Brorsen Smidt

This event takes place on Friday, 31 March 2023. If you are an asylum seeker or refugee and want to attend this event but need transportation, please contact us on akingvars@hi.is and we will find a safe ride for you.

*нижче українською*

In collaboration with the research team “Queer Refugees in Queer Utopias” (see queen.hi.is), we are happy to announce the screening of Familiar Face, a documentary about a Syrian gay man who fled to Germany and a native who fathers him and serves as his family while he settles in Germany. The documentary was made by Ramon Luz, a media professional and video journalism enthusiast based in Berlin, and premiered in Brazil, Switzerland and Germany in 2019.

After the viewing of the film, there will be a panel discussion including director Ramon Luz as well as several other panelists who have been involved in queer refugee work to be announced later.

The screening is at 18:45 in Oddi classroom O101, followed immediately by the panel and discussion, which will finish at 21:00. We will then move to the Student Cellar (Stúdentakjallarinn) afterwards to continue the discussions on a casual note and get to know each other better.

Both the classroom and the table at the Student Cellar are accessible. The documentary is mostly in English, but there are English subtitles when English is not spoken.

The event is open to everyone who wants to attend, but queer refugees are especially welcome. For safety reasons, all guests are asked to sign their names in a guestbook on site. This is done on behalf of those that participated in the documentary, but primarily the man who is the main subject.

_____

У співпраці з дослідницькою групою «Квір-біженці в квір-утопіях» (див. queen.hi.is) ми оголошуємо цей важливий захід! Показ документального фільму «Знайоме обличчя» про сирійського гея, що втік до Німеччини, та німця, що став йому батьком та сім’єю, коли той оселився в Німеччині. Документальний фільм був знятий Рамоном Лузом, професійним медіа та ентузіастом відеожурналістики з Берліна, прем’єра відбулася у 2019 році.

Після перегляду фільму відбудеться панельна дискусія, одним із учасників якої буде продюсер документального фільму Рамон Луз. Інших учасників ми оголосимо пізніше.

Показ розпочнеться о 18:45 в Одді в аудиторії O101, дискусія відбудеться в тій же кімнаті й закінчиться о 21:00. Після цього ми перейдемо до Студентського підвалу (Stúdentakjallarinn), щоб продовжити обговорення та краще дізнатися один одного.

У Студентському підвалі будуть доступні як класна кімната, так і стіл. Документальний фільм здебільшого англійською мовою, але є англійські субтитри, коли англійська не використовується.

Захід відкритий для всіх охочих, але особливо вітаються квір-біженці. З міркувань безпеки всіх гостей просять розписатися в гостьовій книзі на місці. Це зроблено для тих, хто брав участь у зйомках й, в першу чергу, для людини, що є головним героєм фільму. Якщо ви біженець, який шукає притулку, і хочете відвідати цю подію, але вам потрібен транспорт, будь ласка, зв’яжіться з нами, і ми знайдемо для вас безпечну поїздку.