Intimate Nation: Sexuality and Asylum in the Netherlands

A 2011 report published in the Netherlands stated that approximately 200 asylum seekers apply in the Netherlands each year citing fear of persecution in their home countries for their sexual orientation or gender identity. Meanwhile, Dutch nationalists warn of the threat migration poses to Dutch culture and its tradition of liberalism, with a particular anxiety concerning Islam and Muslim migrants, ignited a public discourse and panic over “tolerating intolerance.” LGBTI asylum seekers, however, seem be in some important ways an exception to this panic.

I am interested in the ways in which the processes of claiming asylum as a LGBTI individual produce, rather than simply represent, a specific type of subject. How might the process be less than liberatory, and as Joseph Massad argues, “repress same-sex desires and practices that refuse to be assimilated into its sexual epistemology”? An asylum applicant must often conform to strict ideas and stereotypes of what and LGBTI asylum seeker must look like, act like, know, and have experienced—and if they fail in representing themselves as this type of subject, their stories are deemed un-credible, and their claim for asylum denied. In what ways do these identities and sexual ideologies get used/tried on/modified through the process of asylum application? What assumptions or stereotypes about sex, gender, sexuality, and culture are embedded in the logics of the processes of asylum?