Keele Research Repository

Validating asylum claims on the basis of a person’s sexual orientation relies on discerning what constitutes sexuality and a ‘well founded fear’ of persecution. This administrative process works by suturing narratives of ‘functioning’ sexuality to specific incidents of persecution. Emotion, desire and feeling are obscured in this ethnocentric method of verification. In attempting to dislodge how sexuality remains a fixed and universal identity in the law, this article traces how emotion can be considered in spatial and culturally specific terms, to represent how asylum seekers experience persecution in relation to their ‘queerness’.