Closeted Labour: Carceral Asylum and LGBTQ+ Refugee Labour
Speaker: Dr. Elif Sari
Department of Anthropology, UBC | Queer and Trans Anti-Fascism Research Cluster, UBC | Queer and Trans Salon, UBC
Abstract:
Drawing on the labour experiences of Iranian LGBTQ+ refugees in Turkey who await resettlement to the Global North, this talk introduces the concept of closeted labour to theorize how the carceral asylum regime confines refugees within coerced, contained, and concealed labour relations. Although recognized as a “vulnerable” group eligible for expedited resettlement, Iranian LGBTQ+ refugees remain stranded in Turkey for years—sometimes over a decade—due to resettlement countries’ border closures and anti-immigration policies. During this prolonged wait, resettlement countries routinely neglect refugees’ essential needs, abandoning them to survive on their own, while Turkey’s asylum and labour laws simultaneously criminalize and constrain their means of survival. Extending the concept of “closet” beyond gender and sexuality to include labour, the talk argues that the asylum regime governs LGBTQ+ refugee labour through three interrelated carceral logics of the closet: coercion, containment, and concealment. It systematically coerces refugees into exploitative and injurious labour conditions, contains their labour through spatial confinement and economic incapacitation, and forces them to conceal both their non-normative genders and sexualities due to homo/transphobia and their informal labour through deportability. Yet, refugees continually devise strategies to navigate, subvert, and refuse these multiple forms of closetedness and survive within and against carceral asylum.
About Dr. Elif Sari
A queer feminist anthropologist, Elif Sari’s research focuses on asylum, migration, waiting, humanitarianism, and carcerality, with particular attention to queer and trans refugees in the Middle East and its diasporas. Her current manuscript draws on long-term ethnographic research (2014–2022) with Iranian LGBTQ+ refugees in Turkey awaiting resettlement to the Global North. It examines refugees’ individual and collective experiences of stuckness and prolonged waiting amid U.S. and Canadian border closures that have effectively halted the admission of Iranian LGBTQ+ refugees and suspended their resettlement indefinitely. Her new research project, supported by a SSHRC Internal Development Grant, examines Canada’s private sponsorship programs and analyzes how they have increasingly replaced government-sponsored refugee resettlement pathways, particularly for racialized queer and trans refugees. Dr. Sari is a co-founder of the Queer and Trans Anti-Fascism Research Cluster, which investigates the intersections of global fascism and queer and trans resistance, and a co-convener of the Queer and Trans Salon, a space dedicated to supporting and showcasing emerging research and writing by queer and trans scholars and students at UBC and across Vancouver.
Photo Credit: Elif Sari
