In an attempt to elicit public compassion, often refugee advocates construct and promote assimilationists narratives that refugees are people just like us. While well-meaning in their intention, such a narrative follows a colonial trope of a supreme (white) nation who is saving the poor and vulnerable. This creates a single narrative of who can be a refugee both in terms of identities and circumstance as well as a degree of one’s trauma and availability of one’s testimony. This limiting nature of existing narratives about refugees inevitably impacts narratives about queer refugees. Similarly to an overall narrative, cisgender male experiences are implicitly privileged in accounts of queer asylum. It is rare if not uncommon to hear cisgender female or transgender accounts.
Additionally, sexuality triggers something else. Queerness gets to be equated with the sign of modernity and progressiveness. Queer refugees are presented as more deserving of protection not because they are ‘people just like us’ but because they are ‘queers just like us’.
Simultaneously, their queerness is assigned an extreme state of vulnerability because of the oppressive regimes they are coming from. The single narrative about refugees privileges stories of those who come from countries where homosexuality is criminalised over stories where violence is not legislated but inflicted by all possible actors (such as both state and family) on the societal level. Given that in many instances it is gay men relationships that are criminalised, violence against queer women goes unnoticed but normalised.
In this presentation, I seek to explore the construction of narratives about queer refugees and the places of queer refugee women in them. Reflecting on my work with 8 queer refugee women through my PhD research, I aim to discuss those experiences that are silenced because of one’s gender, sexuality, and biopolitical governance of bodies in situations of exile and asylum-seeking.

Tina Dixson is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. Her thesis is an autoethnographic narrative inquery that is looking into lived experiences of queer refugee women.
She is also an experienced policy, advocacy and communication professional with a strong expertise in LGBTIQ, refugee and women’s rights in Australia and overseas. She has previously engaged with the UN human rights treaties such as CEDAW and the UN programmes such as UNHCR through participating in the development of the Global Compact on Refugees.
Tina is also a co-founder of the Queer Sisterhood Project, a peer-run support and advocacy group for queer refugee women in Australia.

Tina Dixson, PhD candidate, Australian National University, tina.dixson@anu.edu.au