Rebecca Franco

This paper examines how the asylum process for lesbians, gays and bisexuals (LGB) in the Netherlands creates challenges for sexual minority asylum seekers by looking at LGB asylum policies as an ideological state apparatus. Even though many Western countries offer asylum on the basis of sexual identity, the phenomenon of not being found ‘credibly gay’ has disqualified 200 sexual minority asylum seekers in the Netherlands in 2013 alone. Building upon Althusser’s concept of interpellation, LGB asylum policies are conceptualized as mutually constitutive with the asylum seeker it interpellates. Butler’s notion of performativity shows the subject comes into being as it is interpellated and thereby reiterates the existing norms that circumscribe recognisability. This paper argues that asylum policies are implicated with the norms of the national community through the identification of credible LGB asylum seekers: homonormative narratives of sexual nationalism inform and are perpetuated by LGB asylum policies. Looking at examples of asylum cases, it becomes apparent that the asylum process produces identity categories through which sexual minority asylum seekers need to make themselves recognizable by proving the truthfulness of their sexual identity. Examining through identity performativity how asylum seekers learn to occupy these identities by adopting a normative script, this paper explores how this both reinforces and disrupts normativities. It concludes that the terms of intelligibility need to be interrogated to make the national community more inclusive towards non-normative identities.