TY - JOUR
T1 - The queer time of death
T2 - Temporality, geopolitics, and refugee rights
AU - Shakhsari, Sima
PY - 2014/12/8
Y1 - 2014/12/8
N2 - Using the ethnographic data from interviews with the Iranian queer and transgender refugee applicants in Turkey, the UNHCR, and NGOs in Istanbul, Ankara, Denizli, Kayseri, and Nevsehir, I explore the way that refugee rights as a temporally and spatially contingent concept normalizes queer and transgender refugee subjects, while managing the lives and deaths of different populations. Through examining the chronopolitics and geopolitics of rights within the refugee discourse, I point to inconsistencies in the universality of human rights and argue that while the designation of an act as “violation of human rights” committed by states or citizens, is arbitrary and contingent on the place and time of the act, the recognition of the refugee in the human rights regimes relies on essentialist and timeless notions of identity that travel in the teleological time of progress. The Iranian queer and trans refugees in Turkey are suspended in an in-between zone of recognition where rightfulness and rightlessness come together in a temporal standstill. The “protection” of trans and queer refugees under the rhetoric of rights in this in-between zone is tied to the management of life and death of populations through the politics of rightful killing.
AB - Using the ethnographic data from interviews with the Iranian queer and transgender refugee applicants in Turkey, the UNHCR, and NGOs in Istanbul, Ankara, Denizli, Kayseri, and Nevsehir, I explore the way that refugee rights as a temporally and spatially contingent concept normalizes queer and transgender refugee subjects, while managing the lives and deaths of different populations. Through examining the chronopolitics and geopolitics of rights within the refugee discourse, I point to inconsistencies in the universality of human rights and argue that while the designation of an act as “violation of human rights” committed by states or citizens, is arbitrary and contingent on the place and time of the act, the recognition of the refugee in the human rights regimes relies on essentialist and timeless notions of identity that travel in the teleological time of progress. The Iranian queer and trans refugees in Turkey are suspended in an in-between zone of recognition where rightfulness and rightlessness come together in a temporal standstill. The “protection” of trans and queer refugees under the rhetoric of rights in this in-between zone is tied to the management of life and death of populations through the politics of rightful killing.
KW - Chronopolitics
KW - LGBT identities
KW - UNHCR
KW - geopolitics
KW - human rights
KW - necropolitics
KW - queer and transgender refugees
KW - temporality
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84908546573&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84908546573&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/1363460714552261
DO - 10.1177/1363460714552261
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84908546573
VL - 17
SP - 998
EP - 1015
JO - Sexualities
JF - Sexualities
SN - 1363-4607
IS - 8
ER -