Feeling queer, feeling real: affective economies of truth in queer asylum politics

Abstract

This article discusses the role of affect in the credibility assessment process in queer asylum claims. Through 27 semistructured interviews with caseworkers, it explores how sexual truth, in the Greek asylum apparatus, is affectively produced and analyses how access to asylum is intermediated by affective control of who is considered the “good” sexual citizen. According to the research material, the process focuses on applicants' emotions, while caseworkers tend to assess the “authenticity” of applicants' feelings through their senses and intuition. Additionally, apart from the exclusionary politics of emotions in homonationalist border regimes, it discusses affect's transformative possibilities in legal decision-making. Reflecting on queerness as an affect, through those failed, unspeakable queer performances that have been rendered non-credible by the affective rules of spoken sexual truth, it aims to challenge white-centred definitions of “genuine” queerness and the binaries of compliance and resistance in slow-death apparatuses.