“Imagine Being Seen as Straight Here but Gay in Their Home Country”: Bisexuality and Asylum in the United Kingdom and France

The thesis focuses on bisexual+ people claiming asylum in the United Kingdom and France. Statistics from similar states suggest that bisexual+ people are “much more likely” (Rehaag, 2008, p. 79) than gay men or lesbians to have their declared sexuality disbelieved and their asylum claim rejected. I investigate this disparity today in the UK and France and ask how the concepts of bisexuality and deservingness of protection and mobility are (re)produced through asylum and at the border. I use a combination of semi-structured interviews; archival research; and critical discourse analysis of documentary evidence.
I argue that queer asylum systems produce, and filter claimants into, categories of migrant; thereby producing racialised and sexualised orders between people and states. These systems do not account for bisexuality however, meaning that bisexual+ claimants exceed and leak out of those categories. That excess results in lower success rates for bisexual+ claimants but also belies the false homonationalist claim that states offer queer asylum exclusively to protect LGBTQ+ people who are at risk of persecution.
I demonstrate this over three empirical chapters:
The first shows that as queer asylum in France was being developed, the category of “the deserving queer refugee” was produced as an exclusively homosexual category. This results in low numbers of bisexual+ claims that are therefore seen as marginal.
The second explores the mediation of deservingness of protection through proximity to monosexuality (attraction to one gender). In both states, if a claimant is read as too close to straightness, they are assumed to be safe in their country of origin. They are only granted asylum if they are close enough to gayness.
The third examines the tensions between asylum systems’ demands for consistency and the perceived inconsistency of bisexuality. This highlights the inherent exclusivity of basing asylum decision making on categorisation.