The aim of this article and the collaborative art project it describes is to draw attention to an important geo-political issue whose global significance was recognised by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in 2008: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) identified individuals, seeking refuge, health and safety in countries such as Spain, Canada and the UK
queer diaspora making places in transition
Thomas Strickland
urban codes | personal freedoms by thomas strickland
people is widespread – in the workplace, as well as in education and health sectors. In fact, as of 2013 and this project, just three countries had passed laws that provide LGBTQ people the same rights and protections as cisgendered and cissexual individuals: Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain. Recent regressive laws passed in Russia banning gay ‘propaganda’ (2013) and the passing of the Anti- Homosexuality Act, 2014 by the Parliament of Uganda, makes clear the global scale of the dangers faced by LGBTQ people. 2 Seeking refugee status situates an LGBTQ individual within transnational movements of migrant labourers, people seeking to escape war and those escaping persecution on religious grounds. The framework in place to co-ordinate in-migration depends on each individual nation’s legal structures, which are nuanced to serve a given government’s political agenda and each countries’ social mores. Thinking in broad terms, citizenship is accorded by place of birth or pro-rated for individuals who qualify in accordance with the measure of law. In either case, proof of citizenship is made visible in document form, most demonstrably by the passport. The failure of immigration law, in Canada, Europe, the USA and many nations, to acclimatise to the urgency of the LGBTQ refugee and, more broadly, the reliance on a passport as the defining measure of a citizen, is a clear weakness in the system. To exceed the ‘bare life’ of such documents, as Giorgio Agamben puts it, it is necessary to make visible the spaces of social and political agency. 3
In fall 2013 I was selected to participate in a residency with Jiwar Creació i Societat, an organisation that supports community-based artistic and urban research in Barcelona. Under the rubric Making Neighbourhood, the residency, inspired by South African video anthropologist Sydelle Willow Smith, asked four artists, including Smith and myself, to explore the day-to-day lives of non-documented individuals living in Barcelona. My focus during the residency was to illuminate the ephemeral but crucial investments that LGBTQ refugees make in space and to understand how LGBTQ refugees locate themselves in dislocation. While one goal of my project, titled transicions/transiciones/transitions , was to draw attention to the specific conditions of statelessness experienced by LGBTQ refugees, another was to understand and share their spatial practices – their use of the city – as a way to reveal critical relationships between immigration, cities and citizenship. Politically isolated, the LGBTQ refugee is, as Gayatri Gopinath explains, invisible in terms of citizenship. 1 Yet, the context of the LGTBQ refugee is not simply legal, it is also architectural and urban. Why LGBTQ individuals seek refuge varies. But in every case the very health and well- being of the individual is at stake. In seventy-six countries falling in love with someone of the same sex is illegal and can result in a prison sentence – in at least five countries sentencing means the death penalty. Even in countries that have signed the United Nations LGBT Rights Declaration, discrimination against LGBTQ
above: transicions/transiciones/ transitions. Exhibited at Sala d’exposicions del Districte de Gràcia, 6-18 November 2013.
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1 Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005. See Also: ‘At The United Nations Arab and African Nation Get Gay Reference Cut From Violence Measure’, LGBT Asylum News , Nov. 17, 2010. 2 ‘At UN Meeting, Countries Commit to Protect Gay Rights, Combat Discrimination’, UN News Centre. Sep. 26, 2013. Because of this commitment, the Anti-Homosexual Act, 2014, was annulled by the Ugandan Court of Appeal as unconstitutional. While this is clearly a victory for human rights, the ruling has ignited anger amongst anti-gay supporters, leaving the LGTBQ community vulnerable to increasing violence. 3 Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life . (1995). Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
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