This paper offers theoretically-informed and qualitative empirical insights into forced queer migration in the contemporary Global North. The paper aims to explore experiences of seeking asylum based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity in Denmark. The paper demonstrates the legal and social challenges that LGBT asylum seekers face in the struggle of establishing ‘truthful’ evidence of their sexual orientation and gender identities in the process of seeking asylum. I explore how LGBT asylum seekers experience the ‘politics of truths’ in the Danish asylum system and how notions of truth in sexuality and gender shape and create categories of the ‘authentic’, ‘real’ and ‘genuine’ LGBT refugee. I particularly focus on LGBT asylum seekers’ emotional experiences of seeking asylum and interacting with the Danish asylum system. The paper is placed within a theoretical framework that discusses how the legacy of racialized histories of colonialism and migration manifest at the level of LGBT asylum seeker’s lived emotional experiences. The thesis draws on qualitative narrative interviews with LGBT asylum seekers in Denmark. The interviews and narratives of LGBT asylum seekers demonstrate their burden of proving to the Danish asylum system that their sexualities and gender identities are ‘true’. I argue that the practices of credibility assessment in the Danish political asylum process render certain narratives untellable and untranslatable to the asylum system’s notions of truthful sexualities and gender identities. Findings from the interviews revealed that the credibility assessment and determination of ‘genuine’ sexual orientation and gender identity in the asylum system rely on Eurocentric stereotypical understandings of sexuality and gender. The LGBT applicants are therefore forced to translate their sexuality and gender identity into a Western regime of perspectives in order to be heard in the legal process. This burden of proving sexualities demonstrate how the Danish political asylum process produces particular kinds of cultural silences and invisibilities among LGBT asylum applicants, and eligibility hereby remains an unachievable ideal for individuals seeking to negotiate their sexuality during the asylum seeking process in Denmark. This paper further discusses how the process of seeking asylum in Denmark can be traced to histories of social, cultural, and imperialist hierarchies. It therefore seeks to highlight how gendered, sexed, and raced inequalities are reflected and produced in the Danish political asylum system. This post-colonialist framework allows for an examination of the ways in which emotions, gender, sexuality, asylum politics and movement of bodies over borders are woven into each other, combined and regulated by social histories.
