Sexuality and Integration: Gay Iranian Refugees Navigating Refugee Status and Integration in Canada

During the past two decades, Canada has accepted over hundreds of LGBT asylum seekers, including gay Iranian men. Iran is among the very few countries where some same-sex sexual interactions are illegal and punishable by the death penalty. Iranian sexual minorities to leave their home country to seek asylum with United Nations’ (UN) offices located in Turkey. Currently, a majority of those who seek asylum based on their sexual orientation or gender identities (SOGI) are resettled to the United States and Canada. Yet, despite the groundbreaking legal actions in support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual (LGBT) rights and the services provided for the resettlement and integration of refugees, including SOGI refugees, there is a noticeable lack of research on the daily lives of LGBT refugees in Canada. This study concerns the integration practices of gay Iranian refugees, as an example of racialized sexual minorities, in Canada. The central question in this study is: how do sexuality, race, gender, class, and ethnicity as well as their interactions, regulate racialized sexual minority refugees’ belonging to various social groups and their access to rights such as housing, education, healthcare, and employment in their host country? My discussions in this study are based on six months of field work with 19 gay Iranian refugees in Canada (total interviews N = 35; total audio recorded from interviews  60 hours). I used snowball sampling for participant recruitment in Canada and found participants in Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa. To theorize the findings of this study, I merge the academic scholarship on migration and integration, refugee studies, and queer migration. I connect these bodies of research to the larger body of sociological theory by relying on a Durkheimian understanding of social integration as well as a Bourdieusian approach to social inequalities. In chapter 2, I apply intersectional methodology to my analyses of doing research among refugees as representative of vulnerable populations. I focus on relations between marital status and insider status, sexuality and internal gatekeepers, and ethnicity and obtaining signed consent forms. I demonstrate the utility of intracategorical intersectional methodology in enabling researchers to reflect upon the ways that participants’ markers of identity intersect with those of the researchers. In chapter 3, taking integration as a category of practice and relying on Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory, I analyse gay Iranian refugees’ interactions with Canadian society at large, the Canadian gay community, and Iranian Diaspora. My findings indicate that memories play the role of proxies that inform gay Iranian refugees’ interactions in Canada at the intersection of race-ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and nationality. In chapter 4, I argue that overreliance on refugees’ deployment of social capital for integration has grave shortcomings for refugees’ senses of belonging. I draw on Bourdieu’s writings on social capital to highlight internal group differences, social inequalities, and the vital convertibility between financial, social, and cultural capital in building transferrable resources for refugee integration. In chapter 5, I analyze gay Iranian refugees’ pre-migration transnational lives and understandings of the asylum process, their post-migration transnational ties, and their activism practices. I underline refugees’ agencies, and recommend analytical and methodological shifts to simultaneously explore refugees’ pre-migration and en-route lives in addition to their post-migration lives in order to secure a comprehensive vision of transnational practices among refugees. At a theoretical level, I draw on Bourdieusian social theory and argue that it is necessary to deploy de-nationalized methods of inquiry to account for intra-group diversities as well as border-crossing social ties in addition to economic ties. In chapter 6, I conclude my study by outlining a few policy recommendations such as the creation of safe spaces in refugee welcome centers as well as the necessity of implementing culturally sensitive therapy and mental health medical services for racialized LGBT refugees.

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