Queer Forms: Producing Documentation in Sexual Orientation Refugee Cases

Bureaucratic documents are often overlooked by anthropologists because of their “presumed transparency,” that is, the assumption that they provide immediate access to what they document (Hull 2012). However, recent anthropological research reframes documents as mediating objects with active and lively capacities, challenging assumptions of transparency. In this article, I investigate the production of documents in sexual orientation refugee claims in Canada and how this production is crucial to the creation and surveillance of the category of the “sexual orientation refugee.” I argue that anxieties about the production and circulation of “credible documentation” (Fassin and Rechtman 2009) by various participants in the refugee system and reliance on “social aesthetics” (Cabot 2013) in making decisions about who is deserving of a letter reflect the state’s increased levels of distrust of refugee claimants. These affective anxieties contribute to particular modes of defining, delimiting, or discrediting sexual identity formations and experiences at all levels of the refugee determination system.