PhD Seminar: Sophia Zisakou's final seminar

• Attend the seminar online via Zoom

Feeling queer, feeling real

Affective economies of truth in queer asylum politics

This research focuses on the credibility assessment process in queer asylum claims in Greece, a regime of sexual truth that demands asylum seekers prove their “genuine” queerness to be granted asylum. This initial stage of the legal process of refugee status determination is recognised in both legal scholarship and practice as a proving challenge in queer asylum claims and one of the main reasons for rejection. Focusing on this legal challenge of how to prove genuine queerness, critiqued by some scholars as an impossible task or impasse, this study’s early research question was to discuss how sexual truth is produced, through its assessment, within the asylum apparatus. However, following my first conversations with decision-makers, this question slightly narrowed to focus more specifically on the role of emotions in the process, asking how sexual truth is affectively produced within the asylum apparatus. This was not only because applicants’ feelings have become the primary site of assessment for authorities, but also because decision-making, particularly in queer claims, is deeply mediated through caseworkers’ own emotional responses. This research, therefore, examines the affective regime of sexual truth and the affective ontology of asylum politics that underlies it.

Sophia Zisakou holds an LLB from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, an LLM in Public International Law from National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and an MA in Gender Studies from Panteion University for Social and Political Sciences. Between 2016 and 2022, she worked as a refugee lawyer in Greece, specialised in LGBTIQ+ and unaccompanied minors’ asylum cases.