Article

Getting Out: Political

asylum, sexual minorities,
and privileged visibility

Sexualities
2014, Vol. 17(8) 10161034
! The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1363460714557600
sex.sagepub.com

Amy Shuman
Ohio State University, USA

Wendy S Hesford
Ohio State University, USA

Abstract
As part of an emerging field of films documenting the obstacles faced by sexual minorities fleeing persecution and seeking political asylum, the film Getting Out documents
both the persecution of sexual minorities in Uganda and the obstacles individuals face in
their attempts to get political asylum in South Africa. Using the film as a springboard, we
assess the larger issues of recognition, visibility, hypervisibility, and performativity in
encounters between sexual minorities, their advocates, and political asylum officials.
The rhetorical power of Getting Out lies in its performative staging of LGBTQI asylum
seekers navigation of often competing cultural and legal logics on sexuality. The film
calls attention to profound contradictions in the political asylum system for sexual
minorities and for any others who challenge the normativity of a social group.
Keywords
Anti-gay laws, narrative, political asylum, rhetoric, sexual minorities, visibility

Lesbian, bisexual, gay, transsexual and intersex individuals, whose home countries
either condone persecution or refuse to protect individuals from it, face great obstacles when they seek asylum in another country that, ostensibly at least, protects
LBGTQI individuals from persecution. The political asylum system is only a small
part of the larger politics of persecution and protection, but it has become a
growing high-prole site of advocacy, including the production of human rights
lms calling attention to both the persecution and inequities in the political asylum
system, such as Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World
Corresponding author:
Amy Shuman, Ohio State University, 421 Denney Hall, 164 W. 17th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210-1370,
USA.
Email: [email protected]

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(dir. Scgaliotti, 2003), Getting Out (dir. and produced by Neumann et al., 2011),
God Loves Uganda (dir. Williams, 2012), Call Me Kuchu (dir. Wright and Worrall,
2012), Abominable Crime (dir. Fink, 2012), and Born This Way (dir. Kadlec and
Tullman, 2013). In this essay, we undertake a close reading of one of the lms,
Getting Out, a 60-minute documentary lm produced by the Refugee Law Project
at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda in collaboration with the Ugandan
Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law.
Getting Out is situated between recent anti-gay legislation in Uganda and the
political asylum bureaucracy in South Africa. The personal portraits provide a
rst-person perspective that gives agency to the individuals deprived of not only
agency but also any recognition as citizens rst in their home countries and then as
they seek asylum. We are interested in how LGBTQI asylum seekers are produced
as unrecognizable by the state systems and in how the lm portrays them as individuals with legible stories, thus compelling the lm viewer to see their vulnerability
and the impossible subject positions they are forced to occupy. This form of educational advocacy ideally compels the viewer to identify with otherwise illegible,
invisible individuals and their social justice campaign. The goals of our essay are
fourfold: (1) to identify the limitations of identity-based frameworks for addressing
the complexities of sexuality, visibility, and the subjection of sexual and gender
minorities; (2) to illuminate the political and personal consequences for those rendered socially illegible or unrecognizable; (3) to consider the value of scholarship
on queer migration for understanding how sexuality and gender identity norms, as
well as norms of race, class, nation, and health, structure asylum law; and (4) to
consider eorts to queer human rights, especially the potential of coalitional subjectivities, as a means to counter the essentialist logics that produce the persecuted
subject. Finally, we turn to Getting Out because it reveals the severe consequences
of violent refusals of complexity to which the self-appointed normalizers of sexual
desire so readily resort, to draw from Malcolm Bowies introduction to Judith
Butlers 2002 Amnesty Lecture (2005: 46).
Getting Out portrays the struggles of ve LGBTQI Africans eeing persecution,
some of whom are applying for political asylum. Founded in 1999, the Refugee
Law Project provides legal aid to asylum seekers and refugees in Uganda. As the
lm title argues, some LGBTQI Africans need to get out to escape further persecution before they can come out. Coming out has serious consequences,
beyond the stigma or exclusions one might experience from family and others.
Getting Out also exposes the political consequences of the states control of
queer visibility in its dispersion of the concealing logic of discretion. In the lm,
the ocials determine that someone who has experienced persecution based on
sexual preference can return to his/her country, perhaps to a dierent region,
where he/she can be discreet and thus safe. Filmed in Uganda, South Africa,
Geneva, and London, with footage from Malawi and Zimbabwe, the lm explores
not only the homophobia the individuals face in their home communities and
countries but also the hypocrisies and failings of asylum systems in the countries
where they seek refuge. In addition, it exposes the limitations of the identity-based

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categories of LGBTI as not necessarily matching the ways the individuals understand themselves as sexual and gender minorities. As an educational advocacy
documentary, Getting Out provides an opportunity to examine the multiple and
changing discourses about sexual minorities, social violence, and human
rights. The lm uses documentation of personal lives, media representations, and
the legal turmoil of new anti-gay legislation to foster debate and, ideally, social
justice.
Getting Out corroborates how political asylum has become a site for interrogating persecution and compels us to think about sexual rights as transnational iterations of state regulated concepts of sexuality, desire, and identity.1 In presenting
sexuality, and more particularly, the struggles of LGBTQI individuals, as the new
frontier of human rights work, Getting Out fosters critical reection about how
sexuality and sexual rights take on various meanings in the transnational contexts
that asylum law compels. The lm narrator reports, Nobody lives this frontier
more intensely than LGBT persons themselves, particularly when they try to cross
it to seek asylum. In Judith Butlers terms, the political asylum process is a site of
cultural translation of human rights discourses. Observing that universal human
rights refer to a reality that does not yet exist, she arrived at a second view of
universality in which it is dened as a future-oriented labor of cultural translation
(1999: 9). Here Butler points toward the universalizing logic of human rights and its
erasure of cultural particularity. LGBTQI subjects may challenge these universalizing logics, but as Getting Out demonstrates, asylum law and rulings on the persecution of gender and sexual minorities do not escape these logics. Getting Out
shows how sexual rights are shaped by imperial imaginaries and the
privileging of visibility, and therefore provides timely insights about the contradictory role of normative social categories in asylum law and its translation into
justice at the local level. Getting Out aords scholars and activists an opportunity
to contemplate these contradictions and the obstacles that LGBTQI asylum seekers
face as they navigate legal and cultural systems confounded by heteronormative
assumptions.
Early in Getting Out, we see a clip from another lm, Before Night Falls, about
the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, portraying a ctionalized political asylum
hearing in which the hearing ocer asks a young man What position do you
like in bed? To which the young man replies, I like it from behind and on my
knees. Then the ocer commands him to walk to the other side of the room
and back. The young man performs a stereotypical gay walk. The public humiliation in the exchange introduces the lm audience to one of the obstacles to
getting out, and also calls attention to the complexity of performing sexual
identity. The lm presents a variety of such performances, all pointing to the
ways that various governmentalities depend upon their own expectations to assess
conformity to expected sexual categories. Although the hostility and the request
for the performance are exaggerated in the scene from the ctionalized lm,
political asylum hearings are interrogations in which the applicants are obligated
to prove that they are who they claim to be and that they are victims of

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persecution (Bohmer and Shuman, 2010). The gay applicant also must prove that
he is gay.
In addition to excerpts from Before Night Falls, Getting Out includes footage
from political speeches and events. Together, these embedded lms and news
videos serve to highlight the contradiction between, on the one hand, the asylum
systems suspicions that LGBTQI claims might be fraudulent,2 and, on the other
hand, the lens of suspicion that motivates police and other authorities to raid
people in their homes and expose them as committing sexual crimes. In the hearing,
the gay man performs gayness in accordance with the hearing ocers expectations
of conventional gay behavior. The footage from the individuals homelands
portrays dierent sets of expectations that motivate the police or other ocials
who apprehend sexual minorities who are caught in the act, exposed, arrested,
and/or persecuted. In their homelands, individuals express fear of this exposure; in
the political asylum hearings the force of possible exposure is often misunderstood.
Until recently, individuals who were denied asylum were instructed to return to
their homelands and act discreetly to avoid persecution (Keenan, 2011: 35; Shuman
and Bohmer, this issue).
The hearings and the experiences of persecution are presented in the lm as
competing discourses that expose the ineptitude, suspicions, and humiliations in
the political asylum process and the increasing violence against LGBTQI individuals in various communities. In our discussion, we explore the competing
discourses in more detail, and in particular, we examine how the lm uses the
exposure of inconsistencies and stereotypes to call attention to dierences
between East and West, colonizer and colonized, urban sophistication and
rural backwaters in its depiction of categories of multiple sexual and gender
identities.3 We discuss the climate of suspicion that saturates the political
asylum process and the particular suspicion of gay, lesbian, and transgender
people within that climate. For example, asylum ocials demand that asylum
seekers prove that they are gay relies on unquestioned, stereotyped assumptions
about the kind of questions a gay person should be able to answer, the kinds of
aect that signify being gay, and the consequences of public displays that signify
identity as a sexual minority in dierent cultures. We begin by considering the
ocularcentricity of the asylum process and how visuality structures the articulation of LGBTQI4 identities and the states socio-political recognition or subjection of sexual minorities. In exposing these contradictions, Getting Out
demonstrates how the political asylum process often exacerbates and perpetuates
stereotypes and actually defeats the purpose of dierentiating between genuine
and fraudulent applications. The political asylum process is one of the central
sites for negotiating categories of social violence (Baillot et al. 2012); LGBTQI
claims call attention to some of the limits of the system. At the same time, as this
lm demonstrates, LGBTQI claims have captured public interest, and unlike
many other areas of political asylum in which cases are treated individually,
LGBTQI cases have mobilized social groups such as the NGOs involved in
the lm.

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Sexual minorities: Visibility, recognition, and subjection

Article 14 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states,
Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR), a refugee is someone who owing to a well-founded fear of being
persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular
social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is
unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of
that country. The category social group is the most dicult to dene: individuals seeking asylum to escape persecution as sexual minorities fall into this category. Social group is not uniformly dened; sometimes it depends on sharing an
immutable characteristic and sometimes the emphasis is on the visible performance
of membership. Yet many LGBTQI people, as the lm suggests, suppress their
identity and/or social group aliation precisely because greater visibility may instigate further persecution (Hazeldean, 2011: 380). Several sexual minority claims
have been successful (Mohyuddin, 2001); all hinge on the applicants ability to
demonstrate credibility, both in terms of sexual identity and persecution
(Millbank, 2009). In Getting Out, the suspicion of deception is linked to the seemingly arbitrary or dismissive practices on the part of asylum ocials. Persecution
requires no such proof; in fact, a person can be labeled lesbian or gay by association. Attending a gay church does not make you gay to the asylum ocials, but it
can make you gay in Uganda. The asylum process is designed to dierentiate
between fraudulent and legitimate asylum seekers and the asylum ocials often
suspect that asylum applicants are actually economic migrants. Yet, as Karma R
Chavez notes, [E]conomic persecution remains outside the purview of asylum law
(2013: 69). Consequently, the focus of asylum law on the homophobic state erases
the economic persecution of queers and non-queers alike (2013: 69).
NGOs oering assistance to sexual minorities play an increasingly important
role helping individuals to navigate the political asylum process, and NGOs have
become leaders in the eort to call attention to the obstacles sexual minorities face
in applying for political asylum. Getting Out is one of several recent lms designed
to create an awareness of these obstacles. However, as noted earlier, Getting Out
must cautiously navigate the tension between visibility and subjection in its promotion of the rights of sexual minorities. For example, the US premiere of Getting
Out was hosted by the Open Society Foundation, which also provided support for
the making of the lm, and Human Rights First. The premiere took place on
6 April 2011, in the wake of the January 2011 murder of David Kato, the
Ugandan gay activist who worked with Sexual Minorities Uganda. The murder
of Kato was directly tied to his visibility as a gay rights activist; Katos photograph
was published in a local Ugandan tabloid Rolling Stone (no relation to the
US publication) with other LGBTQ individuals with the headline Hang Them.
Clearly, for socially stigmatized groups, such as sexual minorities, public visibility
is not empowering in all contexts.

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Getting Out follows the liberal humanist trajectory of bringing greater visibility
to the struggles of LGBTQ asylum seekers and attests to the benets of social
media. For example, we learn about the importance of Val Kalindes access to
social media as she was growing up. Kalinde, one of ve individuals featured in the
lm, turned to social media to connect with other LGBTQ persons and organizations. Yet, importantly, the lm also draws attention to the risks of visibility, for
when Kalinde came out as a teenager she was featured in a Ugandan newspaper,
and because of that visibility she was subjected to harassment, sexual violence, and
publicly stigmatized. She was kicked out of her church and moved out of her
neighborhood to avoid further harassment. Moreover, the lm draws attention
to those who are hidden in plain sight, including the sex workers who are hypervisible yet rendered invisible through legal exceptions or habitual acts of looking
away. The narrator reports: In the red light area in Kampala, male sex workers
work hidden in plain sight. Not only are the sex workers hidden in plain sight but
many are refugees, which compounds their public invisibility.
The eld of human rights embrace of an ocular epistemology (the seeing-isbelieving paradigm) heightens the salience of normative scenes of social and legal
recognitionor misrecognition(Hesford, 2011: 57). Human rights advocates
privileging of visual representations intersects with the LGBT right movement
and its celebration of gay and lesbian visibility and the coming out narrative.
The seeing-is-believing paradigm and the challenges that it poses for certain social
groups is particularly apparent in asylum law, which requires that asylum seekers
prove membership in a social group (lesbians, bisexuals, gay, transgendered) and
fear of persecution on the basis of that membership. The social group must be
socially recognizable and therefore, to one degree or another, socially visible.
To put it dierently:
Unlike other refugee claimants who are not compelled to perform a visible identity in
the country to which they migrate, lesbian and gay asylum applicants frequently are
expected to conform to neoliberal narratives of sexual citizenship grounded in visibility politics, consumption, and an identity in the public sphere in order to be considered worthy candidates for asylum. (Lewis, 2013a: 179)

In a discussion of political asylum and stigmatized categories of social practice,

Amy Shuman and Carol Bohmer describe how the visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility of social practices are related to the tellability or untellability of particular
narratives (Bohmer and Shuman, 2008; Shuman and Bohmer, 2004). Stigmatized
social practices can be either more or less visible and more or less legible. Stigma
works by assigning, legitimating, and disputing value . . . and then naturalizing
those positions (Shuman and Bohmer, 2012: 217). Stigma works in conjunction
with the public spectacle, especially with regard to the policing of sexuality. In
Getting Out, Florence Kizza describes how police in Uganda invaded her home,
found her in bed with her partner, and paraded both her and her girlfriend around
town naked. Footage of police in Malawi escorting the rst married gay couple in

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handcus through the town and a police raid of a gay wedding in Kenya serves as a
backdrop to Kizzas narration. These scenes eectively capture the states command of the visual regime and the deployment of the public spectacle to shame
LGBTQI individuals. Crowds gather and laugh as the gay couples are escorted to
the police station and courtroom. The lms inclusion of the public shaming spectacle aligns viewers with the states objectifying gaze and as witnesses to this objectication, and foregrounds the signicance of the visual realm in upholding
relations of power.
Questions of visibility surface crucially in the immigration ocials arguments
for discretion as a solution to the persecution of sexual minorities. The British
ocials argument that a person who is LGBTQI can return to their country and
be discreet is a perpetuation of the colonial view of sexual discretion. The discretion
argument, now overturned,5 did not take into account the fact that once the person
has made an asylum application, he or she has become a target for persecution.
Alice M Miller writes:
The adjudicators construct a circular argument: burdening sexual dissidents with the
obligation to be discreet, the adjudicators are then unable to understand how a
woman who has been discreet can be gayafter all, she has not even been sexually
out or active. (Miller, 2005: 160)

Further, the idea of discretion depicted in the lm is based on British legal concepts
of the public and private that do not necessarily apply to other cultures and places.
Just to identify the simplest problem, a woman who is neither a wife nor mother, or
who isnt both, may be presumed to be a lesbian in some communities. Such identications are not necessarily about discretion or even necessarily about sexual
encounters. One of the more complex problems is the category of sex for pay and
the question of whether same sex for pay is considered categorically dierent. Rachel
Lewis addresses the issue of perceived homosexuality and its recognition or lack
thereof in asylum cases and narratives in her work. As she argues in a recent essay:
The primary obstacle facing lesbian asylum applicants is the lack of representational
space within heteronormative asylum narratives for the articulation of female samesex desire, evident in the notion that (to quote one asylum adjudicator) a homosexual
lesbian can avoid the risk of harm by being discreet in her conduct. (Lewis:
2013a: 180)

Early in the lm the narrator says, In order to be able to come out, they rst have
to get out. Here the narrator conrms the centrality of the coming out/gay rights
liberation narrative to the lms advocacy stance. Yet the individual coming out
narratives that the state requires of claimants in order to meet the conditions for
political asylum also point to how the state circumscribes the narrative parameters
of recognition of sexual rights. The lms focus on the narratives elicited through
the asylum process importantly draws attention to the states regulation of

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sexuality and its perpetuation of essentialist identity categories (Berg and

Millbank, 2009).6

Contending vulnerabilities, identities, and narratives

Mid-way through the lm we meet the Director of the Refugee Law Project, Chris
Dolan, who draws attention to contending vulnerabilities and identities, such as
that of Leon (who uses only his rst name), a refugee, father, and sex worker. Leon,
a refugee from the Congo, now in Uganda, left his home country because his
sexuality was discovered. Due to discrimination in Uganda, however, Leon did
not disclose his fear of persecution based on his perceived sexuality. Sexual-preference-based discrimination was not part of his asylum narrative. Instead, he
describes being introduced to sex with men as something that would bring him
luck as a magical act. When asked why he continued, he said he got used to it.
Given that Leon was once married and has two biological children and seven
orphaned children whom he supports, Dolan tells us, Leon doesnt t the stereotype of a gay man from western Europe or Australia. Moreover, Leon doesnt
think of himself as gay; instead, he foregrounds his identity as a sex worker. His
account is that he has sex with men for pay to support his children. He says that the
man who introduced him to sex with men explained that it would be something
that might be useful later, as, indeed, has turned out to be the case in Leons ability
to support his children. Dolans goal is to learn how to guide asylum clients such as
Leon to better represent these contending vulnerabilities in their testimonies for
resettlement in safer countries. The challenge that such asylum seekers and their
advocates face, however, is that intersecting vulnerabilities challenge the normativity underlying the category of membership in a social group, one of the four
categories that qualify for political asylum.
In Leons case, as a man who has sex with other men, being gay seems to be more
visible to both activists and police than being a sex worker. Leons self-description
as a man who has sex with other men for money blurs the categories of LGBTQI,
which do not include, for example, male prostitutes, or even more particularly for
some contexts, local men who have sex with visiting tourists for money. Leon is,
then, out as a sex worker if not as a gay man. Leons case demonstrates how the
deployment of sexuality in the global sexual rights movement poses dilemmas at the
local level (Howe and Rigi, 2009: 298). Leons case prompts us to ask: What are
the limitations of identity-based legal frameworks for addressing the complexities of
sexuality, visibility, and structures of subjection, especially if we take into account
confounding vulnerabilities?7 In keeping with Butlers call for future-oriented labor
of cultural translation, the lm describes cases such as Leons not as exceptions but
as examples of the problem of being uncategorizable (1999: 9). Butler describes the
problem of uncategorizability in relation to violence, specically:
The person who threatens violence [against someone who does not conform to gender
norms] proceeds from the anxious and rigid belief that a sense of world and a sense of

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self will be radically undermined if such a being, uncategorizable, is permitted to live

within the social world. The negation, through violence, of that body is a vain and
violent eort to restore order, to renew the social world on the basis of intelligible
gender, and to refuse the challenge to rethink that world as something other than
natural or necessary. (Butler, 2005: 71)

The asylum system itself perpetuates the vulnerability of seemingly uncategorizable

individuals who do not conform to the asylum ocials expectations for the
category.
Many of the individuals in the lm have multiple vulnerabilities and sometimes
competing narratives. Of particular note, Tatenda Ngwara tries without success to
convince the asylum ocials that she is a transgendered woman. Her claim is
refused, but we learn in a subsequent lm that she was raped and became pregnant.
We do not know what motivated the decision, whether by Tatenda or the lmmakers, to exclude the category of intersex from her narrative. However, we can
observe that intersex and transgender are culturally specic categories. In some
cultures, intersex and transgender overlap; in some they are distinct categories
(Chase, 1998). The case of Florence Kizza, who was held, raped, and brutalized
for three days by Ugandan ocials, eventually escaped her captors and migrated,
with the help of human trackers, to the UK to seek political asylum, further
illustrates the incapacity of the juridical system to account for the complexities of
persecution based on sexual orientation. Once Kizza arrived in the UK, she
struggled not only with physical illness and depression because of her horric
experiences in Uganda, but she also struggled through the UK asylum process.
She indicates that she felt degraded by the legal system in having to prove her
sexual identity as a lesbian. Her initial asylum claim was rejected, the judge argued,
because there was no proof of rape based on sexual orientation. The judge therefore ruled that she could go back to Uganda, relocate, and be more discreet.
Unfortunately, these are fairly common rulings. With the help of a legal rights
agency, Kizza was granted discretionary leave to remain for three years, and still
has had no contact with her partner. Rachel Lewis describes how the discretion
logic that underwrites queer asylum policy in the UK not only produces the expectation of particular performances of identity in the public sphere but, perhaps more
disturbingly, has resulted in an excessive focus on the sexuality of individual
claimants (2013a).
Harriet Baillot, Sharon Cowan, and Vanessa Munro point out that cultural
conventions for talking about stigmatizing experiences such as rape play a signicant role in the asylum systems culture of suspicion and suggest that Legal advice,
where it is available, can help applicants to reframe their narratives to t the
persecution paradigm (2011: 120). The issues Baillot et al. raise are further intensied in political asylum claims by sexual minorities (Swink, 2006). Claims of rape
are, as they observe, dependent on conventions for disclosure/non-disclosure; rape
is currently recognized as persecution in many countries, although applicants who
can prove they were raped do not necessarily receive asylum (Dorling et al., 2012).

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Claims based on persecution of sexual minorities face the additional problem of

what Jasbir Puar describes as sexual exceptionalism, producing exceptional vulnerabilities (2007: 7) and impossible subjectivities (2007: 19). In other words, not only is
disclosure not the whole problem, but disclosure is always compromised. The individuals claiming political asylum based on violence they experienced as sexual
minorities are, in a sense, unknowable, because unrecognizable, to the asylum ocials. By telling their individual stories, Getting Out does not make them known but
instead points to the problem of unrecognizability.
Getting Out is an eort to create visibility for otherwise unrecognizable victims
of persecution. We have suggested that this lack of recognition can be attributed in
part to the political asylum policies requiring demonstration of membership in a
social group and to the necessity of non-disclosure for people fearing persecution.
But the lm also points to the ways in which visibility logics sanctify singular
identities and the atomistic legal subject of liberalism, and in so doing erase the
social factors that may be less visibly intelligible, such as the economic persecution
of queer communities. The persecution of sexual minorities is, interestingly, one of
the areas in which political asylum applicants have become activists confronting
inequalities, in part through documentary lms, such as Getting Out, that importantly raise the prole of political asylum decision making. Political asylum is not a
widely understood or recognized problem; some categories of political asylum
applicantsand individuals eeing sexual violence is an examplehave received
publicity. The argument that some, or even many, political asylum applicants are
actually economic migrants is unsubstantiated. For example, in a South African
Broadcast Corporation Special Report, the narrator suggests that with few other
avenues open to immigrants seeking work, the political asylum process has become
ooded, with South Africa becoming the largest country receiving applicationsand also, turning them away. Just getting into the process is nearly
impossible.8
People who work on political asylum, whether the lawyers, judges, policy
makers or scholars, recognize that highly politicized cases have been more successful and that without publicity, some cases would not succeed at all. Celebrities
seeking asylum, for example, famous athletes or artists, also benet from an
already recognized country prole. Individuals who do not have a suciently political prole, according to the ocials, to warrant receiving asylum, have, in some
cases, been granted asylum after their cases received so much publicity that they
have been considered to be at risk for return because of the publicity, rather than
because of the persecution they claim in their application (for example Fauziya
Kansinjda). Films such as Getting Out create a prole for the individuals portrayed
and thus, perhaps, enhance their success with the asylum process. In particular,
applicants seeking asylum based on sexuality face the problem of proving that they
have a political prole that puts them in danger. Their activism in the UK and their
participation in the lm help to substantiate their claim to that prole.
Without a doubt, politicians and activists have made signicant inroads into
greater success for asylum applicants; several successful sexual minority cases relied

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on publicity and advocacy (Mohyuddin, 2001). At the same time, political advocacy has fueled persecution; in some cases, the categories of LGBTQ have been
seen as western and/or colonial imports; this perception has then been used as a
warrant for persecution. Getting Out includes an excerpt from Hilary Clintons
speech to the United Nations, in which she makes a plea to end persecution of
LGBT individuals. In the longer speech made to the UN, she argues that LGBT
people are everywhere and that being LGBT and/or Q is not a choice but a way
that people are. She argues ercely against persecution, but as we see in the lm,
her views are an example of what the persecutors in Uganda regard as imported
colonial values. Getting Out thus prompts viewers to consider the degree to
which the identity categories LGBT reect a western understanding of sexual
minorities based on individual conceptions of selfhood that do not necessarily
address the complexity of the experiences of sexual and gender minorities from
diverse cultures.
In a discussion of the complexities of cross-cultural inuences, impositions of
categories, and stereotypes regarding sexuality, Joseph Massad argues, The Gay
International is correctly perceived as part of Western encroachment on Arab and
Muslim cultures (2002: 375). Massad recommends a complex understanding of
highly visible (and often negative) westernized gay discourses in the Arab world,
including the role of sexual tourism. Getting Out refuses easy categories of sexuality
and, for example through Leons story, includes the contexts of sexual tourism.
Some of the people portrayed are themselves activists, and although they may be
unsuccessful in gaining any recognition from the bureaucracies, they are clearly in
control of their own stories. Part of the problem, as the lm makes clear, is that the
political asylum discourse looks remarkably like the persecution discourse in its
dismissal of the LGBTQI applicants for asylum. Although positioned to oer
protection as a remedy for persecution, the political asylum discourse, as represented in the lm, sustains the negative discourse of the persecutors. The problem
may be the discourse of protection itself. Matthew Price argues that discourses of
protection inevitably fail and that instead recommends an accountability approach.
The protection approach, which looks to a refugees exposure to harm rather than
to the identity of the agent responsible for the harm, relegates asylum to an essentially humanitarian, rather than political, role (2005: 357).
The rhetorical power of Getting Out therefore lies in its performative staging of
LGBTQI asylum seekers navigation of often competing cultural and legal logics
on sexuality. As Judith Butler pointed out in her 2008 lecture Performativity,
precarity and sexual politics, [N]orms are not only instances of power; and they
do not only reect broader relations of power; they are one way that power
operates (2009: ii). There is no gender without this reproduction of norms that
risks undoing and redoing the norm in unexpected ways (2009: i). The lm
prompts us to ask: What normative assumptions about the conditions of recognition underwrite the public and ocials engagement with LGBTQI asylum seekers?
And how do/can LGBTQI asylum seekers and their advocates navigate the legal
regulation of sexuality as a mechanism of exclusion?

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Within the rst few minutes of the lm, viewers are presented with an example of
the strategic use of discourses of contagion, invasion, and negation by parties that
support anti-gay legislation and those that oppose anti-gay legislation, and more
broadly, the legacy of using sexuality as an exclusionary mechanism of the state.
On 14 October 2009, the Ugandan anti-homosexuality law, known as the Kill the
Gays Bill, was introduced by a Member of Parliament David Bahati. (The bill was
reintroduced in 2012.) The bill aims to broaden the criminalization of same-sex
relations in Uganda domestically, includes provisions for Ugandans who engage in
same-sex relations outside of Uganda, and penalties for individuals, companies,
and organizations that support LGBTQ rights. The bill also includes a provision
for the death penalty for aggravated homosexuality. Daniel Englander notes that,
the Bill sparked a nationwide are of homophobia, where citizens, politicians, and
the media have branded homosexuals as un-African (2011: 1264). Supporters
argue that the law [is] designed to protect their traditional values against the
invasion of Western homosexuality (this disposition was represented in the lm).
As the narrator of the lm notes, The outdated provisions on unnatural oenses
echo those found in the penal codes of many of the former colonies of the British
Empire. Although local supporters in Uganda, who were interviewed in the lm,
view the bill as a law against the invasion of Western homosexuality, a western
man, interviewed by ABC news, tries to distance the West from its colonial past by
framing western interventions in support of the anti-gay bill as an eort to bolster
existing cultural values in the community. In the ABC news interview, when asked
if his comments might yield unpleasant outcomes he replies: Do you think that
these people have not already had a strong opinion against homosexuality? In an
ironic appropriation of anti-colonialist criticism, he argues that the accusation that
western Christian groups have brought homophobia to Uganda is racist and an
example of the colonial mindset all over again.
Human rights entanglement with colonialism points to a core debate between
cultural relativism and philosophical universalism in the history and development
of human rights law and its mobilization. Although justications for the persecution of sexual minorities sometimes refer to anti-colonialist rhetoric, they represent
a more complex web of Christian, local religious, historical, and cultural moral
discourses. The cultural traditions to which the relativist features of the Uganda
law and its supporters refer are not isolated or singular. Indeed, supporters arguments are clearly inected by Christian modalities and narratives that continue to
have traction in the West, namely the focus on the sin, not the sinner. We love
homosexuals but hate homosexuality. Anti-gay rhetoric in Uganda draws its
authority from religious discourse as well as from the Christian lobbyists who
promise billions in aid to Uganda (Englander, 2011: 1270). Thus in addition to
asylum reforms, cross-border activist collaborations, and international pressure,
LGBTQI rights activists must also engage the religious debates. By focusing on the
multiple layers of power and cultural discourses operating in the political asylum
process as well as transnational movements for LGBTQI justice and
local responses to these movements, Getting Out essentially prompts viewers to

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think about how sexuality and sexual rights operate as forms of transnational
exchange.

Queering human rights and political asylum

The political asylum process has several fundamental aws. On the face of it, the
most obvious aws that are revealed in this lm are: (1) the perpetuation of homophobic stereotypical assumptions embedded in asylum ocials expectations that
applicants prove their sexual status; (2) more generally, the problem of applying
western categories of sexuality to culturally dierent situations; and (3) contradictory ideas about the public and private display of sexuality (which led to the now
discredited idea that discretion is a solution to persecution). However, the lm
points to a deeper aw in the political asylum process, the idea of countries that
persecute and countries that oer safe haven. The political asylum process oers
safe haven but at the cost of sustaining a distinction between East and West, global
South and global North, developed and undeveloped countries. Getting Out therefore prompts us to approach LGBTQI rights from a transnational framework
attuned to how state mechanisms police sexuality and sexual liberty.
In using Getting Out as part of the genre of human rights documentary to bring
a transnational approach to the study of LGBTQI rights and political asylum, our
goal has not been to arrive at some uncontaminated rights discourse but rather to
consider how overlapping cultural and political discourses delimit the parameters
of public exchange on and legal recognition of the rights of gender and sexual
minorities. Here we refer to transnationalism to account for the circulation of
people, policies, and categories of sexual minorities that are central to political
asylum. However, as the lm demonstrates, the contexts in which LGBTQI individuals negotiate their rights are either relentlessly local, designed to prohibit any
sort of circulation, whether of individuals or ideas, or blatantly transnational, in
media messages intended for far distant audiences. In the local contexts, the ocials deny the rights of asylum seekers who base their claims on their status as
persecuted sexual minorities. The lm is part of a transnational public exchange,
and at the same time, with its focus on individual cases, it acknowledges that this
public exchange about human rights may have little impact in the local arena of
decision making. Getting Out also suggests through its depiction of Leon, that
LGBTQI asylum claimants face intersecting forms of oppression, and, as Susan
Hazeldean notes in her research, that LGBTQI asylum seekers are also vulnerable
to stigmatization and to the outmoded status [identity] and conduct [behavior]
distinction (2011: 405, 394).
Getting Out calls for a transnational sexual rights discourse that does not treat
confounding identities and vulnerabilities as an obstacle to political recognition. To
develop this critical rights discourse we turn to the insights that queer migration
scholarship oers with regard to these confounding identications, the limits of
identity-based systems of analysis and legal implementation, and the legal recognition of the multiple, contingent identities of the queer migrant (Chavez, 2013: 27).

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In Queer/migration: An unruly body of scholarship, Eithne Liubheid observes

that LGBT activism and queer studies scholarship oer two contrasting
approaches to identity-based rights. On the one hand, LGBT activism has long
been perceived as a recovery and valorization of histories and identities rendered
invisible and/or unspeakable (those who identify or are identied by others as
LGBTQ, tomboys, queens, etc.), and the LGBT rights movement has long been
focused on bringing LGBT persons into the language of the law, as same-sex
marriage rights. On the other hand, queer studies scholarship tends to focus on
identities that exceed existing categories, or that have been cast as impossible
subjects. Queer studies scholarship tends to place methodological emphasis on
how regimes of power and knowledge . . . generate structures of impossibility and
heteronormative governance (Liubheid, 2008: 175). Similarly, queer migration
scholars and activists call for the development of a coalitional political vision.
For example, Chavez argues that the queer migrant is an inherently coalitional
subject, one whose identities and relationships to power mandate managing multiplicity (2013: 9). Clearly, the universalizing logic of human rights can work in ways
that erase cultural particularities. Can asylum law accommodate a more uid
understanding of sexuality and sexual identity? How do asylum cases based on
culturally dierent concepts of sexual minority challenge the idea of universally
applied human rights? And further, if gay and lesbian activism has emphasized the
immutable nature of sexual identity, what is at stake in adopting a queer framework for sexual rights?
Getting Out may point us toward but does not overtly address the queering of
human rights. Importantly, Getting Out reveals how the obstacles to political
asylum are part of the heteronormativities that operate in both the countries
people ee and the countries where they turn to for refuge. The lm juxtaposes
scenes of brutality and hate-mongering in Uganda with encounters with political
asylum system bureaucracy and presents them as book-end obstacles representing
the fear of coming out in ones home country and the diculty of getting out (and
getting asylum). But Getting Out does not fully address how both situations make
queer individuals into impossible subjects, unrecognized and unknowable according to preconceived categories of normalcy. Butler observes the political predicament that rights discourse imposes on those who argue for protection against
discrimination. Rights discourse calls forth a presentation of oneself as distinct,
recognizable, delineated, a subject before the law, a community dened by sameness (2005: 52). Although this language may well establish our legitimacy within a
legal framework ensconced in liberal versions of human ontology, Butler argues,
and we concur, it fails to do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear
us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that
are not our own, sometimes fatally, irreversibly (2005: 52). Likewise, in her essay
Queering vulnerability: reconceptualizing the erotic in political asylum narratives,
Lewis calls for the queering of lesbian asylum narratives, which involves recognition of how violence and erotic agency co-exist. Lewis turns to queer conceptions of vulnerability and precarity as oering something other than sexual

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autonomy as an alternative to state violence (2013b: 22).9 Lewis also calls for a
theory of sexual rights grounded in the notion of erotic vulnerability or contingency (2013b: 18). She argues that such a theory would be a useful tool to adopt
in the context of the political asylum process insofar as it helps to pose the problem
of identity in lesbian asylum narratives (2013b: 18). Queering human rights thus
represents a shift from the atomistic subject of rights law toward the recognition of
coalitional subjectivities that reach for the causes of vulnerability and conditions of
belonging to the nation-state. Eorts to queer human rights, however, do not
escape universalizing logics. Rather as Getting Out demonstrates, LGBTQI
asylum seekers must carefully navigate both the universalizing logic of human
rights and the logic of xity that the asylum system engenders.

Conclusion
In sum, Getting Out calls attention to profound contradictions in the political
asylum system for sexual minorities and for any others who challenge the normativity of a social group. Of course, persecution itself targets individuals who fail to
conform to various locally and politically imposed normativities. Getting Out oers
important insights about how the political asylum process sustains those normativities; as the lm makes clear, the discourses of protection and the discourses of
persecution are both complicit in rendering LGBTQI individuals invisible and
illegible. Adopting a queer framework may push scholars and activists beyond
an understanding of sexual rights as solely a matter of navigating entrenched cultural and historical norms. Chavez articulates a theory of rhetorical interactionality
that highlights the complicated and dynamic way in which identities, power, and
systems of oppression intermesh, interlock, intersect, and thus interact (2013: 58).
Similarly, we propose that queering human rights is not about the delineation or
xity of intersecting identities, though certainly persecuted subjects experience
interlocking oppressions. Queering human rights aims to counter the logic of
xity that sustains oppressive social norms to produce the persecuted subject of
asylum law. A queer framework compels an analysis of what prevailing protocols
of intelligibility do not account for and render invisible and/or unknowable.
Rendered unintelligible, invisible, and unrecognized in the political asylum process,
sexual minorities attempting to get out are faced with the ultimate exclusion,
without any safe place to go.
Notes
1. Here we build on C Howe and J Rigi (2009) Transnationalizing desire: Sexualizing culture and commodifying sexualities.
2. For an overview of obstacles faced by LGBTQI individuals, see the Fahamu Refugee
Report (n.d.). The first successful applicant claiming political asylum on the basis of
persecution as a sexual minority was Fidel Toboso-Alfonso, a gay man from Cuba,
who received asylum in 1990, 10 years after he left Cuba on the Muriel boatlift
(Mohyuddin, 2001: 400; Canning, 2011; see also Neilson, 2005).

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3. Keenan writes, The very operation of refugee law in the context of sexuality confirms
the Western states status as place of modernity, cultural tolerance and political superiority, and that of the county of origins primitiveness, homophobia and general inferiority (2011: 43).
4. As we discuss, the categories LGBTQ and I are themselves fraught and, in many cases,
limiting. Transgender and intersex applicants face particular problems. Fatima
Mohyuddin discusses the term third gender to describe people around the world
who live outside of culturally imposed sexual and gender boundaries (2001: 388). In
some cultures, third categories, such as the hijiras in India, are recognized. Mohyuddin
provides descriptions of several transgender and intersexed applicants, some of which
were successful (2001: 404410). Also see Tom Boellstorffs The Gay Archipelago, which
focuses on queer activism in Indonesia or Martin Manalansans ethnography of queer
Filipinos, Global Divas. Both demonstrate that LGBTQ terms often co-exist with local
terms and/or are adapted with differential meanings in non-western societies.
5. See Keenans discussion of the overturning of the discretion requirement (2011: 35).
6. Keenan argues that, refugee law produces particular spaces and identities that most
queer women fleeing state-tolerated persecution fail to fit into (2011: 32).
7. See Keenans discussion of producing the vulnerable lesbian subject in the political
asylum process (2011: 35).
8. Documentary films and news articles about political asylum have pointed to inequities in
the system and also to controversies about the idea of providing safe haven, a relatively
non-controversial policy when it was first instituted, in part in response to the embarrassment of not protecting refugees fleeing Hitler during the Second World War. It was
relatively non-controversial to offer political asylum to individuals fleeing Communism
during the Cold War or to individuals from South East Asia in jeopardy from collaboration with the USA after the Vietnam War. Interestingly, the first sexual minority to gain
political asylum in the USA was from Cuba, so his success may have included a predisposed positive attitude toward his case (Mohyuddin, 2001).
9. See also Millers observations about how complexly queerness migrates, how it is constituted and constitutes itself differently on different sides of borders (2005: 163164).
See also Pulitanos discussion of the role of race in asylum hearings (Pulitano, 2013).

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Filmography
Fink M (2012) Abominable Crime. Dir. Micah Fink.
Kadlec S and Tullman D (2013) Born This Way. Dir. Shaun Kadlec and Deb Tullmann.
Neumann D et al. (2011) Getting Out. Dir and Produced by Daniel Neumann, Alexander
Chapman, Chris Dolan, and the Refugee Law Project.
Scgaliotti J (2003) Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World. Dir. John
Scgaliotti.
Williams RR (2012) God Loves Uganda. Dir. Roger Ross Williams.
Wright K and Worrall MZ (2012) Call Me Kuchu. Dir. Katherine Fairfax Wright and
Malika Zouhail Worrall.

Amy Shuman is an ethnographer and narrative scholar who, with Carol Bohmer,
has been conducting research on political asylum for more than 10 years. She is
Professor of Folklore, English, Womens Studies and Anthropology at The Ohio
State University and a fellow of the Mershon Center for International Security. She
is the author of many articles and three books: Storytelling Rights: The Uses of
Oral and Written Texts Among Urban Adolescents; Other Peoples Stories:
Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy; and, with Carol Bohmer,
Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century.
Wendy Hesford is Professor of English, Comparative Studies, and Womens,
Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the author of

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Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy, and Spectacular

Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms, winner of the 2012
Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. She is co-editor with Wendy Kozol
of two collections: Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the
Real, and Just Advocacy? Womens Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms,
The Politics of Representation. She has published essays and reviews in a range
of journals, PMLA, Biography, College English, Journal of Human Rights,
Humanity, Modern Drama, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and TDR: Journal of
Performance Studies, among others.

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