Lawful Performance and the Representational Politics of Queer African Refugees in Documentary Film

ABSTRACT

This article explores lawful performance in documentary film representation of queer African refugees. Lawful performance is a framework I develop to identify a performative structure in which cultural production and everyday performances internalize and reproduce legal paradigms, such that legal logics remain the central paradigm against which to measure belonging, legitimacy, and value. I argue that Getting Out, a 2011 film produced by the Uganda-based Refugee Law Project demonstrates how documentary aesthetics, asylum policy, and international human rights parallel and reinforce one another. I interrogate the implications of using documentary to represent the experiences of LGBTIQ African asylum seekers to ask: how, if at all, a medium so focused on documenting and visualizing can intervene upon political frameworks that themselves are founded upon visualizing and documenting? I then look at a series of short films, the Seeking Asylum Series, produced by the queer African digital storytelling project None on Record, identifying how these films offer representational strategies that propose opportunities for refashioning queer asylum seekers’ relationships to dominant structures and how viewers might imagine queer asylum seekers within and beyond those structures.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender and sexuality
• refugees
• LGBTIQ
• representation
• politics
• performance
• documentary film

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this article, I use queer as a way to name emergent identities and practices that cut across gender and sexuality rather than as a fixed identity or political category. I do not use it to name a specific individual’s identity as many of the queer African asylum seekers who appear in these documentaries would not self-identify as such.

2 The asylum system itself can be argued to be a perpetuation of mid-20th century militarized European nationalism, as the first international legal definitions of refugees and the processes to protect them were established by the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention in response to the violent displacement of World War II. Many European nations and the United States itself were particularly unwilling to accept displaced Jewish people, suggesting a religious and ethnic othering of the Jewish people from these Christian and ethnically White majority nations.

3 While the focus of this article is about what reading documentary film as lawful performance can open up for the ways we think about defining queer African refugee belonging more than it is an explicit critique of documentary film itself, this analysis of film follows queer, feminist and African critiques of documentary film as articulated, for instance, by Ukadike (1995), Barlet’s (2000) critique of viewership and the gaze of African film in African diasporic contexts, Lesage (1978, 2020), Currier (2012).

4 Though None on Records podcast, AfroQueer, has published a story about Gibson, a gay man from Uganda who flees to Kenya and organizes the first Pride parade in a refugee camp, Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp.