“Have You Read Oscar Wilde?” Performing Queer Citizenship in Asylum Spaces

This paper contributes to the growing literature on law and performance by examining the experiences of queer refugees within the asylum system. It examines the performance demands placed on queer asylum seekers—specifically, the dimensions of embodiment, aesthetics, narrative, affect, and audience—while also considering the broader performativity that undergirds the legal system’s construction of queer subjects. It illuminates a fundamental tension between queer theory, which conceptualizes sexuality as infinitely capacious, and the law, which attempts to taxonomize it. It ultimately suggests that queer asylum seekers’ self-making reveals the impossibility of codifying queerness into law: the legal attempt to define sexuality, to prove it, only reveals the plasticity of queerness.