Closeted Labor

Examining the labor experiences of Iranian LGBTQ+ refugees in Turkey who await resettlement to the Global North, this article introduces the concept of closeted labor to theorize how the transnational asylum regime confines refugees within coerced, contained, and concealed labor relations. Although recognized as a “vulnerable” group eligible for expedited resettlement, Iranian LGBTQ+ refugees remain stranded in Turkey for years—sometimes over a decade—because of resettlement countries’ border closures and anti-immigration policies. During this prolonged wait, resettlement countries routinely neglect refugees’ essential needs, abandoning them to survive on their own, while Turkey’s asylum and labor laws simultaneously criminalize and constrain their means of survival. Extending the concept of “closet” beyond gender and sexuality to encompass labor, I argue that the asylum regime governs LGBTQ+ refugee labor through three interrelated carceral logics of the closet: coercion, containment, and concealment. It systematically coerces refugees into exploitative and injurious labor conditions, contains their labor through spatial confinement and economic incapacitation, and forces them to conceal both their nonnormative genders and sexualities because of homo/transphobia and their informal labor through deportability. Yet refugees continually devise strategies to navigate, subvert, and refuse these multiple forms of closetedness and survive within and against carceral asylum.