The Sexual Politics of Asylum emerges from a 2 year long ethnography, which explores the experiences of 60 gender and sexual minority refugees in the UK. Bringing previously unheard stories to the forefront, this book challenges dominant notions about the construction of sexuality and gender as an instrument for claiming rights in a world shaped by postcolonial relations. Giametta first examines why the migratory experience of the studied migrants is located within a set of humanitarian-inflected discourses that privilege suffering and trauma. This is then followed by an assessment of the respondents’ biographical accounts, which uncovers how being situated in liminal socio-political and legal interstices produces precarious forms of life.    


Bio note

Calogero Giametta is a sociologist and visiting research fellow at the Centre of International Research (CERI) of Sciences Po, Paris. His research focus is on gender, sexuality and the political economy of migration. Between 2010 and 2014 his doctoral research examined the experiences of gender and sexual minority refugees, and the discourses linking the politics of sexuality and the British refugee granting process. In his current research he is examining the humanitarian and securitisation practices targeting migrant sex workers within the French migration regime. He is a post-doc researcher for France within the international ERC project 'Sexual Humanitarianism: Migration, Sex work and Trafficking' (2016-2020). He is the author of the Sexual Politics of Asylum (2017).
 

Activity within the doctoral programme Human Rights in Contemporary Societies, projeto de investigação «INTIMATE - Citizenship, Care and Choice: The Micropolitics of Intimacy in Southern Europe» 

Support: Grupo Inter-Temático de Migrações (ITM) do Centro de Estudos Sociais (CES) da Universidade de Coimbra