“Already emancipated”? Queer refugee women in the Netherlands, dirty labor and the paradox of respectability

Abstract

Based on a case study on queer women refugees from Arab-majority countries in the Netherlands, this chapter examines the role of Dutch homonationalist and femonationalist policies in regulating the lives of lesbian refugee subjects. It asks how an amalgamation of femonationalist and homonationalist discourses impacts lesbian refugee experiences, as well as their relations to forms of work that demand specific performances of respectability? How might we better understand the workings of femo/homonationalism when adequately accounting for lesbian refugees—subjects who are framed as “already emancipated Muslim women” by the Dutch state? How does an ethnographic engagement with respectability—considering that this notion is lived and negotiated alongside its nationalist and political-economic registers—deepen our understanding of how gender, sexuality and citizenship/race are classed by design? I argue that respectability manifests in relation to queer womanhood, labor policies and civilizational discourses in specific ways, most notably in the institutional influence and guidance that pushes them into dirty feminized and unpaid labor, and further remarkable in a context where femonationalist formations give lesbian refugees their status as both “already emancipated” and respectable in the eyes of the Dutch state. I further define the contours of respectability by delving into an analysis of civility and traditional womanhood within the LGBTI asylum system and civic integration policies that shape the lives of queer migrants. The nuances themselves contribute to my thinking with/through femonationalism as they crystalize how lesbian refugees are being interpellated as wives, mothers and traditional women, and simultaneously being framed as more civilized/emancipated.