Canadian media coverage of sexual orientation and gendered identity (SOGI) refugees presents a relatively uniform story of these queer newcomers. While LGBT media have identified problems in some Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) decisions, the hegemonic narrative remains one of ‘migration to liberation nation’. In this article I argue that this hegemonic narrative is produced in relation to particular socio-cultural and juridical-legal categories which are themselves historically produced in and through the bureaucratic machinery of the state, human rights organizations, and some legal scholarship. The effect of this model narrative is to reinscribe what Ahmed (2010) calls the ‘happy migrant’, that is, someone who espouses national ideals which are couched in terms of empire, the new twist being that sexual diversity is now held aloft as justification of empire’s liberation from abjection. Based on interviews with SOGI refugee claimants in Toronto.
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