Refugees’ Transnational Practices: Gay Iranian Men Navigating Refugee Status and Cross-border Ties in Canada

Abstract

Despite the rise in displaced population numbers, refugees’ transnational lives, and those of sexual-racial minority refugees in particular, have remained at the margins of transnational migration studies. In this article, I focus on the case of gay Iranian refugees in Canada and analyze their pre-migration transnational lives and understandings of the asylum process, their post-migration transnational ties, and their activism practices. I underline refugees’ transnational agencies and argue against the rhetoric that represents refugees as passive migrants whose emigration means detachment from home countries. Based on my field work findings, I endorse analytical and methodological shifts to simultaneously explore refugees’ pre-migration and en-route lives in addition to their post-migration lives to stress the power relations that, through social ties, affect refugees’ transnational practices. I connect transnational, forced, and queer migration literature to the Bourdieusian social theory and, in conclusion, argue that it is necessary to deploy de-nationalized methods of inquiry to account for intra-group diversities as well as border-crossing social ties in addition to economic ties.