Disrupting Self-Representations

Confession, 'Coming-of-Age,' and Temporality in Queer SWANA Refugee Memoirs

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3948319
AutoresSuad Jabr (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, autor de correspondencia)
Año2025
Páginas1-27
Fecha de publicación2025-02-26
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650045.2025.2467420
OpenAlexW4408009354
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas47

In an increasingly hostile global asylum system, queer SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) refugee memoirs make political claims as sites of self-representation. In this paper, I analyse three Canadian-published queer SWANA refugee memoirs– Exiled for Love: The Journey of an Iranian Queer Activist by Arsham Parsi and Marc Colbourne, We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir by Samra Habib, and Angry Queer Somali Boy: A Complicated Memoir by Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali – to show how queer SWANA identities, selfhood, and refugee ‘journeys’ are commodified through the popular ‘coming-of-age’ structure of memoir. This structure is articulated through two interwoven narrative tropes – ‘queer out of placeness’ and ‘refugee displacement’. Utilising a feminist geographic approach, I analyse these tropes to show how queer SWANA refugee memoirs published in the west simultaneously reinforce and disrupt narratives of progress from youth to adulthood, from closeted to out, and from East to west

Art history · Epistemology · Memoir · Political science · Queer · Refugee · Sociology · Temporality · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · Gender, Security, and Conflict · History · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Philosophy