True Queerness: How Credibility Assessments regulate Queer Persons seeking Asylum

This thesis examines the role of credibility assessments in regulating which queer persons seeking asylum can attain international protection. The study departs from international guidelines that frame credibility assessment to investigate how these establish a regulatory regime of sexual truth. This is produced and reproduced by a culture of disbelief, both in the wider societal and political environment and in the structure and practice of credibility assessment. Moreover, this mechanism creates ‘good’ sexual citizens as opposed to the ‘bogus’ other, regulating who becomes deserving of international protection based on their perceived potential to assimilate to the image of queerness in their country of asylum application. The findings show that rigid and fixed categories, notions of objective and credible evidence, language, and decision makers shape how persons seeking asylum become legible to the system. Within this system, there is a systemic and systematic culture of disbelief towards queer persons seeking asylum, where suspicion has become institutionalised and normalised. Overall, credibility assessments produce unintelligibility, excluding those who do not conform to dominant normative imaginaries of queer persons seeking asylum, ultimately creating a self-justificatory apparatus. Truth, in the end, is illusory, and while credibility assessment guidelines produce sexual truth, it is enforced through practices of disbelief and unintelligibility, making credibility assessments epistemic regulators of queerness.