Displacing Queer Refugee Epistemologies

Dreams of Trespass, Queer Kinship, and Politics of Miseration

The more masters one had, the more freedom and the more fun.

- Fatema Mernissi

In the past few years, I have focused my research on the inconsistencies in refugee regimes, wherein Iranian queer and transgender refugee applicants in Turkey who are waiting for their cases to be processed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Turkish state, and the "third country of asylum" are denied rights while seemingly living under the protection of rights.2 At first glance, it might appear that a mid1990s semiautobiographical text about Fatema Mernissi's (1940-2015) childhood in a Moroccan harem is irrelevant to my scholarship on refugee regimes and queer kinship. Nonetheless, this article brings together this seemingly disparate topics-queer and trans refugee sponsorship, queer kinship, and Mernissi's semifictional account of harem life-in order to question assumptions of incommensurability and to suggest an epistemic shift.

In what follows, I do not aim to "queer" (as an analytic) and re-read kinship theories, Mernissi's Dreams of Trespass, or Mernissi herself as transgressive and disruptive of gender, sexuality, or family norms. Nor am I interested in discovering a hidden queer subject, claiming a forgotten queer past, or imposing an intelligible identity or a desire to impose the queer on the main characters in Mernissi's memoirs. Instead, I want to encourage thinking about the epistemological assumptions in the Gender and Queer Studies curriculum that make it unacceptable to consider Mernissi's rebellious dreams as a teachable text. Many scholars of Middle Eastern studies have criticized Mernissi's knowledge, and I do not seek to honor Mernissi or his knowledge. My goal is to focus on the three Mernissian rebellious dreams, and I have divided this article into three related sections.

First, I analyze the potential ability of the text to help us understand queer kinship through temporal connections and correlations, and thus from European-American theories of kinship, heterogeneous blood ties, liberal ideas of choice, or identity-based interpretations. I go beyond the queer link. Second, I build on the notion of queer kinship - which frees queer kinship from the idealized notions of belonging and community through equality - to disrupt the refugee-oriented progressive temporality. Finally, with the theory of queer kinship and the globalization of asylum seekers through Mernissi's rebellious dreams, I question the division of queer studies and regional studies. I show how queer theory can be textual.