Paper details
| Paper authors | Islam Al Khatib, Marion Bouchetel, Thanasis Tyrovolas, Shirin Heidari |
| In panel on | Sexual and gender minorities, humanitarian action and the Triple Nexus |
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Abstract
This paper explores how humanitarian responses, refugee policy, as well as solidarity and media discourse construct, obscure, and manage the vulnerabilities of queer refugees in a context of legal liminality and humanitarian retrenchment.
Based on the initial findings of a cross-country study in Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, and Switzerland, it critically examines how vulnerability criteria—often presented as apolitical tools of triage—are shaped by deeply gendered, heteronormative, and racialized logics. It also analyses how such criteria can perpetuate structural inequalities by essentializing and/or marginalizing groups whose vulnerabilities differ from dominant ideological and normative expectations.
In these four countries, asylum seekers across gender and sexuality face a complex web of marginalization. Those of diverse SOGIESC (sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics) are often omitted from institutional definitions of vulnerability, deprioritized in healthcare and protection services, and exposed to unsafe housing, mental health risks, and sexual violence. This is often combined with states of ‘legal liminality’ generated by unfair, instrumentalized and ever-changing asylum systems—including through lack of documentation, delayed decisions, shrinking of legal safeguards and pathways, and restricted mobility—which directly undermine refugees’ physical and psychological well-being.
In this climate, transactional sex and other survival strategies emerge not as isolated choices but as structural consequences of policy design. Yet, these are rarely acknowledged in vulnerability assessments or health interventions, rendering queer suffering both invisible and illegible. These dynamics unfold against a backdrop of shrinking humanitarian assistance, where the US-led defunding of global development and protection programs has compounded existing inequalities. Humanitarian actors are under mounting pressure to justify inclusion, enforce thresholds, and prioritize “legible” vulnerability—leaving those at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and displacement excluded from protections.
We argue for a re-politicization and re-thinking of vulnerability—understood as a socially
produced and power-laden condition—through feminist and queer lenses. Only by
acknowledging how systemic neglect, legal precarity, and eroded humanitarian
commitments co-produce layered queer vulnerabilities can we begin to reimagine responses that are inclusive, intersectional, and accountable.
