"Let's Get Some Family Chosen" Refugees, Homonationalism, and Queer Family Rhetoric

The expectation or hope that lesbians and gays would transform heterosexist family forms has been central to generations of queer activism and theory. However, now that a substantial contingent of queer life has aligned itself with established frameworks of marriage and inheritance, and now that sexual minority identity has—through a political rearrangement Jasbir K. Puar has termed “homonationalism”—become part of the national imaginary of several Western countries, what can the recourse to ‘chosen’ or queer kinship still make possible? This contribution explores instances of queer family rhetoric in relation to Muslim refugee subjects under conditions of homonationalism, focusing on two cases in particular. An episode of Canada’s Drag Race (2020), welcoming sexual refugees to the country, is shown to mobilize an expanded form of consubstantiality that approximates sexual and national identity, rephrasing “chosen family” in terms of selectivity and similarity. As a result, gayness functions as a proxy form of citizenship that precedes and conditions humanness. The second case addresses several apologies for Gay Pride Amsterdam chair Frits Huffnagel, who resigned after enduring protests against his anti-refugee statement in 2021. Here, appeals to queer kinship move beyond the singular favor of LGBTQI-refugees to the exclusion of others, primarily Muslims, as well as to a quasi-depoliticized form of internal discipline for those “within the family.”