ABSTRACT

This article explores lawful performance in documentary film representation of queer African refugees. Lawful performance is a framework I develop to identify a performative structure in which cultural production and everyday performances internalize and reproduce legal paradigms, such that legal logics remain the central paradigm against which to measure belonging, legitimacy, and value. I argue that Getting Out, a film produced by the Uganda-based Refugee Law Project demonstrates how documentary aesthetics, asylum policy, and international human rights parallel and reinforce one another. I interrogate the implications of using documentary to represent the experiences of LGBTIQ African asylum seekers to ask: how, if at all, a medium so focused on documenting and visualizing can intervene upon political frameworks that themselves are founded upon visualizing and documenting? I then look at a series of short films, the Seeking Asylum Series, produced by the queer African digital storytelling project None on Record, identifying how these films offer representational strategies that propose opportunities for refashioning queer asylum seekers’ relationships to dominant structures and how viewers might imagine queer asylum seekers within and beyond those structures.

摘要

本文探讨了在纪录片中对非洲酷儿的合法表演。合法表演是我开发的框架，用于识别一种表演结构，在其中文化生产和日常表演内部化并复制法律范式，因此法律逻辑仍然是衡量归属，合法性和价值的主要范式。我认为走出去，这是一部由乌干达的难民法项目制作的电影，展示了纪录片美学，庇护政策和国际人权如何相辅相成。我询问使用纪录片来代表LGBTIQ非洲寻求庇护者的经历的含义：要问，如果有的话，那么专注于记录和可视化的媒介如何能够干预本身基于可视化和记录的政治框架？然后，我看一系列的短片，寻求庇护系列由同志的非洲数字叙事项目“无记录”制作，该影片确定了这些电影如何提供代表性策略，为重塑同志寻求庇护者与主导结构的关系提供了机会，以及观众如何想象这些结构之内和之外的同志寻求庇护者。