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Whose Lives Count?: Queering Iranian Asylum Narratives
Abstract
Gelare Khoshgozaran, a multi-disciplinary artist in Los Angeles, gave her initial performance of “UNdocumentary” as part of the “welcome to what we took from is the state” exhibition at Queens Museum in New York. This first performance entailed the artist and audience members reading Khoshgozaran’s original declaration of asylum to the U.S. government. When this produced some empathetic and, in Khoshgozaran’s words, “depressed” reactions from the audience, including from queer women who felt they could identify with the narrative, Khoshgozaran altered the performance, re-writing the document to reflect how she understands her life trajectory, as opposed to what queer Iranian asylum seekers are expected to produce to become legible subjects of the state. Her second and third “UNdocumentary” performances in late 2016 were readings of this new document between streams of ice water poured over her, and against a backdrop of user-submitted Google Maps images of her native Tehran. Khoshgozaran’s refusal of legibility and empathy for a life narrative she (in some ways) lived, but simultaneously did not identify with, is a conduit for understanding how marginalized subjects can deploy their “right to opacity,” opening pathways to different modes of life. Employing a transnational feminist framework, I argue that “UNdocumentary” serves as an embodied interruption to heteronormative space (bridging geographical and imagined distances between Iran and the U.S., diaspora and empire) and time (via Khoshgozaran’s literally frozen speech invoking U.S. waterboarding torture techniques). To consider Khoshgozaran’s playfulness with space and time, I draw on Henri Lefebvre’s formulations of everyday life in The Production of Space and Critique of Everyday Life. Attending to MESA's call questioning how contemporary concerns, such as who gets to be a refugee, and how refugee-as-victim is constructed, Khoshgozaran’s performance unsettles borders as it simultaneously demonstrates the violence of them. "UNdocumentary" points to gaps in how the U.S. formula for "refugee-ness," specifically for Iranian queers, cannot map onto the lived experiences and complex reasons people migrate. I draw on Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity” to explore the productivity of refusal I read in Khoshgozaran’s artistic interpretation of the U.S. asylum process. "UNdocumentary" compels a consideration of how we may differently invest in queer forms of being and opacity, opening up planes of existence that re-calibrate our understandings of what constitutes life. Put differently, Khoshgozaran's embrace of opacity brings margins to center, unsettling how we produce and care for life, particularly life we cannot accept or understand.
Discipline
Art/Art History
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
Queer/LGBT Studies