Archives of affective ambivalence in the governance of queer asylum

This article explores the politics of truth and recognition in the assessment of queer asylum claims in Denmark, focusing on how credibility is produced, evaluated and governed through affect. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with queer asylum seekers and immigration officers, alongside rejection letters from the Danish Immigration Service, I explore how asylum seekers are compelled to produce intimate affective archives of desire, fear and identity. These archives function both as forms of evidence and as sites of state discipline, yet they often exceed bureaucratic logics, appearing in ambivalent, fleeting and resistant forms. This article shows how the circulation and evaluation of affect operates as a technology of governance that shapes inclusion, exclusion and deservingness within the asylum system. By foregrounding ambivalence in queer affective archives, it argues for alternative epistemologies of queerness that challenge normative assumptions of coherence and consistency in credibility assessments.