Forces of love in queer asylum: Governing affect and the possibilities of the otherwise

This article examines the affective politics of love within queer asylum regimes in Denmark and Germany. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with queer refugees, volunteers and immigration officials, we analyse how love functions as both a regulatory and a generative force across asylum assessment and support practices. In the process of refugee status determination, applicants must not only establish the factual basis of their claims but also demonstrate ‘credible’ queerness through affect. Love thereby becomes a form of evidence – a means of rendering intimacy legible within bureaucratic frameworks privileging Eurocentric narratives of monogamous, romantic and publicly visible sexuality. Building on affect theory and Haritaworn's notion of the ‘queer lover’ and the ‘hateful other’, we trace how queer refugees are incorporated into national imaginaries of tolerance and diversity through their alignment with homonormative scripts of love. Nonetheless, we also show how these same affective frameworks generate new exclusions, rendering alternative forms of kinship, intimacy and care unintelligible. The article further explores how love circulates within queer refugee support organisations, where care and compassion function ambivalently as both protective and disciplinary. What we term protective love reflects the tension between safeguarding vulnerable subjects and reproducing hierarchies of race, citizenship and belonging. Finally, we highlight moments in which love exceeds regulatory capture (through, e.g., one's chosen family, collective joy and solidarity), creating affective spaces of survival and resistance. We argue that, while love is a central technology of governance within queer asylum, it also holds transformative potential as a force that sustains life and gestures towards queer futures beyond the state.