Gendered Asylum

"Women filing gender-based asylum claims long faced skepticism and outright rejection within the U.S. immigration system. Despite erratic progress, the United States still fails to recognize gender as an established category for experiencing persecution. Gender exists in a sort of limbo segregated from other aspects of identity and experience. Sara McKinnon exposes racialized rhetorics of violence in politics and charts the development of gender as a category in U.S. asylum law. Starting with the late 1980s, when gender-based requests first emerged in case law, McKinnon analyzes gender and sexuality-related cases against the backdrop of national and transnational politics. Her focus falls on cases as diverse as Guatemalan and Salvadoran women sexually abused during the Dirty Wars and transgender asylum seekers from around the world fleeing brutally violent situations. She reviews the claims, evidence, testimony, and message strategies that unfolded in these legal arguments and decisions, and illuminates how legal decisions turned gender into a political construct vulnerable to U.S. national and global interests. She also explores myriad related aspects of the process, including how subjects are racialized and the effects of that racialization; and the consequences of policies that position gender as a signifier for women via normative assumptions about sex and heterosexuality"-- "In this project, Sara McKinnon examines the contingent and conditional position of gender in asylum cases and charts the implications of the emergence of gender as a political category in U.S. asylum law from the late 1980s to 2012 against the context of broader national and transnational politics. McKinnon studies cases made by Guatemalan and Salvadoran women for relief from sexual and intimate abuse during what is now known as the "Dirty Wars," women from numerous African countries citing female circumcision as a form of persecution, Iranian women claiming that their political opinions as "feminists" and "westernized women" made them fear torture in Iran, and Chinese applicants fleeing state sterilization and abortion programs. The asylum cases show the ways in which gender is made, undone, and remade to serve U.S. national and global interests. The cases also illuminate how states offer protection (or exclusion) to particular subjects for the political, economic, and cultural viability of the state. McKinnon analyzes the claims, evidence, testimony, and message strategies that unfold in legal arguments and decisions and attends to national and global public discourses that shape the success and failure of particular asylum seekers. In doing so, McKinnon demonstrates the way U.S. national and global interests go beyond shaping gender's emergence as a political concept in asylum law to racialize sexuality"--

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of LGBTQ+, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.