Troubling Gender And Asylum: Everyday Uses of the Law in a Post 9/11 World

This dissertation examines how law operates in the everyday through an analysis of the adjudication of gender-based political asylum claims in the United States. The author specifically interrogates how public discourses around immigration, border security and terrorism, and gender-based violence impact legal practices and decision-making. She argues that gender is discursively constructed as troublesome and that, in drawing on wider cultural understandings and practices, legal actors attempt to naturalize particular notions of the political, thereby precluding those experiencing gender-based forms of violence from asylum relief. The first chapter traces the development of asylum law from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 to the immigration reform laws of 1996, focusing on the entanglement of immigration and asylum law and U.S. foreign policy concerns. The author also begins to describe the courtroom context and associated chaos that is one of the principle findings. In chapter two she examines public discourses on immigration, border security, and terrorism and considers steps taken by the Bush Administration that directly impacted the adjudication of asylum claims in the Arlington court, including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Chapter three examines how divergent notions of the political clash in claims for political asylum. The state insists on an understanding of politics that is explicit and demonstrated through direct action and overt speech, while asylum seekers may put forward a more implicit notion of the political. New boundaries between the public and the private are constructed through this tension. In chapter four the author argues that gender is constructed as trouble and asylum seekers as troublesome. The author also contends that asylum seekers and their attorneys craft claims in ways that avoid putting gender at the forefront of the case or ignore the issue of gender altogether. In so doing, particular understandings of harm and the political are precluded from use.