Women filing gender-based asylum claims long faced skepticism and outright rejection within the United States 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 L. McKinnon exposes racialized rhetorics of violence in politics and charts the development of gender as a category in American 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 American 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. Wide-ranging and rich with human detail, Gendered Asylum uses feminist, immigration, and legal studies to engage one of the hotly debated issues of our time.

This study provides a comprehensive account of the situation of women refugees globally and explains how they differ from men. It looks at causes of refugee flows, international laws and conventions and their application, the policies and legislation of Western governments, and lived experiences of the refugees themselves.

Winner of the 2018 British Society of Criminology Book Prize Britain is often heralded as a country in which the rights and welfare of survivors of conflict and persecution are well embedded, and where the standard of living conditions for those seeking asylum is relatively high. Drawing on a decade of activism and research in the North West of England, this book contends that, on the contrary, conditions are often structurally violent. For survivors of gendered violence, harm inflicted throughout the process of seeking asylum can be intersectional and compound the impacts of previous experiences of violent continuums. The everyday threat of detention and deportation; poor housing and inadequate welfare access; and systemic cuts to domestic and sexual violence support all contribute to a temporal limbo which limits women’s personal autonomy and access to basic human rights. By reflecting on evidence from interviews, focus groups, activist participation and oral history, Gendered Harm and Structural Violence provides a unique insight into the everyday impacts of policy and practice that arguably result in the infliction of further gendered harms on survivors of violence and persecution. Of interest to students and scholars of criminology, zemiology, sociology, human rights, migration policy, state violence and gender, this book develops on and adds to the expanding literatures around immigration, crimmigration and asylum.

This book examines the migration of women as gendered subjects to and from Turkey, using feminist research practices to explore a range of diverse experiences of migrant women as refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented or documented migrants. The collection includes contributions from researchers, practitioners, and migrants themselves to present a nuanced analysis that challenges binary divisions between ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ migrants and highlights the political and social agency of refugee and migrant women in Turkey. Drawing on a rich body of original empirical and theoretical research the volume explores recent policy change in Turkey, the political and social influences that have shaped migration policy (both internally and globally), and how women migrants have been positioned within its changing refugee and migration regimes. Analysis of the Turkish experience of redesigning migration policy in a country with weak civil protection against gender discrimination provides important lessons, in particular for countries in the Global South that are under pressure from the Global North to control and manage migrant flows. This interdisciplinary volume offers gender-sensitive recommendations for policymakers and practitioners and will advance global debates on migration management and governance across the fields of sociology, social policy, anthropology, labour economics and political science.

Today within neoliberal democracies, gender and sexuality provisions give people the opportunity of being granted social and legal protection. But how does the asylum system intervene within claimants’ understandings of themselves and in what ways does this affect their livelihoods in the country of arrival? The Sexual Politics of Asylum emerges from a 2 year long ethnography, which explores the experiences of 60 gender and sexual minority refugees in the UK. Bringing previously unheard stories to the forefront, this enlightening volume challenges dominant notions about the construction of sexuality and gender as an instrument for claiming rights in a world shaped by postcolonial relations. Giametta first examines why the migratory experience of the studied migrants is located within a set of humanitarian-inflected discourses that privilege suffering and trauma. This is then followed by an assessment of the respondents’ biographical accounts, which consequently uncovers how being situated in liminal socio-political and legal interstices produces precarious forms of life. Whilst the topic of asylum for gender and sexual minorities has attracted wide media coverage over the past decade, there persists a lack of academic attention to the complex experiences of these refugees. As such, this timely book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in human rights, sociology, anthropology, migration, sexuality, gender and cultural studies, as well as people working within the refugee granting process.

Questions of gender have strongly influenced the development of international refugee law over the last few decades. This volume assesses the progress toward appropriate recognition of gender-related persecution in refugee law. It documents the advances made following intense advocacy around the world in the 1990s, and evaluates the extent to which gender has been successfully integrated into refugee law. Evaluating the research and advocacy agendas for gender in refugee law ten years beyond the 2002 UNHCR Gender Guidelines, the book investigates the current status of gender in refugee law. It examines gender-related persecution claims of both women and men, including those based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and explores how the development of an anti-refugee agenda in many Western states exponentially increases vulnerability for refugees making gendered claims. The volume includes contributions from scholars and members of the advocacy community that allow the book to examine conceptual and doctrinal themes arising at the intersection of gender and refugee law, and specific case studies across major Western refugee-receiving nations. The book will be of great interest and value to researchers and students of asylum and immigration law, international politics, and gender studies.

Women at the Border analyzes border policing practices currently informed by paradigms of securitization against unauthorized mobility and explores the potential for a paradigm shift to a more ethical regulation of borders. By focusing on the ways women have sought to cross borders in ‘extra’-legal fashion, the book shows how border enforcement differentially impacts on some populations and makes the case that unauthorized migration requires management rather than repulsion and criminalization. When facing the emerging and future challenges of unauthorized mobility, border policing must be recast as a function of human rights that results in greater human security at the border. Examining gender and border policing across Europe, North America and Australia, this book enhances our understanding of the gendered determinants of ‘extra’-legal border crossing, border policing and the changing dynamics of unauthorized mobility.