Believing Asylum-Seeking Women: Doing Gender in Legal Narratives of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Abstract

In this article I seek to expand the understanding of what it means to credibly “do gender” for women seeking asylum in the United States. I present an empirical analysis of documents related to 30 women's affirmative asylum claims in the US from 2001–2018, which centre experiences of sexual and gender-based violence. My analysis reveals how women's credibility is achieved interactionally and institutionally when their written narratives and interview interactions reflect culturally salient and organizationally-embedded ideas about trauma and memory, culture and violence and, thresholds of harm. I demonstrate how credibility is refracted through these deeply gendered legal and cultural lenses, and how law and gender, in interaction, reframe and reconstitute the meaning of individual actions and narratives, producing and reinforcing a limited range of credible stories about gender-based violence that these women can tell.