Abstract
As with most states across the Global North, legal practitioners and policy makers in the United States have long struggled to recognize the significance of intersectional identities in the review of asylum cases. Since the 1980s, however, this tide has gradually begun to shift. As Sara McKinnon documents through intricate case review and discourse analysis, the complexity of gendered, religious, and racialized identities has been increasingly acknowledged in asylum case law over the past three decades.
Although this central point in Gendered Asylum is not necessarily nuanced, McKinnon focuses on such multifarious cases and pathways that the reader is enabled to see the underlying objectives of such changes in refreshingly nuanced ways. The text begins with a sophisticated analysis of historic and contemporary assumptions regarding gendered identities. It draws perspective from feminist studies, queer theory, critical race theory and identity politics but also from discrepancies and assumptions of what “gender” encompasses in the context of human and refugee rights internationally (p. 8). Splitting the book into five chapters, each with a focused case study, McKinnon draws in points of legal contention, including sanctuary from reproductive harms, transphobic abuses, and sexualized violence. What is achieved overall is a highly problematized overview of state practices, often under the guise of rights-based approaches to global borders.
Rather than producing a landscape that embeds gendered rights, McKinnon demonstrates how politicized topics à la mode become centralized, often as a way to deflect from the states’ own responsibility elsewhere and at home. That is, while certain practices become racially embodied in discourses around “other” states from which people require sanctuary—such as the association of femicide with Central America or female genital mutilation with the African continent—the United States is able to represent itself as “a pastoral state that protects women from violence” (p.22). This is despite the nation’s own roles in supporting some of the very regimes, militaries, and arms accumulation that have facilitated violence in the othered areas. Notwithstanding this is the fact that gendered violence remains endemic in the United States itself: it cannot be mythically relegated to regions beyond its own borders.
Throughout the text, McKinnon develops a sophisticated structural and sociolegal analysis of the gendered nuances of asylum in an intersectional context. It is perhaps the complexity of this analysis in which key strengths and weaknesses of the book lie. From an academic perspective, the depth of case law research is admirable. The key aspects of individuals’ cases for asylum are analytically deconstructed in reflection of broader political landscapes, in terms of both asylum legislation and the political objectives of successive governments, specifically in consideration of their foreign policies.
The weakness to this is that McKinnon does not necessarily make points of legal contention, or indeed her own perspectives on them, absolutely clear in some places. This is due, at least in part, to complex language but also to the number of issues she relates to the topic overall. Although perhaps inevitable because of the multifaceted objectives of the book, it has potential to confine the overall text to academia and legal practice. The possibilities of targeting this audience alongside asylum advocates, activists or nongovernmental organizations seems slightly diminished by this overall style. Likewise, chapter-specific case topics at times dismantle the flow in such a way that the book occasionally reads as a series of articles from chapter 2 onward. Indeed, because of this lack of clarity, it took me until the concluding chapter to fully acknowledge the author’s own stance on the direction of asylum policy or law.
With this in mind, the final paragraphs in particular make a direct and uncompromising assertion of what broader state objectives of gendered violence prevention truly facilitate in the U.S. asylum system. This is, McKinnon asserts, “a further extension of this neoliberal technique of migration control. . . . Focusing on those places that have been racialized as violent to women, the state can enact its pastoral care as global moral authority without the risk of being overwhelmed with migrants” (pp. 129–30).
This is a powerful recognition and one that is likely to be further tested in the new era of U.S. Republicanism, won at least in part by rampant racialization in the context of border controls. How intersectional gendered identities will fare in this forthcoming political era only time will tell. But if complex claims are inadequately considered or inconsistently handled, as McKinnon has evidenced from the past, then those who may depend most on asylum for sanctuary are likely to face the greatest barriers to receiving it in the future.