Feminist legal archeology, domestic violence and the raced-gendered juridical boundaries of U.S. asylum law

Abstract

In 1996, a Guatemalan woman named Rody Alvarado was granted asylum in the United States but the decision was revoked three years later, triggering a controversy over border control, domestic violence and the standards of refugee protection. Through an intersectional, geographical and historical excavation of Alvarado's case, I illustrate how adjudicators justified revoking asylum by initially framing her as a victim of unfortunate domestic abuse and then as a "scalar threat" to the spatial and legal order. By tracing the gendered and racialized discursive tactics and legal maneuvers deployed to prevent her from winning asylum, I demonstrate the raced, classed and gendered logics that structured legal decision-making and the pivotal role of intimate violence in processes of legal border control. Through a deep contextualization of Alvarado's case, the paper advances critical and feminist geopolitical scholarship on the mutual constitution of the global and the intimate. In particular, I seek to advance feminist legal archeology as a methodology in political geography to make visible the discursive tactics and legal maneuvers involved in the struggle to delineate juridical and territorial borders, specifically as they relate to gender violence. I conclude by discussing how Alvarado's case demonstrates the transcalar quality of the intimate in legal reasoning and the ways in which scale is differently constructed through the legal process to retain control over which bodies have access to political asylum.

Singled Out: Scaling Violence and Social Groups as Legal Borderwork in U.S. Asylum Law

“…The case spawned hope that asylum law would continue to be reformed for gender sensitivity. However, in 1999 the BIA denied the asylum case of a Guatemalan domestic violence survivor ( Matter of R‐A‐ 1999), which sent this burgeoning area of gender‐based asylum into a tailspin for over a decade (Gorman )…”

“…As I demonstrate, U.S. border enforcement practices designed to immobilize those fleeing Central America are prefigured by exclusionary scalar logics that are codified into domestic refugee law and practice (Gorman ). Using the methodology of legal archeology (Coutin ; Gorman ) to examine U.S. asylum case law, I demonstrate how the U.S. government has attempted to manage both mobility and territory by issuing increasingly restrictive legal definitions of the refugee, primarily in relation to Central American asylum seekers.…”

“…Building upon a growing literature in border studies, my research explores the relationship between the discursive frames that depict migrants as bogus or criminal (Mountz ; Mountz and Hiemstra ; Conlon and others ; Loyd and Mountz ); the deterrence, detention, and deportation strategies designed to thwart asylum seeking (Hyndman and Mountz ; Gill ; Coddington and others ; Hiemstra ; Martin ; Tazzioli and Garelli ); and the legal maneuvers used in refugee categorization (Gorman ). I seek to extend work on refugee categorization through attention to the socio‐spatial dimensions of legal interpretation.…”

Feminist legal geographies

“…In this introduction to our theme issue on feminist legal geographies, we provide a short entre´e to the papers by exploring the 'doing' of feminist legal geographic work through, first, a methodology-focused section. In the second section we turn to some of the key messages that the authors illustrate by way of research in Cambodia, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and the US in respect to the hopes and failures of law to exercise and claim various rights: to asylum (Gorman, 2019), housing (Meth et al, 2019), protective areas (Gillespie and Perry, 2019), reproductive choice (Statz and Pruitt, 2019), and legal rights and capabilities within marriage (Schenk, 2019), and in cyberspace (Farries and Sturm, 2019). Together, they speak the vibrancy of emerging feminist legal geographic literature and echo work in feminist legal studies, which is characterized by the breadth of subjects it engages with (Davies and Munro, 2016).…”

West Virginia waterscapes: Surface and mineral owners’ perspectives on groundwater contamination due to natural gas extraction

“…Considering that production of scale produces government and regulatory responses, there has been a call within political ecology to engage further with legal geography as laws and regulations shape "social and legal spaces in which extractive industries operate" (Andrews and McCarthy 2014:7). Legal geography scholarship has shown how legal cases can cause individual political issues to "jump scale" generating implications at the national and international level (Gorman 2018). Andrews and McCarthy (2014) suggest that attention to legal frameworks is an extension of, not in conflict with, political ecology's interest in informal and extra-legal arrangements.…”