Narrativising One’s Sexuality/Gender: Neo-Liberal Humanitarianism and the Right of Asylum
Résumé
In neo-liberal democracies, gender and sexuality can provide people with the opportunity of asking for social and legal protection. Within the global legal-political framework, gender became a legitimate rights-claiming object at the end of the 1980s; this at the time reflected the novel focus of international human rights law and NGOs on women’s rights and violence against women (Ticktin 2006). Sexuality and gender identity, in turn, have attracted humanitarian attention only very recently. Today sexuality and gender-based right claims1 can be enacted by people claiming asylum in the Global North. Within the institutional settings defining the refugee-granting context, asylum seekers confront the legal interface, making their stories intelligible through intimate presentations of the self. In this chapter, I contend that in the process of certifying their sexuality and gender-based claims, asylum claimants’ autobiographical presentations are limited by a specific vocabulary established by the current humanitarian apparatus. Therefore, I here focus on how humanitarian mentality enters the politics of asylum, that is, the decision-making process structures, procedures, practices and discourses of support when sexuality/gender are put under legal scrutiny.