The Normalization of Violence: Gender, Sexuality and Asylum

Abstract

This chapter looks at asylum as a key system of protection for vulnerable migrants. In focussing on how gender and sexuality have been taken up in the asylum system, I trace, through an analysis of UN documents, a discourse of increasing protection and the elimination of biases in the asylum system. This stands in direct contrast to actual practices of asylum recognition globally which are increasingly focussed on exclusion rather than inclusion. Put into the context of a broader system on migration control the asylum system naturalizes place and nation as a form of identification and represents movement as only ever possible under the most extreme forms of violence. The asylum system in this way participates in the more oppressive forms of migration control including detention and deportation.