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To be Feminist and Fearful: Shifting Categories in U.S. Asylum Law
During my ethnographic fieldwork as a Spanish-English interpreter between asylum seekers and immigration attorneys in New York, President Trump’s administration changed the rules under which women fleeing gender violence could apply for asylum. Attorneys had to switch strategies in the middle of the preparation of their client’s testimony for their immigration hearings. This talk discusses the effects of this shift from using the category of persecution based on a “particular social group” to claiming fear of return based on a “feminist political opinion.” I will present cases of Latin American women I worked with and address issues of representation, interpretation, and the making of a feminist liberal subject of human rights.
VALENTINA RAMIA is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Stanford University and a visiting research fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University. Her work is situated at the intersection between medicine and law, with particular attention to questions about the relationship between personhood, mental illness, and the representation of violence. Her dissertation, Psychic States: The Judgment of Fear in U.S. Asylum Law, examines how legal personhood is created through the psychological criteria of fear and its legal regulations. Her project is based on several years of ethnographic research undertaken as a Spanish-English translator on asylum seekers’ legal teams in New York. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Valentina had a career in politics and public policy in Ecuador. Her broader interests include the history of science, experimental ethnography, graphic novels, film, and music.
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