Representations of gender and otherness in the assessment of asylum applications in Spain

Identification of discursive strategies and stereotypes in the authorities’ narrative

Abstract

This text proposes to understand how asylum procedures intervene in the construction of socio-legal borders and, to what extent, they become devices that produce subalternization and cultural difference through racialized representations of gender and sexuality. This research has drawn on a Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the cases of women seeking asylum in Spain under gender grounds persecutions, focusing on identifying the authorities’ discursive strategies in the judgments of the Audiencia Nacional and the Supreme Court. The analysis identified four strategies: the construction of suspicious subjectivities, the existence of hostile categorical generalizations related to the place of origin, the pathological presence of women applicants, and the hypervisibilization of certain types of gender violence as “non-European.” Finally, this research concludes that the categorization of asylum-seeking subjects brings gender into play as a structuring element of national identities. Likewise, two simultaneous processes take place, on the one hand, the attempt to legitimize exclusionary practices and, on the other hand, the essentialization of cultural difference, both having as common axis the production of places of non-belonging.