Fictionalized Femininities and Body Politics Confronting Neo-Imperialism in the Discourse of US Asylum Policy Regarding Female Genital Cutting
Amber Ray
The expansion of asylum policy to include gender-related persecution has hinged upon the normative framing of FGC, particularly in the landmark 1996 Kasinga case. An examination of the framework of the decision to grant asylum to Kassindja through critical discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, however, belies the extent to which inherited colonial narratives and stereotypes about Africa and African women have permeated the larger context in which asylum cases are adjudicated. Although the normative content may have changed, the historical relationship between the West (or US) and Africa has not. Furthermore, the outcome of the case is a direct product of a particular confluence of contemporaneous issues, including confrontational advocacy within the feminist movement, a legal system bent on minimizing immigration while facing increased media pressure, and a political and social climate interested primarily in those voices that either at best facilitate, or at worst do not challenge the United States’ own domestic and international projects of modernization. Preeminent cases that have arisen post-Kasinga, such as Matter of Abankwah, demonstrate that the instrumentalization of these stereotyped images of difference have created a situation in which the possibilities of asylum for FGC and other gender-related persecution have been narrowed just as they have been apparently expanded.