Erasing violence: lesbian women asylum applicants in the United States

Despite growing recognition of sexual orientation- and gender identity-based violence, scholars continue to identify barriers for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals seeking asylum protection. Lesbian women asylum applicants, in particular, encounter a system that is unsure how to classify their cases and that generally questions the credibility of women's experiences. In this way, lesbian women applicants are among the most vulnerable populations of asylum claimants, particularly in the U.S. context. In this research note, I examine U.S. appellate level Circuit Court cases initiated by lesbian women asylum applicants. I expand existing literature to include an examination of how the violence faced by lesbian women is interpreted and ultimately erased as Circuit Courts grapple with legal interpretations of persecution. Specifically, I find three mechanisms of erasure: ruling that the violence experienced was unextreme, finding that the applicants' accounts of violence were unsubstantiated, or arguing that the violence experienced was unrelated to the applicants' sexual orientation. When placed in historical context, these patterns are troubling. Unlike previous decades that have witnessed overt homophobia, racism, and ethnocentrism in the immigration system, these cases indicate a more subtle form of exclusion-finding technicalities in case law and formal legal definitions as grounds for denial.