Sara L. McKinnon

Citizenship and the Performance of Credibility: Audiencing Gender-based Asylum Seekers in U.S. Immigration Courts

The Real ID Act of 2005 gave immigration judges more power over determining who is worthy to remain in the United States. One trend to emerge from this development is that judges in asylum cases evaluate the claimants’ credibility rather than the content of the cases in order to expedite their case load. To understand this shift I focus specifically on the conventions of audiencing used by immigration judges to evaluate the credibility performed by asylum seekers. I examine the cases made by women who claim asylum on the basis of gendered violence, as these are among the subjects most impacted by the dynamics of credibility. The argument proffered here is that the possibility of access to U.S. citizenship is increasingly dependent on asylum seekers’ ability to appear coherently credible, grounded on the performance conventions of good speech, narrative rationality, and embodied affect, which are based in exclusionary discourses concerning the proper performances of U.S. citizenship.

Unsettling Resettlement: Problematizing “Lost Boys of Sudan” Resettlement and Identity

In this critical qualitative examination of the “Lost Boys of Sudan” refugee resettlement, I explicate the ways that the “Lost Boys” negotiate discursive positioning by the U.S. state and nation in forging a sense of identity and belonging in resettlement. Specifically, I examine the ways that the men are recognized as subjects through the “Lost Boys” label and interpellated into U.S. belonging through racist discourses. Finally, I work to show how the particulars of exile and resettlement for the “Lost Boys” factor into the ways identity is communicated and belonging is negotiated for this particular community.

Positioned in/by the State: Incorporation, Exclusion, and Appropriation of Women's Gender-Based Claims to Political Asylum in the United States

Extending an important rhetorical tradition of investigating womens positioning/positionalities in the national imaginary, in society, and in the law, this essay examines how non-US citizen women and their experiences are deployed toward objectives of the US state. Specifically, I analyze the rhetorical significance of two precedent-setting gender-based asylum cases, those of Fauziya Kassindja and Rody Alvarado, to understand the different ways non-US women are positioned by the state. These cases reveal that women claimants, depending on the nuances of their claims, are incorporated into the state as “good” women, pushed to the margins because their rhetoric is “threatening,” or appropriated by the state because their “otherness” provides an image that the United States can deploy in demonstrating itself as the “good” state that protects and supports women.

Kiva.org, Person-to-Person Lending, and the Conditions of Intercultural Contact

Emerging groups such as Kiva International are using the Internet to make person-to-person microlending available by matching mostly First World lenders with Third World borrowers. This study analyzes 635 lender profile Web pages on Kiva.org to identify how Kiva International and its lenders imagine this intercultural, financial exchange through an analysis of discourses that lenders use in their lender profiles to describe their motivations for lending. This article first provides background on Kiva International and the role of the Internet in addressing power inequalities, and then explains the methodological approach. Next, we reveal the themes that emerged in our analysis of lender profiles, addressing the ways that neoliberal discourses of individualism and personal responsibility guide lenders’ motivations for participating in Kiva.orgs microlending process. Finally, we offer discussion and implications of this deployment of neoliberal discourse for intercultural communication, new media, and global financial exchanges, arguing that seemingly liberal and progressive Internet-discourses can perpetuate problematic neoliberal notions.

Kiva's Flat, Flat World: Ten Years of Microcredit in Cyberspace

Abstract While microcredit has been widely praised as a new, powerful tool for enabling development and empowering the poor, this form of ‘development from below’ does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, microcredit programs are inseperable from a host of neoliberal political, cultural, and economic practices and projects. These contexts are, however, systematically missing from Kiva.org, the largest and most popular peer-to-peer microlending portal. Instead, Kiva.org presents a placeless perspective on development and poverty, where borrowers’ skin color, native dress, and picturesque backgrounds seem to vary, but the ‘fix’ of microcredit remains universal. This ‘flat’ approach is problematic for two reasons. First, Kiva.org naturalizes the financialization of poor peoples disadvantage in the coercive form of debt. Second, lenders are encouraged to channel their desire to help alleviate poverty through Kiva.orgs lending portal based on an illusory sense of connection, transparency and beneficence in lending, thus potentially displacing other forms of less problematic development aid and intervention.

Excavating Gender in Women's Early Claims to Political Asylum in the United States

This essay examines how gender is figured as a discourse of U.S. political asylum through womens early gendered claims to political asylum. Using an archeology methodology, I explore how gender comes to matter discursively and materially in asylum courtrooms. Specifically, I find that sexual difference is used as an organizing schema for sexual violence, political access comes through assumed relationships to men with power, and womens subjectivities are figured as personal and private by court officials.

Rhetoric and Ethics Revisited What Happens When Rhetorical Scholars Go Into the Field

As rhetorical scholars adopt field methods to complement traditional text-based criticism, it is necessary to reflect on the ethical standards that guide our practice of rhetorical criticism and analysis. In this essay, we highlight five points of ethical tension provoked when doing research that moves between texts and fields: responsibility, truth, power, relationships, and representation. Each section illustrates an ethical dilemma from the authors’ individual research projects that illustrates one of these tensions, and is followed by a response that explicates the questions of power and ethics. While the ethics of any research practice are often tied to a specific project, many of the issues we discuss apply widely to the practice of fieldwork and rhetorical criticism in general, and many of the questions we raise also resonate with one another. As such, the dialogic quality of the essay is meant to serve as its content as well as its form. We suggest that rhetorical discussions of power help all qualitative researchers better understand what is at stake when we move between text and field in our research practice.

Gender Violence as Global Phenomenon Refugees, Genital Surgeries, and Neocolonial Projects of the United States

This essay investigates the mounting U.S. vision of gender violence since the 1990s as a global phenomenon. Focusing on U.S. legal, political, and media discourse about female circumcision in particular, and gender violence more broadly, this essay examines what U.S. imaginaries about global gender violence enable as warrants for neocolonial consolidations of U.S. power in the 21st century through international projects and programs of defense, development, and diplomacy. The essay first addresses the way female circumcision becomes recognized in the United States imaginary as a gendered violence that is distant from the United States and essential to the African continent and African women’s bodies. It then questions what the recognition of gender violence as a global phenomenon does for U.S. neocolonial projects of defense, development, and diplomacy. It is the flexibility of gender violence as a rhetoric—its ability to be both specific and general—that makes it most potent in the service of U.S. neocolonial practices and projects around the world.

US gender- and sexuality-related asylum law: The politics of transgender asylum:

This essay addresses the politics undergirding the incorporation of transgender refugee provisions in the US system of political asylum. I first outline how asylum provisions for trans persons have developed through legal decisions in relation to two related categories of asylum law—gender-based asylum and sexuality-related asylum. I then question the future of transgender asylum in the context of US transnational aspirations and anxieties. What does the incorporation of particular trans asylum seekers enable? What does it conceal? What US geopolitical and economic motivations help us make sense of trans asylum? This essay serves as both a meditation on the history of trans incorporation in this institution as well as a forecasting of the future for gender-related, sexuality-related, and transgender asylum in the United States.

Necropolitical voices and bodies in the rhetorical reception of Iranian women's asylum claims

ABSTRACT In the mid-1990s, US immigration courts were introduced to a group of Iranian women who claimed that they feared persecution because of their “pro-Western and feminist” political opinions and because of the way they performed gender on their bodies. The claims were, in total, unsuccessful bids to asylum. Analyzing these cases set against the geopolitical background of US–Iranian history and contemporary relations, I argue that their denials illustrate three important dynamics. First, building on rhetorical theorizing of voice and body, this essay demonstrates the uneasy reception in US law and politics of willful noncitizen women of color with explicit political voices and bodies, and second, the consequential racialization of these subjects as willful, unorderable migrant subjects too akin in their sovereignty to their state of birth. Third, this analysis adds to the fields attentiveness to geopolitics by consequently demonstrating US necropolitical desires toward Iran in the states engagement with these cases. I argue that for the United States to recognize these claimants as having political voices contrary to their state would be to recognize the presence and legitimacy of that state—a sovereign that challenges US power and modernity on the global stage.