Sharon Cowan

‘Hearing the Right Gaps’: Enabling and Responding to Disclosures of Sexual Violence within the UK Asylum Process

The barriers that prevent or delay female victims of sexual assault from disclosing to criminal justice authorities, and the obstacles that often disincline professional and lay decision-makers from finding such narratives credible, have been well documented. This article explores the extent to which such difficulties may be replicated, and compounded, in the case of female asylum-seekers; it will examine the complex ways in which the structure and processes, as well as the heavily politicised context, of asylum decision-making may contribute towards a silencing of sexual assault narratives. The article will explore the ways in which the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, culture, religion, language and nationality present distinct challenges to women asylum applicants for whom an alleged rape is a part of their claim, and reflect on some of the difficulties this presents in terms of assessing the credibility of sexual assault allegations, and of the overall asylum claim.

Looking Back (To)wards the Body: Medicalization and the GRA

IT IS true that the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) embodies what could be termed groundbreaking reform, in that it goes much further than the legislation of other jurisdictions in its protection of certain rights of transsexual people. However, as has already been suggested, there are a number of serious issues that the GRA does not address. The Act purports to move forwards, to look beyond the body, since a trans person need not have surgery in order to be granted a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC). But the Act’s continued reliance on psychiatric and medical understandings of what it is to be a transsexual person has simultaneously taken us a step backwards, in that the historical medicalization of the transgender ‘condition’ has now been given the stamp of statutory authority. As Ralph Sandland suggests in his contribution to this debate, the GRA is a repudiation of anything other than a heterosexual dichotomous sex/gender system and in this sense represents what he has called a ‘failure to recognize’. It is in the context of a refusal to question the heteronormative binary sex/ gender system that one might say that the GRA has failed to recognize the problem of the body. That is, the GRA takes for granted the separation of mind and body that dominates both medical and legal discourse. Here the dichotomy between mind and body is created by the heteronormative imperative to line up one’s somatic sex with one’s sexuality and one’s internal sense of sexed/gendered self. Feeling that one’s mind and body do not match, that one is in the ‘wrong body’ is not an uncommon way for transsexual people, or for those psychiatrists and other medial professionals who police the transgender boundaries, to understand and speak about the experience of what it means to be transsexual. Sally Hines (2007: para. 5.3, quoting Jay Prosser) argues that this discourse persists for transsexual2 people simply because this is genuinely what it feels

Reason to disbelieve : evaluating the rape claims of women seeking asylum in the UK

Asylum applicants in the UK must show, to a ‘reasonable degree of likelihood’, a well-founded fear of persecution, on the basis of race, religion, political opinion or membership of a particular social group, in the event of return ‘home’. This requirement presents myriad challenges both to claimants and decision-makers. Based on findings from a three-year national study, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, this paper explores those challenges as they relate to women seeking asylum in the UK whose applications include an allegation of rape. The study explored the extent to which difficulties relating to disclosure and credibility, which are well documented in the context of womens sexual assault allegations in the criminal justice system, might be replicated and compounded for female asylum-seekers whose applications include a claim of rape. Findings suggest that the structural and practical obstacles faced in establishing credibility, and the existence of scepticism about rape claims and asylum-seeking more generally, mean that decision-making can often be experienced as arbitrary, unjust, uninformed or contradictory, making it difficult for women asylum applicants who allege rape to find refuge in the UK.

The Elvis We Deserve: The Social Regulation of Sex/Gender and Sexuality Through Cultural Representations of 'the King'

This paper analyses the way in which the image, masculinity and sexual identity of Elvis Presley have been recently culturally deployed by particular social groups. It explores the way in which the image of Elvis is used by lesbian drag king performers who try to queer the cultural stereotypes which underpin the social regulation of gender roles; and the use of Elvis’s image by the U.K. fathers’ rights campaign group Fathers 4 Justice, as a sign of unthreatening familiarity to support traditional heteronormative ideas of masculinity and gender roles. These cultural re-appropriations of Elvis raise questions for contemporary understandings of sex/gender and sexuality; as the motto of the San Francisco-based Elvis impersonator ‘‘Extreme Elvis’’ suggests, “Every generation gets the Elvis it deserves.”