Feminist Theory

Feminist Theory http://fty.sagepub.com/

Feminist asylums and acts of dreaming Heather M. Turcotte Feminist Theory 2014 15: 141 DOI: 10.1177/1464700114528769 The online version of this article can be found at: http://fty.sagepub.com/content/15/2/141

Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Feminist Theory can be found at: Email Alerts: http://fty.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://fty.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://fty.sagepub.com/content/15/2/141.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Jul 14, 2014 What is This?

Downloaded from fty.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CONNECTICUT on July 20, 2014

Article

Feminist asylums and acts of dreaming Heather M. Turcotte

Feminist Theory 2014, Vol. 15(2) 141–160 ! The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464700114528769 fty.sagepub.com

University of Connecticut, USA

Abstract This article explores how US legal expansions narrow justice possibilities. Drawing from Joan Scott’s work on experience, echo and reverberation, the article puts forth a method for reading the convergence of historical absences within legal subjectivity. In particular, it traces the denial of one Nigerian woman’s US political asylum claim within the context of US handlings of Nigerian human rights cases focused on petroleum violence alongside the expansion of political asylum to include gender and sexual violence. The article accounts for the production of gender within a larger context of colonial state violence and questions how gender becomes a viable legal category through a variety of violent histories that implicate the US. By reframing questions of feminist justice within the site of law, the article argues for a deeper engagement with discontinuous narratives, which read against our common sense understandings, as a first step in divesting in US legal privilege. Keywords Feminist historiography, gender violence, legal geographies, political asylum, transnational justice, US–Nigerian petroleum relations

In 2007, New America Media published an article about a Nigerian woman’s, Rosemary Okere’s, fight for political asylum in the United States (US) (Johnson, 2007). She came to the US along with her young son in the mid-1990s during a time of dictatorship, petroleum wealth and political unrest in Nigeria. In this news article narrative, she and her husband were journalists who wrote against the corruption of the government. They were ambushed and her husband was killed by Nigerian military police. She filed reports and requested a police investigation, but no government action was taken. When she began receiving death threats, she fled to the US for protection.

Corresponding author: Heather M. Turcotte, University of Connecticut, Unit 1024, 365 Fairfield Way, Storrs, CT 06269, USA. Email: [email protected]


142

Feminist Theory 15(2)

Considering the US’s recognition of human rights abuses generated in Nigeria, the innovative legal application of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) to file suit against multinational oil companies on behalf of petroleum communities’ human rights and the expanding conditions of US political asylum to include a variety of violences against women, I awaited the next article detailing her US asylum approval. No further articles materialised, and the results of her case remained uninvestigated. A later attempt to locate information about her case uncovered a news story in the Seattle Globalist, which focused on her son’s political asylum case. It mentioned she had been deported from the US (Hertz, 2012). How, in a context of increased recognitions of new forms of violence and strategies for legal justice, did Rosemary Okere lose her status as a candidate for political asylum and vanish from the discourses of petroleum and gender justice projects within the US? To answer this question, I explore how US legal expansions to include petroleum violence and violence against women silence a variety of violent histories that make gender a viable legal category. Historicising legal subjectivity offers crucial insight into why current US legal expansions should be questioned for their colonial, capitalist and imperial sensibilities beyond the fact that the US is a colonial settler state (see also: Smith, 2005, 2008; Byrd, 2012). Okere’s denial and the corresponding silence around her case is a consequence of colonial state violence and the failure to account for the historical convergences of petroleum and gender within the site of law. Despite feminist victories that have rendered some forms of gender violence visible and legitimate within legal frameworks, I argue that gender as a legal subjectivity continues to limit and, at times, completely foreclose justice possibilities. Joan Scott’s insights on feminist methods and historiography are crucial for historicising Rosemary Okere’s legal subjectivity. Okere becomes a deniable legal subject within a ‘historical process that, through discourse, positions and produce[s her] experience’ (Scott, 1991: 779). I examine how Okere becomes the wrong legal subject for gender and petroleum justice through historical processes that position her experience of violence outside of state definitions. In drawing upon Scott’s (2002) feminist reverberation method that accounts for the re-echoes and repercussions of feminist struggles, I read Okere’s legal subjectivity as the refusal of petroleum and gender binaries and the potential to expose the colonial fictions of legal protection. Additionally, historicising Okere’s US legal subjectivity and its deniability raises serious concerns about US legal expansions. In what follows, I put forth what I call a feminist historiography of justice as a method for reading the convergence of historical absences within US legal subjectivity. As the US extends its legal territory through gender, it is crucial that feminist justice projects attend to how law regulates what can and cannot constitute violence. Scott argues that ‘it is in the transgression of law, that one becomes a subject of the law’ (2001: 297). Rosemary Okere is not only an individual subject of law; she is a social figure who has been written in and out of the historical discourses of law. I take seriously Avery Gordon’s theorisation of the ‘ghost’ as a social figure to read competing power dynamics. Okere, I argue, can take us ‘to the dense site


Turcotte

143

where history and subjectivity make social life’ (Gordon, 1997: 8). In an expanding legal terrain of rights and protections, Okere is a haunting presence that suggests expansion is violence. A feminist historiography of justice accounts for nuances of violence in the site of law by investigating that ‘which appears absent [but] can indeed be a seething presence’ (Gordon, 1997: 17). Rosemary Okere redirects our attention for the possibility of social change. In the first section, I situate Okere’s case within a larger context of petroleum politics between Nigeria and the US and argue that her asylum would require the US to divest in petroleum profits and account for their own history of petroleum, gender and racial violence in the US and in Nigeria. I discuss how the US perceives (if at all) ‘petro-violence’ (Watts, 2001) and how Okere’s claim relies upon a direct link to multinational oil corporations (MNCs) and the use of ATS. However, even if Okere were able to make such a claim (and she is not), US courts limit ATS. The second section historicises the expansion of US political asylum to include domestic violence, arguing that it is embedded within a larger colonial and imperial history of gender violence. Here I read Okere’s case against legal histories of domestic violence to demonstrate how the figure of political asylum is made through the criminalisation of gender, the pathologisation of racial communities and the spectacle of violence against women. This limited understanding of gender violence situates Okere as the wrong type of US political asylum candidate and eliminates a variety of gender violence. In the last section, I turn to Okere’s son’s appeal to the immigration reform US DREAM Activists. I conclude that reading the Okeres’ cases together, as part of a history of legal imperialism and colonial violence, exposes US legal expansions as narrowing constructs. Such insight, I argue, can reconceptualise violence and raise questions about the necessity to divest in US legal privilege.

Political economies of petroleum, violence and law Rosemary Okere’s case is situated within colonial, imperial and capitalist histories that inform US social imaginaries about what violence looks like in Nigeria. The viability of violence is what is already known to be violent in Nigeria from decades of news reportage, academic knowledge production, US government policies and other legal cases. The viability of violence also relies on the dangerous assumption that the US has no relationship to the violence in Nigeria. However, the US is a participant in the production of violence in Nigeria in a variety of ways and particularly through petroleum politics (Ekine, 2001; Turcotte, 2011). In order for political violence to be legitimate and political asylum a workable framework, the US and Nigeria must be delinked from one another in such a way that violence resides in Nigeria and the US is a site of justice. Asylum adjudication fluctuates depending upon the ‘immigration judge’s work experience, personal bias, gender, and lack of training; by the court to which the case is assigned; and by whether the refugee is fortunate to have effective legal representation’ (Ramji-Nogales et al., 2009: xv). Decisions rest on a few


144


individuals who may (or may not) have an understanding of the historical geopolitical workings of capitalist violence. However, as Chandan Reddy (2011), amongst others (e.g., Luibheíd, 2008), has argued, rights, law and asylum are never about a few individuals; rather, these are structural and historical projects that institutionalise and naturalise state violence and profit maximisation through claims of protection and narratives of freedom. The state claim of protection and freedom through law relies upon simultaneous presentations of racial difference and invisibility to manufacture and consume citizenship. As Reddy (2011: 154) argues, ‘political and economic disenfranchisement of the racialized noncitizen immigrant and the racialized poor citizen is devised in the name of securitizing civil society for its entitled subject, the citizen as capitalist’. Similarly, in their discussion on the racial logic of debt, Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva argue, ‘the subprime crisis facilitated th[e] exacting of profits from places and persons produced as unsuitable economic subjects’ (2012: 365, emphasis in original). Crisis is produced through perceived expansion of property ownership to the once deniable, unsuitable economic subject. Chakravartty and da Silva (2012) argue the crisis of massive defaults and foreclosures is not a result of individuals who over extended themselves, but is an exacerbation point along a longer spectrum of capital’s racial logic that extracts profits from the poor and communities of colour. Legal subjectivity is intertwined in this making of (un)suitable economic subjects. Colonial histories of subjugation construct the modern suitable subject through racial, economic, juridical and moral differences between Europe and the rest of the world. Law naturalises racial colonial violence and subsumes it within capitalist architectures of the state ensuring profits for the colonial project (Mamdani, 1996). In thinking about political asylum as a racialised economic project of the state, US political asylum is a question of how the state and its citizens have constructed legal subjectivity and legitimate figures for citizenship (Luibheíd, 2008). Okere is denied legal subjectivity because her social figure and her experience with violence are limited within US definitions. In what context, then, is her experience with violence viable? To address this question, I turn to dominant US framings of petroleum violence. US dominant narratives detail Nigeria as a place of conflict, corruption, and human rights abuses (Klare, 2001). The US established a colonial presence through petroleum production. Since Nigeria’s independence from Britain, the US continues to remain a presence. US Chevron, as well as other MNCs, are colonial industries that profit greatly from years of petroleum extraction and production in Nigeria. While US projects such as AFRICOM claim to stabilise the oil industry and society, it is petroleum profits that dictate US relationships in Nigeria (Turcotte, 2011). These oil profits come at a severe cost to the rights and liveability of petroleum communities. Oil is an indicator of where violence happens in geopolitics (Klare, 2001). The 2000 US Department of State report, Patterns of Global Terrorism, listed the Niger Delta of Nigeria as a terrorist region ensuring further militarisation of


Turcotte

145

the oil-producing region (United States Department of State, 2000). Increasingly, petro-violence is presented as a result of gangs and terrorist movements (see critiques in Cioffi, 2010). These discourses of security, terrorism and gangs work together to conjure up racist and gendered images of violence that remove the structural conditions of petroleum violence and present it as endemic to Nigerian petroleum-producing communities. These presentations of endemic violence become the means through which violence can operate without having to draw attention to US culpabilities in the production and perpetuation of petro-violence. Petro-terrorists and petro-gangs are subjects that ‘come into being’ through US narratives of racial and gender threat embedded within the structure of the state (Turcotte, 2011). This endemicisation of petro-violence produces fantastical figures of threat who are new, but are also dependent upon older imaginaries of threat (Davis, [1978] 1998; Puar and Rai, 2004). As Scott argues, when one narrative becomes the overriding lens in which to understand the history and politics of our relationships, ‘other subject positions are subsumed’ by this identity (1991: 785). The figures of the petro-terrorist and petro-gang member become the ‘evidence’ of petro-violence without our having to contend with the violent histories that have led to the production of this subject. This is not to say such figures are not real, nor to suggest such subjects share some similar history of violence. It is to draw attention to the historical conditions that produce petro-violence as an endemic construction and ask: what is being mystified in this moment and for what (or whose) purpose? Rob Nixon argues that our attention to violence is given to the spectacular forms that occur in short bursts of time and place and there is a crucial need to attend to the seemingly uneventful, the naturalised and the ‘catastrophes that overspill clear boundaries in time and space’ (2012: 7). In this shift of perspective, new histories of violence emerge that contest and destabilise the US as both a neutral site and one of justice. Environmental degradation and loss of land, economic corruption and inequality, political instability, resource conflict and shortages, human rights abuses and militarisation, and various negative health effects are all part of the violence of petroleum production and consumption (Omoweh, 1995). Petro-violence literatures have drawn critical attention to the linkages of ecological and social violence of global capitalism that affect extraction communities disproportionately (Okonta and Douglas, 2001; Watts, 2001; Zalik, 2011) and reveal how contemporary sites of resource violence are inextricably linked to the exploitive relations of colonisation and global capitalism that include the US (see also, Ekine, 2001; Nixon, 2012). Petroleum violence is a structural condition of the interstate system. Considering petroleum violence within this broader historical context also expands the purview for what constitutes justice strategies against the state and MNCs. Community protests, and particularly women’s protests in Nigeria, have long challenged the conditions of petroleum and state violence. Community protests have drawn attention to the violence by halting production, which sometimes enables negotiations for social, political and economic benefits. However, the state


146


and MNCs quickly re-secure production by criminalising these strategies and the people who perform them (Turner and Brownhill, 2004; Turcotte, 2011; Zalik, 2011). The productive power of these social justice strategies is often difficult to engage with in relationship to US advocacy for petroleum communities because of the dominant narrative that continues to circulate about petro-terrorists and petrogang members, which constructs such communities as violent and responsible for the conflict. In addition, the public awareness of petro-violence in Nigeria is in a constant ebb and flow motion (see also: Nixon, 2012). In the mid-1990s, US consciousness about petro-violence was strong when Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Movement of the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) drew international attention to the widespread violence of the Nigerian state and petroleum industry, and oil giant Royal Dutch Shell (McLuckie and McPhail, 2000). The focus on a variety of human rights for Ogonis exposed corporate and state militarisation, as well as brought to light the histories of petroleum production that fostered sexual violence, torture, imprisonment, environmental and ecological violence. The expansive purview of the Ogoni movement linked layers of petroleum violence to the international system and to personal investments in oil. This increased consciousness, however, was unable to stop the state execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight Ogoni members. Since 1996, attorneys have brought suit against Royal Dutch Shell for human rights violations in Nigeria. In 2009, Wiwa v. Shell1 was assigned a trial date in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York under the Alien Tort Statute. However, the night prior to the trial Shell settled out of court for $15.5 million dollars and a stipulation that it was not culpable to any forms of violence nor connected to the Nigerian military (Earth Rights International and the Center for Constitutional Rights, 2009; Pilkington, 2009). While not denying the importance of monetary retribution, this financial exchange forecloses other possibilities of justice because it denies a plurality of petro-violence. What is at stake in buying out culpability, and what histories are elided in this financial contract? Reading Wiwa v. Shell in relationship to Bowoto v. Chevron (2008), in which Chevron was acquitted in a US court, raises further questions about legal justice. In 1998, US Chevron was accused of facilitating and supporting the Nigerian military police and security forces’ killing of community protestors and acts of violence against petroleum communities (Democracy Now, 2003). The Bowoto v. Chevron case charged Chevron with actions ranging from torture to wrongful death under the Alien Tort Statute and was tried in the US Federal Court in San Francisco, California (Center for Constitutional Rights, 2008; Justice in Nigeria Now, 2008). Chevron’s exoneration in a US court attests to US denial of culpability in petroleum violence. Could it be that recognising Chevron’s role in the production of violence would mean that the US would have to then hold Chevron accountable to the violence it produces on US soil right across the Bay from the San Francisco court house?2 While innovative in their use of the US Alien Tort Statute, neither case shifted the systemic violent practices of oil corporations and states. The cases


Turcotte

147

did, however, reaffirm that states are not culpable parties to petroleum violence. While it is important that these cases raised attention to violence performed by MNCs, and provided some individuals with monetary compensation, it is also necessary to think critically about who is actually served by these cases. In a US context, the acknowledgement of corporate violence depends upon if the US directly profits from this acknowledgement. Consider the British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon Spill in the Gulf of Mexico where the US government, gulf businesses and residents continue to have some level of legal success – from billions of dollars in payouts to guilty pleas for manslaughter from BP (Barrett, 2013). While the court cases against BP are following a very different legal avenue than ATS, the logic is similar – can corporations be held accountable for the death environments they create? Disturbingly, though, the expansion of US courts to account for petroleum violence in the BP incident is happening alongside the US courts’ shutting down of the possibility of taking MNCs to trial in the US under ATS. Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell is another case led by Nigerian plaintiffs against the Dutch–UK corporation for human rights abuses against petroleum communities during the 1990s.3 The 17 April 2013 ruling states US courts do not have jurisdiction under ATS and thus, Shell cannot be held accountable under a US court for human rights abuses in Nigeria (Safdi, 2013). While the US is able to reap legal benefits against BP within its own territories, as well as reaping high petroleum profits from Nigeria, it forecloses these options to claimants who are struggling against corporate state violence that implicates the US. The expansion of rights to account for petroleum violence is only made possible through the shrinking of rights for others. In commenting on the Kiobel decision, Safdi (2013) argues, The point is not that the US legal system should become the ultimate arbiter of global human rights violation . . . rather, it is that the US – and all of us within it – are already complicit in the atrocities . . . we are failing to hold ourselves accountable to the moral and human rights laws and standards we have helped to expound. . . . It’s also up to us to do our best to police our own investment and consumption behaviors, divesting ourselves from products that embody violence that we would so rather not see.

Safdi links US complicity in violence both in petroleum production, but also in legal rights and protections. She questions US participation as individual consumers, as well as a collective state that touts itself as a leader in human rights. Following her insight, I argue it is less a question of policing ourselves, than one of divesting in the profits we, as US citizens, accumulate from being US citizens. US citizenship as the comprehensive solution to violence buries the histories of violence that produce this extractive and privileged subject position. To divest in citizenship is to re-imagine our linkages to one another as part of a disorderly historical process in the making. I am not arguing for refusing people citizenship, but rather for further engagement with how the historical production of US citizenship and legal rights is built upon exclusions and debts of slavery, colonisation and


148


imperial expansion that can never be repaid (Smith, 2008; Chakravartty and da Silva, 2012). In her analysis of law as a form of advocacy for the victims of the Bhopal Disaster, Kim Fortun asks, can it ‘be anything other than a technology that reproduces and extends capitalist economies’ (2001: 29)? US law reproduces and extends capitalist economies in both its denial and persecution of petroleum violence. US petroleum justice advocacy needs to account for how law relies upon the construction of a suitable legal subject that elides US accountability in violence. As Fortun argues, ‘advocacy becomes a historical project’ (2001: 353). The figure of the advocate is also part of the construction of suitable US legal subjectivity. Advocating for petroleum justice means engaging in the histories of how the US – the state and its citizens – are made into privileged subjects through the political economy of petroleum, violence and legal advocacy. Advocacy is less about saving the victim than it is about attending to and shifting the structural histories of violence. As Fortun argues, advocacy must move past the ‘modernist hero to something different’ (2001: 354), otherwise the law continues to serve those in already privileged positions. Importantly, Rosemary Okere’s case is a product of these linked US–Nigerian histories. Her denial illustrates the political stakes of investing in US legal privilege. While Okere’s case was tried during the development of ATS cases against petroleum MNCs, it did not draw the attention of a US public or a petroleum justice advocacy network. Because US legal frameworks have failed to account for the expansive historical view of petroleum violence, dominant narratives of petro-violence as endemic criminal activity remain. As long as the US’s role in petroleum violence is silenced by law, Okere’s legal subjectivity remains illegitimate. However, examining Rosemary Okere as a political, economic and legal social figure within the histories of oil production illustrates a rupture within US presentations of petroleum violence and legal justice. Historicising the legal subject of petroleum violence draws attention to the role of the US state in producing petroleum violence in the US and elsewhere, which demands new logics and practices of US petroleum justice advocacy. In continuing my examination of expanding US legal terrains as foreclosing structures, the next section reads Okere’s case as a product of colonial legal regimes that continue to inhibit feminist justice possibilities. By situating Okere’s legal subjectivity within a larger history of gender violence before the law, I discuss how US political asylum to include domestic violence limits the conceptualisation of gender, violence and justice. Historicising Okere’s denial in the context of gender justice once again draws attention to how legal privilege hides the accountability of the state, and justice advocates, in the production of violence.

Gendered historiographies of legal violence Law has played a significant role in institutionalising violence and demarcating gender. Gender justice projects have struggled to create a legal space where gender,


Turcotte

149

sexual and domestic violence are legitimate claims for legal protection. While these laws can be considered a feminist achievement because they recognise new legal subjectivities and claims to rights, they are produced through the elision of colonial state histories of racial and gender subjugation and capitalist exploitation. Rosemary Okere’s legal subjectivity is intimately linked to these histories. Feminist legal critiques argue that domestic violence as a legal category creates new forms of regulatory practice that can generate violence and restrict justice (Alexander, 1991; Dowd and Jacobs, 2003; Sudbury, 2005). Domestic violence produces ‘women as a stable category’ and a ‘visible population’ (Grewal, 2005: 154), reinforces binary understandings of gender and maintains racial stratifications (Weisberg, 1996). The current US expansion of political asylum to include domestic violence necessitates a critical feminist examination attentive to the histories of violence within law. The argument that ‘law itself is violent’ is not new. Lucinda Joy Peach (2000) explains that women, if they are even recognised within the law, are at best victims of male violence. US ‘privacy acts’ delimited domestic violence as a male act against a woman within the private sphere making it distinct from systemic and/or public forms of sexual and gender violence, such as those performed by the military, police forces and sex tourism. Relatedly, Donna Dickenson (1997) argues that US ‘coverture laws’ ensured that any property with which a woman entered marriage became the property of the husband. Marriage ‘hinges on its assertion of male property in female bodies’ (Dickenson, 1997: 77). The production of gender as a legal category through property law and marriage regulations is about the production of race as a gendered legal category. As Peggy Pascoe (2009) argues, regulations of marriage are fundamental to the construction and changing context of racial legal categories and white supremacy in the US. The historical production of gender and race as legal subjects becomes legible through the social conditions of sexualised violence and particularly rape. Estelle Freedman (2013) argues, the definition of rape develops through social privilege and political power that upholds white patriarchal privilege, and racialised definitions of rape that are central to the legitimisation of domestic violence and the social perception of gender violence. In other words, domestic violence as a legal category is dependent upon the social perceptions and legal regulations of which gendered subjects are perceived as legitimately (or not) violated. US histories of slavery and colonialism deeply inform ideas of (il)legitimate violation that enable gender as a viable legal category. The racist lens of property rights and capitalist expansion situates domestic violence within the legal terrains of white privilege, which denies the lived conditions of gender, racial and sexual violence within state structures (Davis, [1978] 1998; Hartman, 1997; Smith, 2005). For instance, Cheryl Harris (1993) argues that during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries US property laws shifted from an understanding of owning bodies and land to one of owning ‘white identity’, which was an extension of legal claims. However, the expansion from white body to whiteness functioned to limit access and ownership to new markets of privilege. While the move from white bodies to whiteness could be perceived as bringing previously excluded bodies into the realm


150


of white privilege, in reality it gave the law (and its privileged creators) more power to regulate which bodies could (or could never) pass into whiteness. Historically, immigration and non-citizenship status complicate the production of suitable legal subjects of gender violence. As Kimberle´ Crenshaw (1995) argues, protection under the law compromises immigrant women’s access to social services in particular because of their fears of deportation, language barriers, unfamiliarity with US law and culture and the fact that numerous immigrant women experience domestic violence from ‘husbands’ who are not US citizens. Crenshaw argues that the law positions immigrant women for state and interpersonal violence because the ‘US government positions these women to absorb the simultaneous impact of its anti-immigration policy and their spouses’ abuse’ (1995: 359–360). Immigrant women are denied legal protections because their legal subjectivity is criminalised through citizenship laws. Additionally, immigrant women are often uninformed on how to navigate US legal structures and counsel resulting in the denial of their legal status as a victim, making detention and deportation more likely. This insight is particularly significant when considering Okere’s claim for political asylum. First, her political asylum is premised upon similar relationships (and regulations) of race, gender and immigration, which ensures her ‘victim status’ will be intensely regulated (and imagined) by the US state and justice advocates. Second, the logistics of navigating US legal structures are not any easier for people making claims to violence in other countries. Okere’s initial denial was a result of ‘bad information’ from her lawyer, and she was promptly detained and positioned more securely as an unsuitable legal subject. Third, if there is not a support network to help navigate and to advocate on your behalf, it does not matter how violated you are because there is no one to corroborate your story or appeal to privileged sensibilities. Not only did Okere not have a network of petro-justice advocates, feminist advocates did not utilise her experience as an opportunity to make claims to more expansive understandings of gender violence. In current US legal formulations, Okere is written out of the possibility of being granted asylum based on gender violence. This suggests an urgent need to re-imagine legal subjectivities within political asylum and reframe feminist advocacy to account for the intersecting structural histories of gender violence that render most subjects deniable. Okere’s historical insight reveals how feminist justice in the site of law also reproduces privilege for US citizens. Expansions of political asylum rely on narratives of endemic violence that position the US as a saviour and provider of justice. Even within the agendas that seek to eradicate gender violence, violence becomes legible only when there is a viable subject abused by her community, partner or inadequate ‘third world’ state. Rarely, is the US held accountable for its role in the production of domestic violence in other regions of the world; instead it is narrated as the protector of women’s rights. As Leti Volpp (2006: 1636) argues Respect for human rights is assumed to be inherent in some states and the violation of human rights inherent in the pathological culture of others. The first kind of state is


Turcotte

151

made up of citizens who have a social contract and exercise citizenship; the second is made up of subject victims, not citizens. The first kind of state is thought to have a civil society, rather than a culture; the second kind of state is presumed to have no civil society but a pathological culture that creates human rights violations.

The legal rendering of domestic violence hides how gender, racial and domestic violence are products of the interstate system. Additionally, international organisations, such as the United Nations or Amnesty International, are significant actors who have institutionalised gender violence as a global problem that can be ameliorated through an attention to women’s rights (Merry, 2003; Shepherd, 2008). This recognition of gender violence is filtered through an older geopolitical logic that renders some places and people of the world violent while others are in a position to save such populations. Women need to be produced as victims of racial and cultural oppression in order to gain access to the rights of the state. US political asylum expansions follow this logic – legitimate political asylum candidates come from culturally oppressive racial geographies. Again, this logic elides the violent histories of how a state becomes a perceived site of protection from domestic violence. Colonial law is critical to this historical formulation. It functions as a regulatory tool to secure, order and control colonised populations. British state law bifurcated justice into understandings of the customary (cultural) and the state (official) (Mamdani, 1996; Mbembe, 2001). The binary structure of colonial law segregated communities and global practices in a hierarchical fashion that protected state interests in the West. A crucial part of the colonial project is to transform or eradicate contrary practices in order to secure Western hegemony. Colonial law systematically erased existing social practices by criminalising them and institutionalising Western conceptualisations of violence, rights and protections. The colonial state enforced its monopoly on the legitimate use of force and naturalised unequal terms of exchange through legal codes (see also: Comoraff and Comoraff, 2006). The expanding context of ‘third world’ decolonisation during the 1960s also brought with it ‘first world’ reorganisation to maintain political and economic strongholds through practices of development, democracy and human rights (Williams, 2010). It is in the moment of colonial transitions that domestic violence surfaces as a legal category that positions the state as the protector of women from their families and communities. Elevating the figure of domestic violence in this moment works to silence the histories of structural and interpersonal colonial state violence. Postcolonial feminism has long detailed how colonial states build themselves through gender violence and the naturalisation of it (i.e., Alexander, 1991; Eisenstein, 2004; Kapur, 2005). As Amina Mama explains, ‘when we consider the history of women’s abuse, we must recognize that there have been pernicious continuities between colonial, nationalist and postcolonial systems’ (1996: 61). Violence against women, while historically present in a variety of forms during colonisation, emerges as a new identity in the postcolonial moment.


152


One of the ways to connect these histories to Rosemary Okere and the expansion of US political asylum is to ‘treat the emergence of a new identity as a discursive event’ (Scott, 1991: 792). For a feminist historiography of justice to account for how the law is the textual rendering of the state, one must read a variety of texts together to see the cultural critiques and counter-narratives that decolonise law. Take, for instance, Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1979), which culminates in a legal battle during Nigeria’s postcolonial transition. In it, the main character is called upon to be a character witness at the trial of her husband, who has been arrested for assaulting his neighbour. The courtroom exchanges present Nigerian culture as perpetually pre-colonial and violent and the law as culturally neutral and existing to protect ex-colonised subjects from the violence they perform on each other. While the husband is arrested for his perceived criminal acts against his neighbour, he is sentenced to prison for domestic violence against his wife. Emecheta’s text illuminates how domestic violence is written into postcolonial social imaginaries. The courtroom promotes endemic constructions of domestic violence as a way to erase the existence of colonial state violence. As Volpp (2011) argues, law disappears its own cultural construction, covering over the ways it is a cultural product of power struggles and serves state interests. In taking seriously Scott’s call to ‘read for the literary’ as a way to denaturalise social figures, I read Emecheta’s novel as a legal text that articulates gender legal subjectivity as a colonial product. The novel provides a window into seeing how the domestic violence victim emerges as a regulatory figure for the state. The moment in which gender violence is legitimated in law coincides with the reorganisation of colonial power and the advancement of global capitalism. Emecheta intervenes in the recolonising efforts of law by revealing how a domestic violence conviction fails to save the main character; instead, this new legal subjectivity extends the structural conditions of violence. In the end, the main character dies alone in complete poverty and, ultimately, it is the very law that claims to protect her that indeed kills her. Historicising texts like Emecheta’s alongside Okere’s denial of political asylum reveals how suitable legal subjectivity is made through violent configurations of race, gender and national culture that serve Western state interests (see also: Nnaemeka, 2004; Volpp, 2011). Through this reading, gender as a legal category is exposed for failing to account for the importation and colonial creation of gender. Additionally, presenting a legal geography of expansion mystifies these restrictive colonial contexts of racial and gender criminalisation by upholding a ‘third world woman’ victim of domestic violence to be saved by the West (Spivak, 1988; Kapur, 2005). Much like the petro-advocacy in the discussion earlier, advocacy for gender justice often fails to address the state’s, as well as the advocate’s role, in reproducing gender violence. Consider now, in this larger colonial context, the December 2000 US Department of Justice proposed R-A Rule.4 The R-A Rule is described as ‘propos[ing] an analytical framework within which gender-related and other new kinds of claims could be considered . . . [and it] was developed with an awareness of the


Turcotte

153

circumstances surrounding the persecution against women and recognizes that domestic violence is not only a private matter’ (US Department of Justice, 2000b). The proposal of the rule does not, however, detail the meaning of gender, women, nor domestic violence. The rule centres on gender, ethnicity and culture as ‘particular social groups’ that determine a person’s eligibility for asylum and are defined as immutable characteristics, social visibility and particularity that are not protected by the home state of the individual. In short, to be eligible for asylum the person must be able to appeal to what is already understood as gender, place and violence. Again, women need to be produced as victims of cultural oppression in order to gain access to the rights of the state. The case that strongly informs this proposed rule was one Guatemalan woman Rody Alvarado’s political asylum case based on the violence of her ex-soldier husband. Rody Alvarado was granted asylum by an immigration judge in 1996 based on the precedent of ‘female genital mutilation’. However, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (now Department of Homeland Security) reversed the decision in 1999 stating that while she was credible, she did not qualify for asylum because the persecution was not on the ‘account of social group membership and political opinion’ (Mendel-Hirsa, 2010). This ruling set in motion a decade-long struggle for her US political asylum based on domestic violence, which ended with her receiving asylum in 2009 after her attorney argued that she was in a social group of ‘married women in Guatemala who are unable to leave the relationship’ and two leading experts on ‘domestic violence in Guatemala’ gave testimonies (Mendel-Hirsa, 2010). The reversed decision and ten-year deferral of Alvarado’s asylum illustrates the difficulty of making claims to domestic violence even in intense and explicit instances of gendered violence. It takes a substantial amount of work to produce the credibility of violence and the meaning of gender because they rely on colonial definitions and imperial testimony about the acceptability of gender violence in geographies of the global south. In 2004, the US Department of Homeland Security reconsidered political asylum to include violence against women and domestic violence (Swarns, 2004), and again in 2009 the Obama administration moved to expand political asylum (McGreal, 2009; Blake, 2010). In each of these moments (2000, 2004, and 2009), the US approached the discussion of gender violence through attention to earlier US political asylum claims for protection against female circumcision in parts of Africa, which included Nigeria. This focus, as Nnaemeka (2004: 367–369) argues, silences the ‘West’s role in the creation and perpetuation of violent socioeconomic structures such as racism and unemployment’ that contribute to the production and exacerbation of gender violence on a far greater scale. This focus, rather, ensures that the expansion of political asylum can only account for extremely limited forms of gender violence that appeal to colonial racist and gender imaginaries of violence. The political consequence of advocating for US political asylum expansion is Okere’s deportation. Because Okere’s legal subjectivity emerges in the convergence of colonial histories and US legal imperialism, her approval requires her to prove


154


she ‘suffer[s] severe physical or sexual abuse from which [she is] unable to escape because it is part of [her] culture’ (McGreal, 2009). In this context, Rosemary Okere can never make legible claims to gender violence. US rights expansion affirms that gender is a spectacular legal subjectivity that draws our attention away from the structural and systemic formations of violence. The histories of state sponsored gender violence and the role of feminist advocacy are part of the historical production of a suitable legal subject, yet political asylum based on domestic violence does not address these historical conditions. In doing so, feminist justice projects often fail to be accountable to asylum denials and further legitimate gender violence in the site of law. Within an ever-expanding human rights regime that privileges law and the US, feminist investments in the law continue to require reflection. Feminist historiographies of justice offer a framework of textual and historical interdiction to expose this privilege in a variety of contexts. The state will continue to maximise its profits through new kinds of deniable subjects, so what would it mean to imagine a feminist justice project that decriminalises gender violence and divests in legal frameworks?

Feminist historiographies of justice Considering Rosemary Okere’s deportation as a product of transnational histories of petroleum and gender draws our attention to the limitations of legal justice. A feminist historiography of justice reads for the larger political and economic exchanges that inform legal subjectivity. Such a reading opens the space to rethink how current neoliberal framings of law are liable to the embedded histories of racial, gender and capitalist violence of the state. As Fortun argues, ‘liability calls upon us to question the order of things – to refigure how law works – to rethink how the past should be built into the future’ (2001: 352–353). The focus on petroleum and gender justice in the site of US law hides US liabilities. However, reading Okere’s case as the convergence of petro- and gender histories reveals past legal debts and the global imaginaries that confine legal justice. The site of colonial economic transitions continues to write law into being, and we must contend with these intergenerational histories. In 2012, Al Okere, Rosemary Okere’s son who stayed in the US after her deportation, called upon the DREAM Activists (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) to draw attention to his own impending deportation (Catchpole, 2012). The DREAM Act and President Obama’s 2011 enactment of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) extend and defer deportation. The DREAM Act was reintroduced to Congress in 2011. It provides a legal framework of six years’ conditional residency for undocumented students who have lived most of their lives in the US, attended at least two years of higher education or enlist in the military and have good moral character. The DREAM Act has not passed and has gone through a series of revisions. DACA, which is premised upon the DREAM Act rubric, provides two-year deferment of deportation to current undocumented youth who came to the US before the age of sixteen,


Turcotte

155

have proof of education or military service, and have not committed a felony, significant or more than two misdemeanours, or pose a threat to national and public security (American Immigration Council, 2012; Immigration Legal News, 2012; DREAM Act, 2013). In the short term, Al Okere’s case rests on his legal counsel’s ability to persuade Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to exercise prosecutorial discretion. However, the long-term viability of his staying in the US relies on Al Okere’s ability to be read as a suitable legal subject as well as a suitable figure for renewed justice advocacy around the DREAM Act (Catchpole, 2012; Immigration Legal News, 2012). While the current trend of expanding rights has increased capital to the US in explicit monetary forms (i.e., court and lawyer fees, tax revenue, and employment creation for non-governmental organisations, academics, lawyers, police, military, and immigration enforcement), it has also repositioned the US as a profitable geographic site that distributes rights and protections. Al Okere’s case comes into being because of the historical conditions of Rosemary Okere’s case. His deferment of deportation reveals the continued economic sensibilities of law that privileges US citizenship and requires immigrants to work toward the possibilities of law even though US legal status can shift to exclude them (see also, Luibheíd, 2008). Al Okere’s case also informs the acute need for access to legal rights now and the future capacity to divest in legal logics. Rosemary Okere’s ghost resurfaces in the context of her son’s impending deportation. Feminist historiographies of justice are tasked with reading through the fingerprints of colonialism to consider how transnational historical contexts have produced Al Okere as a potentially ‘new’ legal subject in the US. Historicising immigration reform within the complicated crosscurrents of colonial violence, legal expansion, feminist justice projects and the continued remarketing of justice provides a counter-narrative to new packaging of deferment. How long is justice deferrable? By engaging with the discontinuous narratives of petroleum and gender violence, a feminist historiography of justice reads against our common sense understandings and can be a first step in divesting in legal privilege. When we consider that the figure of domestic violence was written into history as an unsuitable legal subjectivity, we can ask what political role law serves within feminist justice projects. This is not to suggest a doing away with political asylum or movements that seek to eradicate violence against women, petroleum communities, and immigrants; rather, it is to continually make present historical relationships of power that are silenced within discourses of justice. Often in our struggles for change, we end up reproducing the very thing we seek to abolish. Part of the work of a feminist historiography of justice is to continue to interrogate unjust structures of privilege in a multitude of ways. Scott argues in our search for common ground that ‘power is produced in concrete and particular relationships, that subjects are structured as a function of these relationships, and that these subjects cannot transcend the specificity of their circumstances’ (2001: 303). In a context of expanding legal terrains and struggles for human rights and immigration


156


reform, it is urgent to account for the historical productions of legal subjectivity that continue to privilege the US. Acknowledgements I thank Lisa Diedrich and Victoria Hesford for their generous support and comments and for the anonymous peer reviewers’ productive criticisms. I am indebted to Anna Agathangelou, Samuel Best, Heath Cabot, Gina Dent, Jeff Dudas, Kristin Kelly, Jennifer Ho, Ronnie Lipschutz, Brian Locke, Asha Nadkarni, Michael Needham, Cathy SchlundVials, Tamara Spira and Gina Velasco for reading various drafts of this essay.

Notes 1. Wiwa v. Shell plaintiffs include family members of the Ogoni nine. 2. Chevron’s headquarters and large refinery, encompassing 2,900 acres, are in Richmond, CA, in close proximity to San Francisco. It has been subject to criticism for environmental racism, ecological demise and economic inequalities (Global Exchange, 2009–2011). 3. The plaintiffs filed under ATS in 2002 and in 2006 and the US District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed many of their claims. The case was appealed and, in September 2012, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held the decision that corporations could not be sued under the ATS. Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell advanced to the US Supreme Court on the question: could US courts continue to hear ATS cases for human rights abuses committed within the borders of a foreign nation (Center for Justice and Accountability, 2013)? 4. The R-A Rule ‘recognizes the longstanding principle that gender can be the basis for membership in a particular social group [that] can include victims of domestic violence who can not obtain protection from their own government’ (US Department of Justice, 2000a).

References Alexander, Jacqui M. (1991) ‘Redrafting Morality: The Postcolonial State and the Sexual Offences Bill of Trinidad and Tobago’. In: Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (eds) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 133–152. American Immigration Council (2012) ‘Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals: A Q&A Guide’. Immigration Policy Center, 17 August. Available at: http://www.immigrationpo licy.org/just-facts/deferred-action-childhood-arrivals-qa-guide-updated (accessed 01 March 2014). Barrett, Paul (2013) ‘BPs Big Payouts Amid Other Oil Spill Liability’. Businessweek, 27 June. Available at: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-27/bps-big-payouts-amidother-oil-spill-liability (accessed 01 March 2014). Blake, Jillian (2010) ‘Welcoming Women: Recent Changes in U.S. Asylum Law’. 108 Michigan Law Review First Impressions, 71–75. Available at: http://www.michigan lawreview.org/assets/fi/108/blake.pdf (accessed 01 March 2014). Byrd, Jodi (2012) The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critique of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.


Turcotte

157

Catchpole, Dan (2012) ‘CWU Student Locked in Deportation Battle’. Yakima HeraldRepublic, 21 January. Available at: http://www.yakima-herald.com/stories/2012/01/21/ cwu-student-locked-in-deportation-battle (accessed 01 March 2014). Center for Constitutional Rights (2008) Bowoto v. Chevron. Available at: http://ccrjustice. org/ourcases/current-cases/bowoto-v.-chevron (accessed 01 March 2014). Center for Justice and Accountability (2013) Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum. Available at: http://cja.org/section.php?id=510 (accessed 01 March 2014). Chakravartty, Paula and Denise Ferreira da Silva (2012) ‘Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capital’. American Studies Quarterly, 64(3): 361–385. Cioffi, Sandy (2010) Sweet Crude. New York: The Cinema Guild. Comoraff, John and Jean Comoraff (2006) Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Crenshaw, Kimberle´ (1995) ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color’. In: Kimberle´ Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas (eds) Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York: The New Press, pp. 357–383. Davis, Angela Y. ([1978] 1998) ‘Rape, Racism, and the Capitalist Setting’. In: James Joy (ed.) The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 129–137. Democracy Now (2003) ‘Drilling and Killing’. 11 July. Available at: http://www.democra cynow.org/2003/7/11/drilling_and_killing_as_president_bush (accessed 01 March 2014). Dickenson, Donna (1997) Property, Women and Politics: Subject or Objects? New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Dowd, Nancy and Michelle Jacobs (2003) Feminist Legal Theory: An Anti-Essentialist Reader. New York: New York University Press. DREAM Act Portal (2013) ‘Frequently Asked Questions: Basic Information’. Available at: http://dreamact.info/faq/1#1n5252 (accessed 01 March 2014). Earth Rights International and the Center for Constitutional Rights (2009) ‘The Case Against Shell’. Available at: http://wiwavshell.org/the-case-against-shell/ (accessed 01 March 2014). Eisenstein, Zillah (2004) Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism, and the West. New York: Zed Press. Ekine, Sokari (2001) Blood and Oil: Testimonies of Violence from Women in the Niger Delta. Oxford: Center for Democracy and Development. Emecheta, Buchi (1979) The Joys of Motherhood. New York: George Braziller. Fortun, Kim (2001) Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Freedman, Estelle (2013) Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Global Exchange (2009–2011)True Cost of Chevron Alternative Annual Reports. Available at: http://www.globalexchange.org/truecostofchevron/alternativereport (accessed 01 March 2014). Gordon, Avery (1997) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grewal, Inderpal (2005) Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harris, Cheryl I. (1993) ‘Whiteness as Property’. Harvard Law Review, 106(8): 1707–1791. Hartman, Saidiya (1997) Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.


158


Hertz, Ansel (2012) ‘DREAM Activist Facing Deportation Speaks out on MLK Day’. The Seattle Globalist, 17 January. Available at: http://www.seattleglobalist.com/2012/01/17/ dream-activist-facing-deportation-speaks-out-on-mlk-day/629 (accessed 01 March 2014). Immigration Legal News (2012) ‘Who Are the DREAMers?’ United States Immigration Policy and Current Issues, 5 February. Available at: http://immigrationlegalnews.word press.com/2012/02/05/who-are-the-dreamers/ (accessed 01 March 2014). Johnson, Julie (2007) ‘Mother-Son Asylum Seekers Pay High Cost in Separation’. New America Media, 2 January. Available at: http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_ article.html?article_id=bdc444204769b9a7a562bdee9b3a9345 (accessed 01 March 2014). Justice in Nigeria Now (2008) ‘Archive for the ‘‘Bowoto v. Chevron’’ Category’. 30 October. Available at: http://justiceinnigeria.wordpress.com/category/bowoto-v-chev ron/page/2/ (accessed 01 March 2014). Kapur, Ratna (2005) Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism. London: Glasshouse Press. Klare, Michael (2001) Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict. New York: Metropolitan Books. Luibheíd, Eithne (2008) ‘Sexuality, Migration, and the Shifting Line between Legal and Illegal Status’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 14(2-3): 289–315. McGreal, Chris (2009) ‘Obama Moves to Grant Political Asylum to Women Who Suffer Domestic Abuse’. The Guardian, 24 July. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2009/jul/24/obama-women-abuse-political-asylum-us (accessed 01 March 2014). McLuckie, Craig and Audrey McPhail (2000) Ken Saro-Wiwa: Writer and Political Activist. Boulder, CO: Rienner. Mama, Amina (1996) ‘Shedding the Masks and Tearing the Veils: Cultural Studies for a Post-colonial Africa’. In: Imam Ayesha, Mama Amina and Sow Fatou (eds) Engendering African Social Sciences. Dakar, Senegal: CODERISA, pp. 61–80. Mamdani, Mahmood (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mbembe, Achille (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mendel-Hirsa, Lisa (2010) ‘Domestic Violence and Political Asylum: Recent Landmark Victories in the On-going Struggle for U.S. Immigration Law to Recognize and Fully Protect Women’s Human Rights’. Empire Justice Center, 19 November. Available at: http://www.empirejustice.org/issue-areas/domestic-violence/battered-immigrants/articles /domestic-violence-and.html#1 (accessed 01 March 2014). Merry, Sally (2003) ‘Constructing a Global Law: Violence against Women and the Human Rights System’. Law and Social Inquiry, 28(4): 941–977. Nixon, Rob (2012) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nnaemeka, Obioma (2004) ‘Nego-feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 29(2): 357–385. Okonta, Ike and Douglas Oronto (2001) Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil in the Niger Delta. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Omoweh, Daniel (1995) ‘Shell, Environmental Pollution, Culture and Health in Nigeria: The Sad Plight of Ughelli Oil Communities’. Afrika Spectrum, 30(2): 115–143. Pascoe, Peggy (2009) What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press.


Turcotte

159

Peach, Lucinda Joy (2000) ‘Is Violence Male? The Law, Gender, and Violence’. In: Marguerite Waller and Jennifer Rycenga (eds) Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance. New York: Garland Publishing, pp. 57–71. Pilkington, Ed (2009) ‘Shell Pays Out $15.5 Million over Saro-Wiwa Killing’. The Guardian, 9 June. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/08/nigeria-usa (accessed 01 March 2014). Puar, Jasbir K. and Amit Rai (2004) ‘Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots’. Social Text, 72(20:3): 117–148. Ramji-Nogales, Jaya, Andrew I. Schoenholtz and Philip G. Schrag (2009) Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform. New York: New York University Press. Reddy, Chandan (2011) Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Safdi, Stephanie (2013) ‘Corporate Accountability for Human Rights: Kiobel’s Call to Action’. Huffington Post, 18 April. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ stephanie-safdi/kiobel-human-rights_b_3111575.html (accessed 01 March 2014). Scott, Joan W. (1991) ‘The Evidence of Experience’. Critical Inquiry, 17(4): 773–797. Scott, Joan W. (2001) ‘Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity’. Critical Inquiry, 27(2): 284–304. Scott, Joan W. (2002) ‘Feminist Reverberations’. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13(3): 1–23. Shepherd, Laura (2008) Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice. New York: Zed Books. Smith, Andrea (2005) Conquest: Sexual Violence and the American Indian Genocide. Boston: South End Press. Smith, Andrea (2008) ‘American Studies without America: Native Feminisms and the Nation State’. American Quarterly, 60(2): 309–315. Spivak, Gayatri (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’. In: Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London: Macmillan, pp. 271–313. Sudbury, Julia (2005) Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex. New York: Routledge. Swarns, Rachel (2004) ‘Ashcroft Weighs Granting of Asylum to Abused Women’. New York Times, 11 March. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/11/us/ashcroft-weighsthe-granting-of-political-asylum-to-abused-women.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm (accessed 01 March 2014). Turcotte, Heather M. (2011) ‘Contextualizing Petro-Sexual Politics’. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 36(3): 200–220. Turner, Terisa and Leigh Brownhill (2004) ‘Why Women are at War with Chevron: Nigerian Subsistence Struggles against the International Oil Industry’. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 39(1-2): 63–93. United States Department of Justice: Immigration and Naturalization Service (2000a) ‘Propose Rule Issued for Gender-Based Asylum Claims, 7 December’. Available at: www.uscis.gov/. . ./Gender-BasedAsylumClaims_120700.pdf (accessed 01 March 2014). United States Department of Justice: Immigration and Naturalization Service (2000b) ‘Questions and Answers, 7 December’. Available at: www.uscis.gov/. . ./R-ARule_120700.pdf (accessed 01 March 2014).


160


United States Department of State (2000) Patterns of Global Terrorism, 2000. Washington, DC. Available at: http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/2000/ (accessed 01 March 2014). Volpp, Leti (2006) ‘Disappearing Acts: On Gendered Violence, Pathological Cultures, and Civil Society’. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 121(5): 1631–1638. Volpp, Leti (2011) ‘Framing Cultural Difference: Immigrant Women and Discourses of Tradition’. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 22(1): 90–110. Watts, Michael (2001) ‘Petro-violence: Community, Extraction, and Political Ecology of a Mythic Commodity’. In: Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts (eds) Violent Environments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 189–212. Weisberg, D. Kelly (1996) Applications of Feminist Legal Theory to Women’s Lives: Sex, Violence, Work, and Reproduction. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Williams, Randall (2010) The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violences. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Zalik, Anna (2011) ‘Protest-as-Violence in Oil Fields: The Contested Representation of Profiteering in Two Extractive Sites’. In: Shelley Feldman, Charles Geisler and Gayatri A. Menon (eds) Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life. Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 261–284.
