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Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 - Transnational Publicity, Gender-Based Violence, and Central American Women's Asylum Cases -- 2 - Fixing Bodies, Fashioning Subjects: Constructing Gender through Rhetorics of Freedom and Choice -- 3 - Standing in her Shoes: U.S. Asylum Policy for Chinese Opposing Population Control -- 4 - The Rhetoric and Logic of one Sex, One Gender -- 5 - The Reading Practices of Immigration Judges: Intersectional Invisibility and the Segregation of Gender and Sexuality -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Index -- About the Author

"Women filing gender-based asylum claims long faced skepticism and outright rejection within the U.S. immigration system. Despite erratic progress, the United States still fails to recognize gender as an established category for experiencing persecution. Gender exists in a sort of limbo segregated from other aspects of identity and experience. Sara McKinnon exposes racialized rhetorics of violence in politics and charts the development of gender as a category in U.S. asylum law. Starting with the late 1980s, when gender-based requests first emerged in case law, McKinnon analyzes gender and sexuality-related cases against the backdrop of national and transnational politics. Her focus falls on cases as diverse as Guatemalan and Salvadoran women sexually abused during the Dirty Wars and transgender asylum seekers from around the world fleeing brutally violent situations. She reviews the claims, evidence, testimony, and message strategies that unfolded in these legal arguments and decisions, and illuminates how legal decisions turned gender into a political construct vulnerable to U.S. national and global interests. She also explores myriad related aspects of the process, including how subjects are racialized and the effects of that racialization; and the consequences of policies that position gender as a signifier for women via normative assumptions about sex and heterosexuality"--

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.

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.

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.

This book explores the ways that scholars, journalists, politicians, and citizens conceive of "the public" or "public life," and how those entities are defined and invented. For decades, scholars have used the metaphors of spheres, systems, webs, or networks to talk about, describe, and map various practices. This volume proposes a new metaphor-modalities-to suggest that publics are forever in flux, and much more fluid and dynamic than the static models of systems or spheres would indicate-especially in the digital age, where various publics rapidly evolve and dissipate. Contributors to th