Feminist legal archeology, domestic violence and the raced-gendered juridical boundaries of U.S. asylum law

In 1996, a Guatemalan woman named Rody Alvarado was granted asylum in the United States but the decision was revoked three years later, triggering a controversy over border control, domestic violence and the standards of refugee protection. Through an intersectional, geographical and historical excavation of Alvarado’s case, I illustrate how adjudicators justified revoking asylum by initially framing her as a victim of unfortunate domestic abuse and then as a “scalar threat” to the spatial and legal order. By tracing the gendered and racialized discursive tactics and legal maneuvers deployed to prevent her from winning asylum, I demonstrate the raced, classed and gendered logics that structured legal decision-making and the pivotal role of intimate violence in processes of legal border control. Through a deep contextualization of Alvarado’s case, the paper advances critical and feminist geopolitical scholarship on the mutual constitution of the global and the intimate. In particular, I seek to advance feminist legal archeology as a methodology in political geography to make visible the discursive tactics and legal maneuvers involved in the struggle to delineate juridical and territorial borders, specifically as they relate to gender violence. I conclude by discussing how Alvarado’s case demonstrates the transcalar quality of the intimate in legal reasoning and the ways in which scale is differently constructed through the legal process to retain control over which bodies have access to political asylum.