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 field's attentiveness to geopolitics by consequently demonstrating US necropolitical desires toward Iran in the state's 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Geopolitics
• transnational feminism
• state and legal rhetoric
• refugees and asylum seekers
• intersectionality
• biopolitics

Notes

1. Najmabadi V. Holder, 597 F.3d 983 984 (2010).

2. Ibid.

3. Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Jacqueline Bhabha, “Embodied Rights: Gender Persecution, State Sovereignty, and Refugees,” Public Culture 9 (1996): 3–32

4. Rebecca Dingo, Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, 2012); Sara L. McKinnon, “Positioned in/by the State: Incorporation, Exclusion, and Appropriation of Women's Gender-Based Claims to Political Asylum in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97 (2011): 178–200.

5. We can also read the relevance of this rhetoric in light of the current nuclear arms negotiations between the countries and what is being billed as the contemporary refugee crisis around the world.

6. Sarah Sharma, “The Biopolitical Economy of Time,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 35 (2011): 441.

7. Brian Amsden, “Negotiating Liberalism and Bio-Politics: Stylizing Power in Defense of the Mall Curfew,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 (2008): 407–29; Nathaniel I. Córdova, “The Incomplete Subject of Colonial Memory: Puerto Rico and the Post/Colonial Biopolitics of Congressional Recollection,” Communication Review 11 (2008): 42–75; Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, “(in)Conceivable: Risky Reproduction and the Rhetorical Labors of ‘Octomom,’” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 11 (2014): 231–49; Kelly E. Happe, “Parrhēsia, Biopolitics, and Occupy,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 48 (2015): 211–23; Amit Prasad, “Capitalizing Disease Biopolitics of Drug Trials in India,” Theory, Culture & Society 26 (2009): 1–29; Dana Schowalter, “Financialization of the Family: Motherhood, Biopolitics, and Paths of Power,” Women & Language 35 (2012): 39–56; Nathan Stormer, “Mediating Biopower and the Case of Prenatal Space,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27 (2010): 8–23.

8. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (2003): 11.

9. Ibid., 40.

10. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1999); Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

11. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Aihwa Ong, Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).

12. Melissa W Wright, “Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico–US Border,” Signs 36 (2011): 707–31; Sarah Lamble, “Queer Necropolitics and the Expanding Carceral State: Interrogating Sexual Investments and Punishments,” Law Critique 24 (2013): 229–53; Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Masood Ashraf Raja, “Death as a Form of Becoming: The Muslim Imagery of Death and Necropolitics,” Digest of Middle East Studies 14 (2005): 11–26; Christen A. Smith, “Strange Fruit: Brazil, Necropolitics, and the Transnational Resonance of Torture and Death,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 15 (2013): 177–98; Jessi Lee Jackson, “Sexual Necropolitics and Prison Rape Elimination,” Signs 39 (2013): 197–220; Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco, “Murderous Inclusions,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 15 (2013): 445–52; Anna M. Agathangelou, “Neoliberal Geopolitical Order and Value: Queerness as a Spectulative Economy and Anti-Blackness as Terror,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 15 (2013): 453–76.

13. Erik King Watts, “‘Voice’ and ‘Voicelessness’ in Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 180.

14. Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique 20 (1991): 5–32; Bonnie J. Dow, “Politicizing Voice,” Western Journal of Communication 61 (1997): 243–51; Michelle Fine, Disruptive Voices: The Possibilities of Feminist Research (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Nancy Cott, Public Voices: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1989); Stacey Sowards, “Rhetorical Agency as Haciendo Caras and Differential Consciousness Thorugh Lens of Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Class: An Examination of Delores Huerta's Rhetoric,” Communication Theory 20 (2010): 223–47; Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: The Problematic of Silence,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997), 170–82.

15. Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” 15.

16. One might situate this notion alongside the exciting scholarship on body rhetoric, which calls scholars to recognize the ways bodies proffer claims and warrants on their own behalf. Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, ACT UP, and Queer Nation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (1999): 18–35; Daniel Brouwer, “The Precarious Visibility Politics of Self-Stigmatization: The Case of HIV/AIDS Tattoos,” Text and Performance Quarterly 18 (1998): 114–36.

17. Gerard A. Hauser, “Incongruous Bodies: Arguments for Personal Sufficiency and Public Insufficiency,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (1999): 5.

18. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Style and Content in the Rhetoric of Early Afro-American Feminists,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): fn. 7.

19. DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments.”

20. Fatin V. Ins, 12 F.3d 1233, 1236 (1993).

21. Safaie V. Ins, 25 F.3d 636, 638 (1994).

22. Ibid., 640.

23. Referred to as Fisher in court documents, the last name of the man that the court denies she was ever really married to.

24. Fisher V Ins, 79 F.3d. 955(1995).

25. Ibid., 960.

26. Ibid., 960.

27. Ibid., 959.

28. Ibid., 959.

29. Fatin V. Ins, 1235.

30. Ibid., 1236.

31. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.

32. Azizah Y. al-Hibri, “Deconstructing Patriarchal Jurisprudence in Islamic Law: A Faithful Approach,” in Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader, ed. Adrien Katherine Wing (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 222.

33. Wendy Hesford, Spectactular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 5.

34. Joan W. Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Radha Hegde, “Eyeing New Publics: Veiling and the Performance of Civic Visiblity,” in Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media and the Shape of Public Life, ed. Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 154–72; Sherene H. Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

35. Dana L. Cloud, “‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’: Afghan Women and the <Clash of Civilizations> in the Imagery of the US War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 285–306; Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104 (2002): 783–90; Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Carol A. Stabile and Deepa Kumar, “Unveiling Imperialism: Media, Gender and the War on Afghanistan,” Media, Culture & Society 27 (2005): 765–82; Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, ed., Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism (London: Zed Books, 2008).

36. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review 30 (1988): 75.

37. Mahmood, Politics of Piety; Nilifur Göle, “Islam in Public: New Visibilities and New Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 173–90; Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Minoo Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Arzoo Osanloo, The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from Middle East to America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

38. Monisha Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

39. Nguyen, The Gift; Ong, Buddha Is Hiding.

40. Historians and scholars of international relations have documented the relationship between the United States and Iran. I will not rehearse those points here. What I do cue into is the surmounting political wrangling of the United States toward Iran during the early to mid-1990s that serves as contextual backdrop for the US immigration courts' negative rulings in these Iranian women's cases. For more information on the historical relation between the countries see: Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2008); Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrin and the Middle East (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

41. “Executive Order 12170—Blocking Iranian Government Property,” (Washington, DC: Federal Register, 1980); “Executive Order 12205—Prohibiting Certain Transactions with Iran,” (Washington, DC: Federal Register, 1980); “Executive Order 12211—Further Prohibitions on Transactions with Iran,” (Washington, DC: Federal Register, 1980).

42. Sasan Fayazmanesh, “The Politics of the US Economic Sanctions against Iran,” Review of Radical Political Economics 35 (2003).

43. Senate, Iran Oil Sanctions Act of 1995, 1st session, December 15 1995.

44. Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, The Iran Foreign Sanctions Act—S.1228, First Session, October 11 1995, 15.

45. When Gilman introduces it, Libya has not been included in the focus of the bill. Rather, all sanctioning focus is on Iran and Oil in Gilman's comments.

46. House of Representatives, Iran Oil Sanctions Act of 1996, 104–2, March 19 1996, 387.

47. Iran Oil Sanctions Act of 1996, 387.

48. Ibid., 387.

49. House of Representatives, Iran and Libya Santions Act of 1996, 104–2, June 18 1996, 6473.

50. Ibid.

51. The Iran Foreign Sanctions Act—S.1228, 12.

52. Ibid., 2.

53. Ibid., 7.

54. Fayazmanesh, “The Politics,” 231.

55. Presently, we also see US refugee and asylum law being used as a political tool. After having received only 2,000 of the over 4 million Syrians displaced since 2011, President Obama pledged in September 2015 to augment resettlement programs for Syrian refugees, arguing that it is the United States's responsibility to ally countries in the Middle East and Europe who were currently shouldering the burden of the displacement. Then, in the aftermath of the 2015 Paris attacks, it was rumored that one of the assailants carried a Syrian passport, which sparked a political maelstrom, led in large part in the United States by Republican governors and senators about refugee processes allowing “terrorists” admittance into the country. Those on the right throughout Europe have expressed similar sentiments. In the current context and in the analysis, the politicization of refugee law leads to further necropolitical exclusion and nonincorporation.

56. Bhabha, “Embodied Rights,” 3–32.

57. Ashleigh Reif Kasper, “Helping the Helpless: The Foreign Policy Strategies Underlying Humanitarian Rhetoric in American Refugee Law and Policy,” Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary 32 (2012): 348–49.

58. Mehdi Bozorgmehr, “From Iranian Studies to Studies of Iranians in the United States,” Iranian Studies 31 (1998): 4–30.

59. The refugee admittances for Iranians during the early to mid-1990s are as follows: 1991, 2,692; 1992, 1,949; 1993, 1,161; 1994, 851; 1995, 978; 1996, 1,256; 1997, 1,305. Asylum acceptances include: 1991, 232; 1992, 231; 1993, 347; 1994, 638; 1995, 785; 1996, 607; 1997, 408. US Immigration and Naturalization Service, “1997 Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service” (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1999), 83–86.

60. Mohsen M. Mobasher, Iranians in Texas: Migration, Politics, Ethnic Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012); Mehdi Bozorgmehr and Georges Sabagh, “High Status Immigrants: A Statistical Profile of Iranians in the United States,” Iranian Studies 21 (1988).

61. Sara Ahmed, “Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects),” S&F Online 8 (2010): 6.

62. Nguyen, The Gift.

63. Ahmed, “Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects),” 6.

64. A basic search at the University of California's Hastings Center for Gender and Refugee Studies (http://cgrs.uchastings.edu/) database of gender-related asylum cases demonstrated that numerous women from Afghanistan making claims similar to those of the cases analyzed here were granted asylum.

65. Fatin V. Ins, 1237.

66. Ibid., 1241.

67. Sharif V. Ins, 87 F.3d 932, 936 (1996).

68. Fisher V Ins, 962.

69. Safaie V. Ins, 640.

70. Ibid., 638.

71. Ibid., 638.

72. Emma Haddad, The Refugee in International Society: Between Sovereigns (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

73. Tanisha M. Fazal, State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

74. Fatin V. Ins, 1240.

75. Fisher V Ins, 967.

76. Judge Noonan's point likely informs the successful cases made by Iranian women through affirmative asylum processes. What is different about these cases and those I analyze is that because they move through the affirmative process, they never enter the official public transcript, meaning that though they receive asylum, these women's voices and bodies are never given space in the political record to speak to the state, nor can these cases be used as precedent later on. In being affirmative cases, they are not challenging in the way the defensive claimants are that I analyze here. For access to the details of these cases, see the University of California's Hastings Center for Gender and Refugee Studies.