Citizenship and the Performance of Credibility: Audiencing Gender-based Asylum Seekers in U.S. Immigration Courts

Abstract

The Real ID Act of 2005 gave immigration judges more power over determining who is worthy to remain in the United States. One trend to emerge from this development is that judges in asylum cases evaluate the claimants’ credibility rather than the content of the cases in order to expedite their case load. To understand this shift I focus specifically on the conventions of audiencing used by immigration judges to evaluate the credibility performed by asylum seekers. I examine the cases made by women who claim asylum on the basis of gendered violence, as these are among the subjects most impacted by the dynamics of credibility. The argument proffered here is that the possibility of access to U.S. citizenship is increasingly dependent on asylum seekers’ ability to appear coherently credible, grounded on the performance conventions of good speech, narrative rationality, and embodied affect, which are based in exclusionary discourses concerning the proper performances of U.S. citizenship.