Gendering citizenship and migration: The sanctity of marriage and family in gender-related persecution claims in the Global North

The discourse on asylum adjudication has exposed an émigré’s non-economic motivations to migrate out of the country of origin. Queer narratives, particularly, illustrated that institutionalisation of heterosexuality, more often than not, forces citizens to escape violence against them. However, little attention is given to the impact heterosexual institutions of marriage and family have on women migrants. The experiences of women migrants are significant because the state, through laws and policies, constructs a polis (a city-state) where the dominance of prevailing heteropatriarchal-based gendered and sexual norms not only rests on disrupting the lives of non-heterosexuals but also hangs on sustaining the secondary status of women as citizens by institutionalising male privilege. This article aims to probe this phenomenon by investigating how heteropatriarchal norms and associated male privilege are institutionalised in the state through the immigration processes. Particularly, gender-related persecution claims are analysed to understand whether access to asylum is ascertained solely based on the adjudicator’s perception of the migrant’s fear of persecution as true or whether conformity to gendered expectations has any role to play in granting asylum. For example, women’s primary role within marriage and family, if repeatedly reasserted in the adjudication of asylum, consequently strengthens the inequality against women. Studying asylum discourse from this lens is significant because asylum law has altruistic motivations at its core. The nations of the Global North project asylum as a legislative step taken to counter gender prejudice and to provide violence-based protections to women from the degenerative Global South, making it harder to believe that gender-based prejudice can be a common occurrence in adjudicatory discourses of the Global North.