Articulaciones de raza, género y nación en el sistema de asilo español: narrativas jurídicas sobre los casos de persecución por motivos de género

This doctoral dissertation aims to analyse the narratives and official representations in the processing of asylum applications for gender-based persecution in Spain. In this sense, I interrogate how the categories of race, nation, and gender are imbricated in the assessment procedure and justify the final decisions while constructing asylum seekers, their cultures, their religions, and places of origin as otherness. Thus, from an interdisciplinary approach, the purpose is to contribute to feminist studies on the politics of membership and border making (Bhabha, 2010; Yuval-Davis, 2004). This research drew on theoretical debates on the three main categories mentioned above (race, nation and gender) and informed by more contemporary debates on the production of borders, the politics of membership and spaces of non-belonging to construct my problem of study. In this sense, the analysis discussed how the racial politics of biopolitics manifest in the invention of the European citizen as a socio-legal and cultural subject distinct from the non-EU immigrant -and the non-EU immigrant woman (Gregorio, 2012)-. Furthermore, the study focused on understanding how the symbolic dimension of gender is constitutive of the idea of Europe as a space of "Freedom, Security and Justice". Gender equality appears as a central value and a reality already achieved in the European Union member countries, a phenomenon that some authors have called gendernationalism (Dahinden et al. 2018) and femonationalism (Farris, 2017). Thus, gender is placed at the centre of membership policies to establish new restrictions on granting residence permits, family reunification and access to citizenship.