Gender in Asylum Adjudication: Ethnographic Perspectives in the Swiss Asylum Administration

Since the 1980s, feminists and researchers showed that the legal definition of refugee is based on heterosexual male experiences and patterns (Freedman 2008, 2010 ; Stichelbaut 2009). In Switzerland, following the international evolution, “gender-specific persecutions” have progressively been taken into account through the law, through the jurisprudence and through a specific institutional practice of the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) (Barzé 2012 ; Miaz 2014). More than this evolution, this contribution questions how gender spreads through and plays in the asylum decision-making. In this paper, I focus on the practices of the decision-makers of the State Secretariat for Migration. First, I will argue that, more than the notion of “gender-specific persecutions”, the categories of refugee and of “vulnerable person” (d’Halluin 2016) rest on gender categories (sex, sexual orientation, gender identity) which intersect with others such as race/ethnic group, socioeconomic situation, age, handicap. Secondly, the practices and judgements of the street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 1980) of the SEM are influenced by gender stereotypes, intersecting with ethno-racial ones (Darley 2014) and shaping their moral judgement, their emotions and, possibly, their decisions.