The trauma narratives told by refugees in their appeal for asylum status in the United States are culturally constructed, based not only on local cultural discourses for talking about grief, tragedy, struggle, and displacement, but also on the legal and bureaucratic cultures of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (B.C.I.S.). On the basis of interviews with asylum seekers and with immigration lawyers and B.C.I.S. officials, we discuss the cultural obstacles of the asylum application process.

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Individuals claiming persecution on the basis of gender or as sexual minorities have faced many obstacles in the political asylum process including additional burdens of proof of identity and of persecution. Based on our own work with political asylum applicants, on legal reports, and on reports by groups providing assistance to asylum seekers, we review the law and the obstacles and consider the conditions underlying and supporting suspicion of the applicants. We observe how particular narratives are rendered untellable in the interrogation process and how the identities of sexual minorities become either invisible or hypervisible.

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