Particular Social Group Trouble: Producing Categories of “Unworthy” Asylum Seekers

Developing ethnographic knowledge is largely about understanding and retaining nuance, complexity, and, even, contradiction. In the asylum courtroom, however, the law looks for certainty, clear percentages of likelihood of harm, and general, essential claims that a given people/country are a particular way. In this essay, I reflect on the ways in which the asylum system, by requiring that individuals be at risk because of their category (particular social group with immutable characteristics), casts other categories of people as inherently violent. I am particularly concerned with this dynamic in terms of gender-based violence claims, where women's very real fears of domestic abuse in Honduras are frequently argued in such a way that serves to reinforce the idea that Central American men are uniquely violent. This, then, undercuts the asylum claims of young Honduran men who are, at the same time, those most likely to be killed upon deportation.