Georgina Colby 2026. Representing Gendered Structural Violence in the Asylum Process: The Refugee Tales. in: Representing Violence Against Women: Asylum, Voice, and Testimony Liverpool Liverpool University Press.
| Chapter title | Representing Gendered Structural Violence in the Asylum Process: The Refugee Tales |
|---|---|
| Authors | Georgina Colby |
| Abstract | This chapter addresses David Herd and Anna Pincus’s Refugee Tales project to explore how co-produced narratives can communicate public awareness and understanding of women survivors’ complex experiences of forms of gendered structural violence within the asylum system, particularly relating to indefinite detention. Through close readings of the tales, the chapter attends to how the Refugee Tales function to visibilise gendered harms in the asylum process and, crucially, reveal the complex nature of harms that can only be understood through stories of lived experience. The tales’ literary forms house the speakers’ experiences, which often involve trauma, without an imposition of linearity. The chapter documents how the narratives expose the relation between the demand for credibility and linearity in the asylum processes and the violence of retraumatisation. Experience-based storytelling in the Refugee Tales offers crucial forms of knowledge and aesthetic resistance that can expose and counter the forms of gendered structural violence imposed by asylum processes and indefinite detention. The chapter contends that the knowledge that arises from the safe, protected environment of the project, in which women are able to speak out, has the capacity to resist and critique the asylum processes that inflict harm upon the women within those systems. |
| Keywords | Refugee Tales; Gendered Violence; Asylum; Indefinite Detention; Literature and Human Rights; Literary Activisms |
| Book title | Representing Violence Against Women: Asylum, Voice, and Testimony |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publisher | Liverpool University Press |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | 28 Jan 2026 |
| Place of publication | Liverpool |
| ISBN | 9781836245650 |
| 9781836249368 | |
| 9781836249450 | |
| Web address (URL) | https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781836245650 |