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This book is my PhD, a combined legal and sociological project on women and refugee status. It consists of (a) a statistical analysis (b) a content analysis of 252 asylum files of single women who applied for asylum in the Netherlands in 1994 (c) an analysis of all case law I could find in Dutch, English, French and German (d) an analysis of the debate among academics, NGO’s and policy makers.

The book was published by Ashgate in 2000. The version released here is the PhD version, printed in 1999. The PhD version is identical, but (a) contains more typos than the Ashgate version and (b) at some points the page numbering differs. I suggest that you refer to this version as Spijkerboer 1999/2000.

Thomas Spijkerboer: Gender and Refugee Status (1999/2000)

This article addresses the issue whether discourse analysis, when taken seriously, allows for positions that go against dominant discourse. I do so by analyzing Fassbinder’s movie ‘Angst essen Seele auf’ (Fear Eats the Soul) from 1974.

Notes on Fassbinder’s ‘Angst essen Seele auf’, in Hanne Petersen (ed): Love and Law in Europe, Ashgate, Dartmouth 1998, p. 81-96

In this article, I read a court decision on a gay asylum applicant through the lens of Fassbinder’s movie Querelle. I argue that when advocating asylum for persecuted LGBT people, notions of sexual identity should be simultaneously rejected.

Querelle Asks for Asylum, in Peter Fitzpatrick and James Henry Bergeron (eds): Europe’s Other: European Law Between Modernity and Postmodernity, Ashgate, Aldershot 1998, p. 189-217

In this law review article (in Dutch), I analyze how Dutch case law deals with asylum claims made by women who have been subjected to sexual violence.

Sheherazade en haar zusters. Sexueel geweld en vluchtelingenrecht, in Nemesis 1994 nr 4, p. 95-105

A report for the Dutch Emancipation Council, with an overview of literature. With the work of Heaven Crawley, Audrey Macklin and Sherene Razack from the same period, this text marks the beginning of an anti-essentialist perspective on gender and refugee law.

Women and refugee status, Emancipation Council, The Hague 1994