Reclaiming Vulnerability as Structural Relation. A Postcolonial Feminist Critique of Asylum Governance

This article examines how vulnerability—long central to feminist and postcolonial ethics—has been repurposed in contemporary asylum governance as a tool of triage and selection. Drawing on scholarship on the bureaucratisation of vulnerability, I analyse how digital assessment infrastructures translate lived experience into administratively actionable categories and produce intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, sexuality, and coloniality. Within these infrastructures, women and children are coded as archetypal subjects of protection, racialised men are frequently rendered unintelligible as vulnerable, and queer applicants become recognisable primarily through Westernised scripts of identity and trauma. Bringing together Butler’s concept of recognisability and Brown’s wounded attachments, I show how asylum governance operates through a constitutive double bind of wounded inclusion versus ungrievable exclusion. Reclaiming vulnerability as a political relation therefore requires shifting the burden of legibility from claimants to institutions and foregrounding institutional accountability and epistemic justice.