Abstract
This chapter focuses on asylum declarations as legal documents that produce a particular national subject of trauma who desires entry into the United States. Specifically, Josephson examines the personal narratives of transgender, Latina migrants who are applying for asylum on the basis of gender identity. Asylum declarations bring together the discourse of the asylum seeker as a victim fleeing persecution with the discourse of the transgender person as a self-actualizing individual who chooses to migrate across gender and national borders. Josephson argues that the genre of the asylum declaration makes room for affirmations of family and community and for articulations of love, sex, pleasure, and other forms of embodied emotions that displace the normative discourses of nationalist desire.