Transnational Marriage and Partner Migration

Constellations of Security, Citizenship, and Rights

Edited by Anne-Marie D'Aoust

SERIES: Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts

Rutgers University Press

This multidisciplinary collection investigates the ways in which marriage and partner migration processes have become the object of state scrutiny, and the site of sustained political interventions in several states around the world. Covering cases as varied as the United States, Canada, Japan, Iran, France, Belgium or the Netherlands, among others, contributors reveal how marriage and partner migration have become battlegrounds for political participation, control, and exclusion. Which forms of attachments (towards the family, the nation, or specific individuals) have become framed as risks to be managed? How do such preoccupations translate into policies? With what consequences for those affected by them, in terms of rights and access to citizenship? The book answers these questions by analyzing the interplay between issues of security, citizenship and rights from the perspectives of migrants and policymakers, but also from actors who negotiate encounters with the state, such as lawyers, non-governmental organizations, and translators.

Seldom have I been so excited by an edited collection! This stimulating volume offers diverse disciplinary and geographical approaches to marriage and partner migration – increasingly recognized as a crucial aspect of international mobility. Troubling the binaries which often dog the subject - legal vs emotional, love vs interest, state vs intimacy and migrant vs citizen – Transnational Marriage and Partner Migration offers both an exciting and wide-ranging introduction for newcomers to this fascinating field, and fresh perspectives for those of us already hooked.' Katharine Charsley, author of Transnational Pakistani Connections: Marrying 'Back Home'

This multidisciplinary gem explores the emotional intimacies and legal intricacies of citizenship in today’s fraught context of ‘family’ migration politics. Doing so reveals the structural centrality of state-sanctioned marriage for reproducing – through eurocentric paradigms of love, citizenship and resource distribution – crises of sexual, racial and economic inequality. Not what most expect, and well worth a read. V. Spike Peterson, co-author of Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium

ANNE-MARIE D'AOUST is an associate professor in political science at the Université du Québec à Montréal in Canada. She is the editor of Affective Economies, Neoliberalism, and Governmentality.

Series Foreword by Péter Berta
Introduction: Thinking in Constellations: Marriage and Partner Migration in Relation
to Security, Citizenship, and Rights
ANNE-MARIE D’AOUST

PART ONE
Policing Rights and Belonging: Histories and Legacies of Marriage Migration Management
1 The Odd Couple: Gender, Securitization, Europeanization, and Marriages of Convenience in Dutch Family Migration Policies (1930–2020)
BETTY DE HART
2 “A Necessary Evil”? The Problematization of Family Migration in French Parliamentary Debates on Family Migration, 1974–1993
SASKIA BONJOUR AND MASSILIA OURABAH
3 “All the Time, Hard Time”: Narrative, Agency, and History in the Sinse Taryeong of Korean Marriage Migrants
JI-YEON YUH

PART TWO
Intersectional Effects of Contemporary Marriage and Partner Migration Management: Stratification of Rights
4 What Do States Regulate When They Regulate Spousal Migration? A Study of France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Denmark
HELENA WRAY
5 “I’m Not a Bad Guy, I Swear”: Analyzing Emotion Work and Negotiations of Criminality and Masculinity in Vietnamese-Canadian Men’s Participation in “Fake Wedding” Arrangements
GRACE K. TRAN
6 Moral Economies of Family Reunification in the Trump Era: Translating Natural Affiliation, Autonomy, and Stability Arguments into Constitutional Rights
KERRY ABRAMS AND DANIEL PHAM

PART THREE
Navigating the Security State: Couples and State Bureaucracies
7 Negotiating Trust and Suspicion: Lawyers as Actors in the Moral Political Economy of Marriage Migration Management in Canada
ANNE-MARIE D’AOUST
8 Intimacy Brokers: The Fragile Boundaries of Activism for Heterosexual and Same-Sex Binational Couples in France 171
LAURA ODASSO AND MANUELA SALCEDO ROBLEDO
9 He Said, She Said: The Complexity of Oral Relationship Narratives as Written Factual Evidence in Belgian Marriage Fraud Investigations
MIEKE VANDENBROUCKE

PART FOUR
Challenging Neoliberal Affective Regimes: Care, Work, and Economy
10 “I Don’t Even Know Where My Heart Is Anymore”: Migrant Bachelors and Immigrant Wives Lost in Time, Space, and Im/mobility
PARDIS MAHDAVI
11 Intimate Citizens: Filipina Migrant Hostesses in Japan
RHACEL SALAZAR PARREÑAS
12 Same-Sex Marriage against the Deportation State
EITHNE LUIBHÉID
13 Epilogue: Love Triangle: Nation, Spouse, Citizen
AUDREY MACKLIN
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Index

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