Navigating borders as good wives/good citizens

Abstract

This chapter examines how Canadian migration policies intersect with gendered norms and marriage practices in the case of Indian marriage migrant women. In the largely patri-virilocal cultures of India, a woman is expected to follow her husband to where he lives and/or works while maintaining close links to her natal home. In the case of transnational marriage migration, this norm is mapped across national borders, bolstered by family reunification policies and technological innovations like matrimonial websites that enable transnational matrimony. However, the Canadian state’s increasing focus on economic ‘designer migrants’, over spousal sponsorship policies, requires marriage migrants to be an economically self-sufficient conjugal unit, shifting educational and employment expectations for wives in order to be able to migrate. Using an intersectional and transnational lens, this chapter analyses the strategies and decision-making processes of 24 Indian marriage migrant women in Canada, who led the migration process as economic or student migrants in an inversion of the patri-virilocal norm, while negotiating patriarchal control and heteronormative boundaries enacted by their families and communities in India and Canada. It argues that in these cases, the onus lies on women to reconcile the state’s expectations with those of their husbands, families and communities.