Abstract
AbstractThis paper examines marital instabilities in the transnational social field connecting Pakistan and Britain, distinguishing between first marriages and remarriages. In British Pakistani families, national statistics show transnational marriage to be the dominant practice, although there is significant differentiation in its popularity. I show that in their remarriages, participants reevaluate the merits of transnational marriage, based on their experience of their unsuccessful first marriage. Despite considerable ambivalence towards cross‐border marriage, remarriage continues to be a channel for marriage migration because British nationality, citizenship and permanent settlement status can raise a participant's marital capital in a transnational social field, mitigating the devalued identity associated with divorce. Overall, the material raises concerns about internal racial discrimination and the harmful immigration policies that enable and support such processes. I show the necessity of adopting a combined intersectional and transnational approach to the study of transnational divorce.
Highlights
Zulfi was 37 years old when I met him for an interview at a fast food restaurant in East London
Zulfi's analysis, in the opening vignette, of the global geosocial inequalities that enable those with limited marital capital locally in the United Kingdom to remarry in Pakistan is exemplified by the three cases in my study where participants followed a first marriage between two British-born spouses with a transnational remarriage
Nida's interview suggests that migrants from Pakistan may suffer the consequences of harmful immigration rules that enable domestic control and violence, and, that once they acquire permanent settlement, they may sometimes seek to manoeuvre within the inequalities engendered by immigration status to try to protect themselves in their second marriages
Summary
Zulfi was 37 years old when I met him for an interview at a fast food restaurant in East London. This differentiation in the popularity of transnational marriages is reflected in equivocal stereotypes about migrant spouses from Pakistan among British-born Pakistanis, which Charsley and Bolognani (2017: 50) have recently brought to light.
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