Marriage Migration Research Articles

From tourists to (im)migrants: intimacy mobility chains between Europe and Brazil

The construction of intimacy quite often implies fluxes and mobilities. Building upon this premise, the article delves into the chains of dislocations associated with the transnationalisation of intimacy led by European men and Brazilian women who find themselves in the tourism meeting ground of Ponta Negra (Natal-RN, Northeast Brazil). The primary aim presupposes an understanding of transatlantic configurations of mobility and intimacy that emerge in passionate Euro-Brazilian relationships, while adopting a critical stance towards the notions of ‘sex tourism’ and ‘marriage migrations’, conceptual constructions which are common in the social sciences, yet profoundly reductive and with little empirical support. This analysis draws on elements provided by a multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, encompassing various physical and digital research sites. The gathered data allowed the comprehension of the pluricausality, interconnectedness, and plasticity of Euro-Brazilian mobilities, alongside their intrinsic association with polymorphic transnational configurations of intimacy, in the framework of which relations with different places are (re)defined and flexible links of conjugality, family, residence and citizenship are generated.

Assimilation of marriage migrants and the role of language: evidence from South Korea

Assimilation of marriage migrants and the role of language: evidence from South Korea

Backlash or victims? ‘Victimised Korean husbands’ of migrant wives and problematic norms on sexual relations in South Korea

Violence against marriage migrants became a critical social issue in South Korea in the late 2000s, and the government instituted various measures in response, partially adopting civil society organisations’ demands to protect migrant women. However, men’s rights groups also mobilised shortly after to advocate for the rights of citizen-husbands under the slogan of ‘male victims of international marriages’. Their campaigns targeted both the unscrupulous commercial matchmakers and their deceitful migrant wives. This article situates the victimised men discourse as a backlash against violence against women campaigns to reverse policy gains in the protection of women’s rights. The article argues that government policies have legitimised such discourse and used flawed ‘data’ to justify their policies. This article uses as data complaints submitted to the Korea Consumer Agency, a government regulator for consumer disputes, about international marriages and focuses on their mentioning of sexual relations, intimacy and sexuality. By doing so, this article demonstrates that men’s rights as consumers of marriage brokerage services are behind their claims of victimhood, and the victimhood discourse undermines the safety and human rights of migrant women. Moreover, a close look at the database about ‘male victimhood’ reveals severe human rights violations against migrant women.

Trafficked or Married? Unpacking Dispossession of Matrimonial Choice in Cross-Region Marriage Migration in India.

The article, based on original research from 246 villages, discusses contemporary marriage migrations of poor women from India's development peripheries to rural North Indian men. Anti-trafficking activists and organizations in India assert that migrant brides are trafficked into sexual slavery through 'coerced' alliances. Employing a postcolonial feminist lens, this article challenges hegemonic anti-trafficking discourse with its gendered presumptions about widespread 'bride-trafficking' by showing that the processes of cross-region marriage mediation and motives are replete with contradictions and ambiguities. Fieldwork reveals a range of actors, including the migrant brides, involved in marriage mediation while poverty and heightened dowry compromise women into such matrimonies.

Asian Marriage Migrant Women’s Labor Market Participation: Korean Husbands’ Egalitarian Gender Role Attitudes and Resources

Asian Marriage Migrant Women’s Labor Market Participation: Korean Husbands’ Egalitarian Gender Role Attitudes and Resources

Marriage migration, intimacy and genre in Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) and Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. (2019)

A significant strand of cultural and social studies research on late modernity has focused on intimacies; in particular, ‘mediated intimacies’ (Attwood et al., 2017; Barker et al., 2018; Gill, 2009), exploring how the media, in its various forms, represents and affects intimate relationships. Romance fiction, the most popular global genre, offers a key source text for exploring intimate and romantic relationships and the ways culturally and politically specific forms of intimacy are shared transnationally. Of particular interest is the increase in the twenty-first century of romantic stories that deal with the intersection of intimacy and migration. This article brings together critical work on intimacy and affect, scholarship on popular romance, and research on migration and transcultural exchange to explore how contemporary Anglophone popular romance fiction mediates intimate relationships in the context of migration. Focusing on two romance novels featuring South East Asian migration to the USA — Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. (2019) and Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) — I explore how these novels represent marriage migration and its relationship to and impact on intimacy. Both novels are aware of existing stigmas around marriage migration (the risk of abuse or fraudulent marriage), but the association of marriage with ‘authentic’ romantic love in the romance genre ultimately serves to uphold such stigmas, rather than challenge them. The texts pay equally close attention to the performativity of romantic love, noting how heteronormative, western norms of romance are required for migrants but, in the case of You, Me, U.S., can also be queered. These texts are concerned with the movement of people and cultures while themselves travelling across borders as products of a transnational, global publishing market. These fictions, then, showcase how their particular articulations of intimacy offer new insights for scholars interested in marriage migration.

Exploring the interplay of migrant entrepreneurship, emotional intelligence and social integration of marriage migrant women in South Korea

This research explores the role of entrepreneurship and emotional intelligence in the social integration of female marriage migrants who are entrepreneurs in South Korea. A qualitative research design was employed to gather data from 32 female marriage migrant entrepreneurs in South Korea through snowball sampling. The main findings revealed that they encountered enormous challenges at various stages of their entrepreneurship, but emotional intelligence played an essential role in their business success. This study demonstrates that entrepreneurship, with the help of emotional intelligence, enables marriage migrants to integrate socially into the host country. This research examines a unique aspect of migrants as it captures hidden realities, and presents implications and future directions for many stakeholders. The findings of this research can serve as a reference to help resolve the problems of migrant entrepreneurs and integration issues of migrant women in similar contexts.

‘Marriage is like Gambling’: Interpreting and Narrating Stories of Hakka Chinese Indonesians’ Marriage Migration

ABSTRACT This article examines the stories of marriages between ethnic Hakka Chinese women from Singkawang, Indonesia and men in Taiwan. Initially, Indonesians described marriage as an opportunity to achieve a better life, whereas Taiwanese saw a ‘foreign spouse’ as the means to fulfil caring duties and carry on family lines. Marriage from Singkawang to Taiwan was a normative practice shaped by cultural, sociopolitical, and economic conditions, which peaked in number in the early 21st century. Yet these marriages rapidly declined in number after 2010, as Indonesia’s economy improved, and as attitudes changed when returning women told stories of failed marriages and abusive spouses and in-laws in Taiwan. Analysis of stories collected from more than 100 participants in Singkawang shows how participants interpreted ‘good’ and ‘bad’ marriages via an adaptive and malleable folk theory of fate and luck. Hence, parents can narrate themselves as passive, ill-fated participants not responsible when their daughters’ marriages turn bad. Or a woman can say that it is her fate to ‘try’ marriage and narrate herself as having agency when making decisions that test her luck. Therefore, this study deepens and enriches our understanding of the complexities and enduring impacts of marriage migration as experienced across time in Asia.

Lived religion and digital homemaking: The case of Indonesian marriage migrants

The article examines the intersection between two key fields in which international migrants respond to displacement and negotiate a sense of home: digital media and religion. The example chosen is the vlogging strategies used by Indonesian marriage migrants to navigate complex religious relationships with their followers and weave these into wider homemaking practices. The vlog analysis and in-depth interviews with the Indonesian marriage migrants in France and Belgium show that religion is an important element in constructing a sense of home in new locations. However, the immediacy of vlogs exposes them to religious expectations from followers back in Indonesia. As a result, homemaking is shaped by a complex interplay between the feelings of belonging and alienation in relation to their followers. Using vlogs, the marriage migrants seek to maintain control over their sense of home by building a mediated form of religious tolerance with their followers through adapted religious expressions in the vlogosphere.

‘I know more Korean than the brides’: migrant categorisations and intra-group heterogeneity within the Vietnamese community in South Korea

ABSTRACT This paper examines the representative and performative aspects of the legal title ‘marriage migrant’, which surrounds the everyday lives of Vietnamese women who married South Korean men. While previous studies have predominantly addressed how categorisation by receiving states reproduces certain identities and treatments for those on the move, little is known about how it influences migrants’ behaviour. Drawn on observations and in-depth interviews with Vietnamese women married to South Korean men, this paper demonstrates that the category ‘marriage migrant’ not only carries gendered and socioeconomic hierarchised identities but further shapes Vietnamese women’s actions in response to those responsibilities and classifications. The research findings emphasise how categorisation and discourse reconfigure ethnic networks at the intersection of gender, class, and mobility. This study offers a nuanced understanding of intra-group dynamics within migrant communities, highlighting the implications of migrant agencies in categorising politics.

Dis/Connected in Diaspora

Reflecting on the nature of my ethnographic research comprising open-ended biographical narrative interviews and participant observation, this article explores what transpires between people who are socialized in broadly similar postcolonial, multilingual, and multireligious environments yet meet for the first time away from “home.” What do they share; what divides them? Where do their paths converge; where do they fork? How do they connect to each other; wherein lies the disconnect? “Home,” in this case, is the Indian subcontinent—India for me and Sri Lanka for my interlocutors—and the new location abroad is Germany. In the context of academic research, both my research subjects and I detected several commonalities and differences, some overt and unwittingly acknowledged, but most covert and left unsaid. I argue that the dissimilarities, the distance perceived, and the disjunct between the life-worlds, real or imagined, enabled my connection to different women from Sri Lanka. Aged between twenty and sixty, they had arrived through various modes as refugees, tourists, or marriage migrants from the 1980s onwards. Subsequently, they settled in Germany and saw themselves as a refugee community connected with fellow exiles across continents. Viewing the narratives and reflections of Tamil women refugees in terms of their diasporic memories and transnational citizenship, a distinction emerges between concrete, transient, and symbolic sites of memory with their own varying shades of gendering. This article takes up encounters with differentinterlocutors and illustrates the wide-ranging connections that materialized in the diaspora context. For the sake of narrative brevity, I shall focus on, firstly, the shared language, Tamil, with different vocabularies, secondly, the insights as a translator and facilitator, and thirdly, the nature of diasporic connections and memories across nation-states.

Research Trends on life satisfaction of Married Migrant Women: From 2008 to 2023, focusing on domestic academic journals

Research Trends on life satisfaction of Married Migrant Women: From 2008 to 2023, focusing on domestic academic journals

Illuminating health aspects for immigrant Thai women in Swedish transnational marriages

BackgroundWomen who are migrants experience discrimination and face major risks, including sexual exploitation, trafficking, and violence, which affect their health and well-being.This study explored critical health incidents experienced by immigrant Thai women in marriage migration.MethodsA qualitative explorative approach with in-depth interviews was used. Forty immigrant Thai women who currently or previously had a Swedish spouse were recruited for the study. An inductive critical incident technique was used to collect and analyze the data as the first step. In a second deductive step, the Newman system model was used to categorize health dilemmas.ResultsThe women reported 438 critical health incidents in five main areas. Psychological health dilemmas included emotional abuse, feeling overwhelmed due to family responsibilities and the stress of leaving family behind. Sociocultural health dilemmas included transnational family duties or not performing family duties. Physiological health dilemmas included experiencing physical violence and environmental, domestic or work accidents. Developmental health dilemmas included failing health, difficulties upholding the duties expected of a spouse in the target culture and caring for an elderly husband. Spiritual health dilemmas included critical incidents in which the women perceived themselves to have failed in their hopes and duties as a wife, which intensified their dependence on faith, particularly the Buddhist concept of karma.ConclusionProfessionals in health and welfare practices in Thailand together with professionals in Western countries who work with women in marriage migration situations need to recognize the psychological, sociocultural, physiological, developmental, and spiritual health dilemmas experienced by these women. Furthermore, civil organizations that meet Thai women in foreign countries, such as Buddhist cultural associations, would benefit from the multicultural knowledge revealed by the present study. This knowledge can facilitate healthcare and welfare support for women in marriage migration situations.

결혼이주여성에 대한 가정폭력 요인과 법적 제재

결혼이주여성에 대한 가정폭력 요인과 법적 제재

“We will treat you well because you are helping our nation”: Migrant Wives and Functionalist Visions of Belonging in South Korea

Over the last three decades, cross-border marriages between non-Korean women and Korean men have become increasingly common, comprising between 4% and 10% of all annual marriages in South Korea since 2005. In this article, I explore the historically evolving gendered, racialized, and classed normativities that migrant wives have confronted during this period. Triangulating between state-collected statistical data; ethnographic, demographic, and legal studies on migrant wives in Korea; and the country’s changing laws and policies on marriage migration, I show how these normativities, or what I term “functionalist visions of belonging,” have defined the legitimacy of migrant wives’ presence primarily in terms of their imagined use-values. I suggest that migrant wives have been interpellated by at least three analytically distinct functionalist visions of belonging over the past three decades: (1) ethnonational, which interpellated them in terms of “blood (dis)similarities”; (2) social-Confucian, which interpellated them in terms of their ability to fulfill gendered Confucian social roles; and (3) biopolitical, which interpellated them in terms of their biological-reproductive potential and also as the molders, not merely the bearers, of future Korean citizens.

Choose to Be More Individualistic or Collectivistic? A Reflection on Marriage Practice in Contemporary Chinese Society

This paper explores the evolving dynamics of individualism and collectivism within the context of Chinese modernization, particularly in the realm of marriage practices. Drawing upon Hofstedes cultural dimensions theory, this research conducts two case studies of nominal marriage and marriage migration among rural migrants to assess whether social value in contemporary society reflects a shifting balance between these two values. It finds that there is a trend of departure between biological small self and societal greater self under the modernized environment. Though emerging attention has been paid to individualistic desires for seeking true loves, people still value their social identity when the small- and great- self conflict with each other, possibly through making a compromise to orthodoxy or wrapping themselves in the cloak of individualism to integrate into the so-called modernized urbanites group. Thus, it also indicates that it is hard to define a certain national culture whether appears more individualistic or collectivistic since it depends on what scale it would be measured.

The rise in cross‐national marriages and the emergent inequalities in East and Southeast Asia

The rise in cross‐national marriages and the emergent inequalities in East and Southeast Asia

Intimacy as a competency: information-seeking practices in (marriage) migration online support groups

This article explores the use of online social networks for seeking and sharing information about marriage migration. In Europe, since the 1990s, this migration has faced heightened scrutiny. Laws and administrative practices have added complexity to immigration procedures. Manifold screening methods gauge the authenticity of relationships aligning with the host nation’s concept of a suitable family for integration. In this context, informal self-help groups emerged to offer support to those facing burdensome formalities and local administrative intricacies. Based on extensive qualitative fieldwork, this article examines the significance of these support groups, drawing on the concept of intimacy as a shared competency. Here, intimacy is conceived as an active relational skill that counterbalances the limitations of migration policies. The analysis transcends the division between online and offline modes of living, shedding new light on intimacy and extimité – the sharing of one’s intimate self with others for validation – in doing family.

The digital governmentality of marriage migration: policing US spousal reunification, national belonging and borders in digital spaces

There is extensive research on the governmentality of marriage migration, but more is needed about the role of digital spaces. This article focuses on how online US spousal reunification forums and their users define and police ideological norms regarding the US family and decide which transnational relationships are ‘worthy’ of immigration. We show that through their interactions on the site, users perform borderwork and police family, race and nation. More generally, we argue that online forums constitute institutional settings whose members can reproduce or challenge hegemonic state discourses about ‘proper’ families and national belonging. Further, we suggest that advice given to or withheld from forum participants constitutes an exercise in digital governmentality. Overall, our findings contribute to conversations about the role digital spaces play in institutionalising gatekeeping practices intended to police intimacy, immigration and national belonging.

“I could have married in Europe, if I wanted to” How black migrant men challenge moralizing and racializing discourses when returning to Senegal

ABSTRACT Marriage offers one of the few routes for Senegalese migrants to enter Europe and settle there legally, and it is often assumed that migrants marry just for a residence permit. “Marriage migration” is highly scrutinized by state actors, whose admission practices and their consequences have been the focus of much research. Less, however, is known about the perspectives of migrants who left Europe in response to these practices. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork, we show how male Senegalese returnees and deportees challenge the idea that men want to marry a European resident at all costs. These men are spatially excluded from Europe but they discursively regain their dignity by returning to Senegal. Their return also challenges gendered and racialized European narratives about dangerous and hypersexual black Muslim males, and at the same time reinforces their positioning in moral hierarchies about love and marriage.