scholarly journals Chasing Fate & Fortune in the Borderland: Cross-Border Marriage & Migration at the Malaysian-Thai Frontier

Archipel ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 155-186
Author(s):  
Nurul Huda Mohd. Razif
Author(s):  
Chigusa Yamaura

This chapter discusses how Chinese women in the town of Xinghai navigated their marriageability. In doing so, it offers a picture of cross-border matchmaking practices that, due to differences in the local context, is distinct in a number of ways from Dongyang. In a community where it was socially expected that one should go to Japan, marriage migration to Japan had become a strategy and gendered site of investment for women. By paying expensive brokerage fees, many women actively produced the circumstances of their marriageability and commodified their marriage. But despite their active efforts, their sense of subjectivity within these processes remained unstable. This was due to the unequal and dependent nature of the mobility they engaged in, namely, marriage.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rikke Wagner

This article develops a concept of transnational civil dis/obedience. It provides a framework for interpreting and evaluating practices of cross-border movement by citizens and migrants, who mobilize international or supranational law to sidestep and challenge domestic rules deemed illegitimate. Such acts are made possible by, but also enact, complex, overlapping and competing legal orders in Europe and elsewhere. In contrast to analyses stressing the private and market-based nature of these actions, the conceptual lens introduced here draws out their potentially civic and political character. To construct and illustrate my argument, I engage with an in-depth case study of EU citizenship and cross-border movement in the area of marriage migration, where individual liberty and political membership are fiercely contested. The paper draws on narrative interviews with Danish-international couples who in response to Denmark’s restrictive family unification rules have used EU-law to protest against what they see as unjust interference in their private lives.


Author(s):  
Chigusa Yamaura

This chapter examines suspended and declined visa cases, analyzing how marital relations became sites of regulation. Some forms of migration depend on relatives as sponsors. Others rely on employers, an applicant's “skills,” or specific qualifications. Marriage migration, however, rests on a different manner of validating a legitimate entry. Certificates of residency and spousal visas are not simply issued based on an individual's status or attributes. To gain a spousal visa, what is important for the immigration officers is to inspect the kind of relationship presented in the paperwork. The chapter then illuminates the ways cross-border marriages came under suspicion and participants were forced to perform marital relationships that were more “ideal” and “normatively acceptable” than those expected of couples in Japan. Even if partners have chosen married life with one another, they still require the approval of the state.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (5) ◽  
pp. 1664-1691
Author(s):  
FARHANA IBRAHIM

AbstractThis article examines intersections between sexuality, migration, and citizenship in the context of cross-border and cross-region marriage migration in Kutch, Gujarat, to underscore that women's mobility across borders is one site on which national cultural and political anxieties unfold. It argues that contemporary cross-region marriage migration must be located within the larger political economy of such marriages, and should take into account the historical trajectories of marriage migration in particular regions. To this end, it examines three instances of marriage migration in Kutch: the princely state's marriages with Sindh, nineteenth-century marriages between merchants from Kutch and women from Africa, and contemporary marriage migration into Kutch from Bengal. The article asks whether the relative evaluation of these marriages by the state can be viewed in relation to the settlement policies undertaken after partition, where borderlands were to be settled with those who were deemed loyal citizens. Finally, by historicizing marriage—as structure, but also aspirational category—it seeks to move away from the singularity of marriage as framed in the dominant sociological discourse on marriage in South Asia.


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