Karine Geoffrion

This paper focuses on the Canadian spousal reunification process and its specific bureaucratic temporality, in relation to citizenship and mechanisms of social control. Based on ethnographic research in a Facebook support group of Canadian women married to a non-Canadian man, I examine the role of online communities in reinforcing compliance to immigration slow temporalities at the expense of group members’ urgent love temporalities. Spousal reunification applicants were recommended not to intervene as long as their file was still within official processing times. Those who acted too soon showed low compliance with government regulations and were called back to order by other applicants. The promotion of discourses that valorise both patience and proactivity deployed at the ‘right time’ – when delays are expired – constitute mechanisms of social control and contribute to shaping ‘good’, ‘informed’ and thus deserving citizens, in the context of marriage fraud suspicion. This article builds on the literature on waiting in immigration processes and articulates it with concepts of good citizenship. It reflects on how online immigration support groups become spaces in which applicants police and discipline each other along gendered lines.

This paper focuses on the Canadian spousal reunification process and its specific bureaucratic temporality, in relation to citizenship and mechanisms of social control. Based on ethnographic research in a Facebook support group of Canadian women married to a non-Canadian man, I examine the role of online communities in reinforcing compliance to immigration slow temporalities at the expense of group members’ urgent love temporalities. Spousal reunification applicants were recommended not to intervene as long as their file was still within official processing times. Those who acted too soon showed low compliance with government regulations and were called back to order by other applicants. The promotion of discourses that valorise both patience and proactivity deployed at the ‘right time’ – when delays are expired – constitute mechanisms of social control and contribute to shaping ‘good’, ‘informed’ and thus deserving citizens, in the context of marriage fraud suspicion. This article builds on the literature on waiting in immigration processes and articulates it with concepts of good citizenship. It reflects on how online immigration support groups become spaces in which applicants police and discipline each other along gendered lines.

Objective Drawing on the theory of polymedia and on the role of information and communications technology (ICT) in (re)defining the articulation between the private and the public, this introduction reflects on what ICT does to and for families around the world. Background Through the development of networking platforms, video call applications, personal sites, and collaborative information platforms, ICT has changed the way people live, love, and interact. It has also afforded new ways to “do family.” Method By featuring studies from a variety of national and regional contexts (Canada, Chile, Ghana, Greece, Moldova, South Korea, Ukraine, the Netherlands, United States, and Turkey), it establishes a dialogue between disciplines and a fruitful cross-fertilization of research topics, methodologies, analyses, and theoretical perspectives. Results This special issue explores (a) the nexus among family life, relationships, and ICT and (b) the relation between the everyday lived experiences of family members and the broader social structures that circumscribe the width and breadth of those experiences. Conclusion The contributions show the porosity of the boundary between public and private spaces. Alternative forms of expertise and parenting norms are emerging online. ICTs are integrated into parents' information-seeking and sharing practices, and emotional support. They sustain relationships between family members across distance. However, inequalities regarding access to the Internet and computer literacy still jeopardize digital citizenship and democratization. Implication The contributions in this special issue highlight the need for better structuring of interventions and policies to support families by using up-to-date ICT systems and creating mentorship programs and digital mediation for family professionals and beneficiaries.

For a number of migrant actors, bureaucratic processes related to immigration constitute the greater part of the route toward their aspired destination and significantly shape their experience of migration and forced immobility. This special issue takes a look at the meaningful ways in which migrant actors interact with immigration bureaucracies and at how administrative procedures, with their highly emotional potential, shape in turn the subjectivity, decisions and actions of migrant actors. All the articles here analyse immigration bureaucracy as a dynamic process mediated by a network of people and by material objects (for example, documents, forms). Whether work, marriage or refuge is the reason for migration, the period of waiting in administrative limbo — which can last years — is crucial to our understanding of the bureaucratic encounter as a social force. This issue, dedicated to migrants’ lived experience of paperwork, clerks and other immigration intermediaries, explores t...

Based on an ethnographic study of Canadian women’s intimate relationships with a racialized man from the Global South, this article focuses on their experiences of the spousal reunification process. More specifically, I examine how the women emotionally and materially engage with spousal reunification procedures and administrative temporalities and how interactions with the Canadian immigration bureaucracy affect their subjectivity as women and citizens. I look at three embodied modes of involvement with bureaucratic procedures—waiting, working and fighting—each bringing forth its own set of emotions and creative coping strategies. I argue that love is central to the experience of the administrative procedures, as an ideological and technological tool used both by the state to regulate and discredit non-desirable relationships and by applicants to make sense of their position (of vulnerability) and to create meaningful narratives within state-imposed categories. A form of defensive ...

Cet article explore l’expérience vécue de la relation amoureuse transnationale chez des femmes canadiennes en couple avec un homme non-occidental. Les périodes de co-présence physique et de séparation géographique avec l’amoureux ont été contrastées. Il en émerge une polarisation entre l’être-en-couple ensemble, temps associé aux émotions positives, euphoriques ; et l’être-en-couple séparé, temps associé aux émotions négatives. Ainsi, pour ces femmes, une vie commune avec leur partenaire, sous un même toit, dans un même pays, devient l’objectif ultime de leur relation amoureuse transnationale. Cependant, vu les contraintes à la mobilité de leur conjoint, cette vie commune ne peut se réaliser qu’à travers le processus laborieux de « parrainage » de l’immigration de leur conjoint au Canada.

Cet article examine l’experience vecue du processus de reunification conjugale au Canada du point de vue de femmes canadiennes en couple binational. Il explore comment les difficultes administratives auxquelles ces femmes se heurtent, principalement par rapport a la question de l’authenticite de leur mariage, contribuent a la mise en œuvre de strategies de resistance, ainsi qu’a la (re)production du concept d’authenticite conjugale. La construction d’une semantique de l’adversite permet a ces femmes de legitimer leur choix d’un conjoint non normatif.

'Festive transvestism' is an increasingly visible cross-dressing practice performed by young people in the Southern parts of contemporary Ghana. Based on participant observation in four cross-dressing events, 15 individual interviews and a focus-group discussion, festive cross-dressing is understood as a contemporary ritual that mainly serves the purpose of reinforcing and reproducing gender binaries as well as heteronormativity in Ghanaian society. Nevertheless cross-dressing events also provide a subjective, creative and exploratory space--although temporary and circumscribed--for the transvestites as well as for the spectators to deconstruct sex, gender and sexuality through the performativity of transvestism. The opening of this exploratory space is made possible by the liminality of the social category of youth in Ghana, which grants young people, especially young men, more liberty and (gender) flexibility. Finally, the paper challenges the widely spread Western perception that feminine men and cross-dressers are necessarily homosexual by resituating the concept of homosexuality within the context of Ghanaian society, where it has recently started to occupy the public space.

For a number of migrant actors, bureaucratic processes related to immigration constitute the greater part of the route toward their aspired destination and significantly shape their experience of migration and forced immobility. This special issue takes a look at the meaningful ways in which migrant actors interact with immigration bureaucracies and at how administrative procedures, with their highly emotional potential, shape in turn the subjectivity, decisions and actions of migrant actors. All the articles here analyse immigration bureaucracy as a dynamic process mediated by a network of people and by material objects (for example, documents, forms). Whether work, marriage or refuge is the reason for migration, the period of waiting in administrative limbo-which can last years-is crucial to our understanding of the bureaucratic encounter as a social force. This issue, dedicated to migrants' lived experience of paperwork, clerks and other immigration intermediaries, explores two aspects of migrant actors' encounters with immigration bureaucracies that go beyond the specificities of each individual's personal background and trajectory: the production of affects and bureaucratic agency; the former often being the driving force behind the latter.

Based on an ethnographic study of Canadian women's intimate relationships with a racialized man from the Global South, this article focuses on their experiences of the spousal reunification process. More specifically, I examine how the women emotionally and materially engage with spousal reunification procedures and administrative temporalities and how interactions with the Canadian immigration bureaucracy affect their subjectivity as women and citizens. I look at three embodied modes of involvement with bureaucratic procedures-waiting, working and fighting-each bringing forth its own set of emotions and creative coping strategies. I argue that love is central to the experience of the administrative procedures, as an ideological and technological tool used both by the state to regulate and discredit non-desirable relationships and by applicants to make sense of their position (of vulnerability) and to create meaningful narratives within state-imposed categories. A form of defensive agency emerges in women whose enormous application files, filled with "proof " of the authenticity of their relationship, shows how they have endorsed social anxieties about North-South intimacies and the strategies they have developed in order to legitimize their union.

In Canada, spousal sponsorship is one of the only possible avenues for a Canadian individual to create a home with a non-Canadian partner. For Canadian women in a relationship with a man from a southern country, the lengthy, costly and emotionally charged administrative procedures that characterize the process of sponsoring a spouse are not just formalities. They constitute a series of administrative obstacles to the reunification of the couple. This process increases the romantic idealization of the bi-national couple and contributes to the development of a traditional and mono-national matrimonial model in which women access happiness only through conjugality with a man. The right of women to choose a spouse of their choice is challenged through these bureaucratic procedures.

Au Canada, le parrainage du conjoint est l’une des seules avenues possibles pour qu’un individu canadien puisse fonder un foyer conjugal avec un partenaire non-canadien. Pour les femmes canadiennes en couple avec un homme originaire d’un pays du Sud, les procédures administratives longues, couteuses et émotionnellement chargées qui caractérisent le processus de parrainage d’un conjoint ne sont pas que de simples formalités. Elles constituent une série d’obstacles administratifs à la réunification du couple. Ce processus augmente l’idéalisation romantique du couple binational chez les femmes canadiennes et contribue à la valorisation d’un modèle matrimonial traditionnel et mono-national où les femmes n’accèdent au bonheur qu’à travers la conjugalité avec un homme. Le droit des femmes à choisir un conjoint de leur choix est remis en question à travers ces procédures bureaucratiques.

Cet article examine l’expérience vécue du processus de réunification conjugale au Canada du point de vue de femmes canadiennes en couple binational. Il explore comment les difficultés administratives auxquelles ces femmes se heurtent, principalement par rapport à la question de l’authenticité de leur mariage, contribuent à la mise en œuvre de stratégies de résistance, ainsi qu’à la (re)production du concept d’authenticité conjugale. La construction d’une sémantique de l’adversité permet à ces femmes de légitimer leur choix d’un conjoint non normatif.

In a global context characterized as much by its flows of information, ideas, people and goods as by the increasing impermeability of national borders, what are the dynamics at play in the development of intimacies and conjugal projects between Canadian women and men from the Global South? This anthropological study explores the lived experience of the romantic encounter, the development of intimacy during periods of physical co-presence and periods of separateness, marriage and the Canadian spousal reunification process from the perspective of Canadian women involved in transnational relationships with men from the Global South. It draws on the women’s narratives of their conjugal and mobility trajectories, on eighteen months of participant observation in two online support group designed for women in binational relationships, as well as on interviews with other key actors.

First, this thesis examines the romantic encounter and at the development of intimacy. It appears that for the women, the dynamics of conjugality, mobility and dwelling are all interconnected. However, they differ depending on whether the women lived in the country of her partner or the relationship developed mainly at a distance, such as when the romantic encounter occurred on the Internet or during a vacation trip. In the first case, the choice of destination and the conjugal trajectory of the women are generally the continuation of a familiarization with alterity that started early in their lives. In the second case, the women’s transnational intimacy generates a form of romantic hyper-mobility fueled by the intensity and the frequency of the visits to their husband, and by an extensive use of communication technologies. However, in both cases, the man’s mobility constraints rapidly become a limitation to the development of the relationship.

Second, this thesis explores the lived experience of the Canadian spousal reunification process. This bureaucratic process represents such a great investment on the part of the women that it becomes emotionally loaded and acquires great symbolic value, which, in turn, contributes to the reification of the women’s conjugal project. However, the legitimacy of the relationship is constantly questioned throughout the process—in forms to fill out and in interviews with immigration agents. Hence, the difficulties encountered in the reunification procedures are experienced as a set of administrative trials imposed on their relationship. Because of their first hand experience of this “economy of suspicion”, the women sponsors develop increased reflexivity about their couple relationship and form support networks where information and experiences are shared and discussed and where they question, redefine and reproduce conjugal norms.

Finally, this study demonstrates how trajectories of mobility, dwelling and conjugality are intimately connected. Canadian women’s matrimonial projects with men from the Global South propel their geographical and virtual mobility and thus reinforce their transnational habitus. However, the spousal reunification process acts as a national and a moral border. It contributes to augment the vulnerability of the women, and questions their ability (and their right) to make a legitimate matrimonial choice.

Cet article explore l’expérience vécue de la relation amoureuse transnationale chez des femmes canadiennes en couple avec un homme non-occidental. Les périodes de co-présence physique et de séparation géographique avec l’amoureux ont été contrastées. Il en émerge une polarisation entre l’être-en-couple ensemble, temps associé aux émotions positives, euphoriques ; et l’être-en-couple séparé, temps associé aux émotions négatives. Ainsi, pour ces femmes, une vie commune avec leur partenaire, sous un même toit, dans un même pays, devient l’objectif ultime de leur relation amoureuse transnationale. Cependant, vu les contraintes à la mobilité de leur conjoint, cette vie commune ne peut se réaliser qu’à travers le processus laborieux de « parrainage » de l’immigration de leur conjoint au Canada.

Mots-clés : amour, couple mixte, Canada, immigration, autoethnographie.

This article explores the lived experience of Canadian women in transnational love relationships with a non-Western partner. Periods of physical co-presence and geographical separation were contrasted. It emerges that the Canadian women divide their relationship into two main phases: times of togetherness, which are associated with positive, even euphoric, emotional states; and times of separateness, which are mainly associated with toxic emotions. Hence, for the women, a conjugal life with their partner under the same roof, in the same country, becomes an ultimate goal. However, due to the mobility constraints their non-Western partner often faces, their goal can only be achieved through the « sponsorship » of their spouse’s immigration to Canada, a cumbersome and time consuming process.

Keywords: love, mixed couples, Canada, immigration, autoethnography.

Les couples transnationaux composés d’un individu originaire d’un pays du Nord et d’un individu originaire d’un pays du Sud font l’objet de critiques sociales, tant dans les médias populaires que dans la littérature scientifique sur le tourisme sexuel. Les partenaires sont souvent figés dans les stéréotypes du bourreau (du coeur) et de la victime. Or, si ces couples présentent effectivement des rapports de force inégaux — par rapport à la classe, la race et la nationalité —, mettre l’accent sur le contexte (affectif) de la rencontre amoureuse permet de complexifier la représentation de cescouples. En se basant sur les récits de parcours amoureux de treize jeunes femmes canadiennes qui ont rencontré, puis épousé, un homme « local » lors d’un séjour de longue durée en Afrique subsaharienne, cet article explore l’expérience vécue d’attachement et d’intégration de ces femmes « à leur place » en Afrique.

For the past 20 years, mixed(race) identities and bodies have started to appear increasingly in the media. Within the context of Canadian multicultural policies, which endorse ethno-racial diversity as a positive value, mixedness is often celebrated, especially through the bodies and images of mixed-race children and young women. In 2017, the city of Montreal featured the image of a mixed family—a white, presumably Canadian, mother, her black partner and their young mixed-child—as its icon. What are the repercussions of this fetishization of mixed-race children on their own lived experience and that of their parents?
This paper reflects on the every day lived experience of being the mother of a mixed-race little girl in the specific context of the city of Montreal, in Canada. It uses the researcher's own experience to reflect upon the racialization processes of mixed-race children through analyzing the gaze, touch and discourse of strangers, family members and friends toward her own child. The hair of mixed-race little girls is at the center of the reflection as it is 1) a central aspect of black women's identity, and 2) the focus of both white and black individuals' attention and touch. Hence, this paper will address how the celebration of mixed bodies in Canada justifies the crossing of mixed little girls' bodily boundaries and parental permission to do so on the pretext of "cuteness".

This international conference on mixed families contributes to the state of knowledge on mixed families by fostering a discussion between scholars whose recent and original work explore a wide range of cases worldwide. Using a comparative lens, the conference intends to highlight the diversity of mixed parents’ identity projects and of mixed individuals’ identity configurations in various national contexts and in relation to various social factors such as—but not limited to—class, gender, age, community, social representations, living and schooling environments, name, family dynamics and socialization, the extended family and family networks, transnational networks, the (im)migration experience of parents, physical appearance and national settings. It focuses on the various elements that may influence the identity projects of mixed parents toward their children, the choices made by mixed children and the articulations between transmission and agency, the social perceptions of the various types of family mixedness, and the lived experience of racism and discrimination. We also propose to further explore transnational dynamics that often constitute the everyday reality of many mixed families.

Abstracts (300 words maximum) must be accompanied by a short bio-bibliographic notice of the author and should be sent to all three members of the Organizing Committee at the following email addresses:

josiane.le.gall.ccomtl@ssss.gouv.qc.ca
c.therrien@aui.ma
karine.geoffrion@umontreal.ca

Deadline to submit an abstract: March 30, 2018