Description
Book Synopsis As globalization and transnational encounters intensify, people’s mobility is increasingly conditioned by intimacy, ranging from love, desire, and sexual liaisons to broader family, kinship, and conjugal matters. This book explores the entanglement of mobility and intimacy in various configurations throughout the world. It argues that rather than being distinct and unrelated phenomena, intimacy-related mobilities constitute variations of cross-border movements shaped by and deeply entwined with issues of gender, kinship, race, and sexuality, as well as local and global powers and border restrictions in a disparate world.
Trade Review “[The] volume represents a forceful challenge to dominant narratives about mobility and migration being the results of “push and pull” economic factors.” • Geopolitics
“Bringing together the concepts of intimacy and mobility, Groes and Fernandez have composed a collection of articles that show not only how enriching the concept of intimacy is for mobility but also the other way round… With the presented volume, Christian Groes and Nadine T. Fernandez published a book that is inspiring for researchers interested in mobilities, intimacies, and especially intimate mobilities.” • Anthropos
“[This volume] marks a significant contribution to the literature on labor migration, cross-border marriages, and transnational intimacies. The book is a must-read for migration scholars and mobilities researchers concerned with racialization, gender and sexual politics, and the global circulation of bodies, desires, and relations.” • Transfers
“Written by an international cluster of leading scholars, this volume combines the work of academics who have engaged in sustained, multi-sited, transnational ethnography with that of newer scholars rethinking the field of marriage, migration state policy, and locality. The scholarship of this volume challenges and transforms the field of migration studies by teaching us how to theorize migration and state immigration policies through the lens of intimate relations.” • Amalia L. Cabezas, University of California, Riverside
“This is a solid, worthwhile scholarly contribution that moves our knowledge of migration and intimate relationships further along.” • Gilbert Herdt, San Francisco State University
Table of Contents Foreword
Katharine Charsley
Introduction: Intimate Mobilities and Mobile Intimacies
Christian Groes and Nadine T. Fernandez
PART I: MIGRATION REGIMES AND THEIR INTIMATE DISCONTENTS
Chapter 1. Transnational Matchmaking: Marriage Practices of Chinese Migrants from Qingtian Living in Europe
Martina Bofulin
Chapter 2. Temporary Intimacies, Incipient Transnationalism, and Failed Cross-Border Marriages
Nicole Constable
Chapter 3. Screening for Romance and Compatibility in Brussels’s Civil Registrar Office: Practical Norms Of Bureaucratic Feminism
Mäité Maskens
PART II: CIRCUITS OF SEX, RACE AND GENDERED BODIES
Chapter 4. Survival Within A Multi-Circuited Maze: Latin American Sex Workers In Spain
Laura Oso
Chapter 5. Mobility through the Sexual Economy: Exchanging Sexual Capital for Respectability in Mozambican Women’s Marriage Migration to Europe
Christian Groes
Chapter 6. Fluid Sexualities Beyond Sex Work and Marriage: Thai Migrants’ Racialized Gender Performance in Copenhagen
Marlene Spanger
PART III: MORALITIES OF MONEY, MOBILITY AND INTIMACY
Chapter 7. From Programas to Help and Marriage: Transnational Sexual, Economic and Affective Exchanges among Brazilian Women
Adriana Piscitelli
Chapter 8. True Love and Cunning Love: Negotiating Intimacy, Deception and Belonging in Touristic Cuba
Valerio Simoni
Chapter 9. The Masculine and Moral Self: Migration Narratives of Cuban Husbands in Scandinavia
Nadine T. Fernandez
Index
