Building on a discourse analysis of both policy documents and media statements by government and political representatives on the entangled topics of marriage migration and integration, this article starts by exploring the factual details and context of emergence
of the 2011 renewed Belgian marriage migration policy. It will argue that these restrictive marriage migration policies are informed by the rise of a specific gendered and culturalised political discourse: the growing need to protect and save women ‐ especially when they are Muslim
or come from a Muslim background (Ghorashi, 2010; Moors & Vroon-Najem, 2020) ‐ and to determine the purposes for marriage migration in order to combat sham and forced marriage practices. The paper thus moves beyond the written marriage migration policy ‐ and its dominant
narrative ‐ and seeks to theoretically contribute to a critical perspective concerning the construction of a colonial feminist discourse in marriage migration policy. The methodological contribution of this paper consists of the work with expert informants or ‘mediators’
(Lutz, 1993, p. 486) in order to challenge this dominant colonial narrative. Therefore, the main focus of this article is a grounded and intersectional analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with mediators working in the Flemish socio-political field of migration and integration. Building
on their expertise and positionalities, the analytical part looks at their narratives and arguments of critique concerning tensions and ambivalent characteristics of the policy’s regulations and conditions, and how they affect migrant couples in general and migrant women in particular.
This contribution is an interview with social and cultural anthropologist of Surinamese-Dutch background prof. dr. emerita Gloria Wekker. It discusses the debate that ensued in the Netherlands after the publication of her book White Innocence (2016), now translated in Dutch as Witte onschuld (2017). The interview covers the reception of the book, Wekker's future work, and her legacy for the academic as well as public debates about gender and race.It goes into methodological questions concerning intersectional analysis and the notion of race as a social construct.
In the context of marriage migration, women are believed to be held back or constrained by their husbands, family and religion from integrating and partaking in (regular) citizenship and Dutch courses, which denies their agency as both wives and citizens. Additionally, their personal choice to become mothers is believed to exacerbate their position as passive citizens: becoming a mother supposedly leaves little time to invest in integration courses, especially since day-care services are an important threshold. As these representations and policies are often not based on rigorous research that consults these migrant women, this research aims to fill this gap by bringing together the gendered representations and policy views on marriage migration, and lived experiences and desires as articulated by migrant women themselves. Another aim is to find out how exactly Moroccan migrant women navigate these structures as affective migrant mothers, and the role of religion in this.
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