Migrate to divorce, to overcome divorce, or to avoid divorce? Divorce and migration nexus among Chinese (wo)men migrants in Paris

Abstract

Drawing on 10-year ethnographic fieldwork in France and China with Northern Chinese migrants in Paris, this paper analyses the imbrication of divorce and migration. Most women had divorced before leaving China, a smaller group divorced after arriving in France, many of them try to remarry abroad, while men respondents were almost all married in China. Relying on an intersectional approach and a transnational perspective, this paper unveils how married or divorcee status have influenced their choices to move or to remain in China, to stay abroad or return. More generally, it examines how the gendered social norms on family, marriage and divorce shape migrants' agency and how it may vary according to social class, gender, age, marital and migration status. The paper questions the transnational power of gender norms and observes how the scripts on family and divorce in China traverse state borders and continue to structure migrants' transnational experiences.

A biographical approach to understanding irregular Chinese migration to the United Kingdom

“…Second, irregular migration is an escape from unhappy marriages. As the case of Deng Lin illustrates, migration is a way for women to escape unhappy and even abusive relationships by geographically distancing themselves from their (ex‐)spouses, when they fail to divorce in China due to the onerous official divorce procedure and the Chinese traditional social values that discourage divorce (see also Lévy, 2022). Furthermore, the social stigmas attached to divorced women in China may lead female migrants to work abroad so that they can improve their economic status and remedy their reputational damages.…”

“…Also, although it is often assumed that as breadwinners, men migrate to give their families a better life, the reality is more complicated, with marital relationship problems playing a role in men's migration too. Lévy (2022) shows that Chinese men can avoid divorce by migrating and sending remittances home, thereby restoring their role of breadwinner and fixing their weakened images in the eyes of their wives. By contrast, the case of Chen Wen illustrates that men can also migrate abroad to escape the role of family breadwinner after the conjugal relationship has broken.…”

Divorce in transnational families: Norms, networks, and intersecting categories

“…Five empirical research‐based papers comprise the present special issue, and all of them adopt qualitative data‐gathering methods. These contributions examine the experiences of transnational couples and involve migrants from Asia (Fresnoza‐Flot, 2021; Lévy, 2022; and Qureshi, 2020), Africa (Sportel, 2021; see also Gaspar et al, 2021), and Latin America (Gaspar et al, 2021). They engage in meaningful dialogue with one another by bringing to the fore the dominant elements and forces that shape the lives of the separating or divorced couples in their transnational social spaces: social and legal norms, social networks of support, and categories of difference.…”

“…The earlier mentioned discourses on transnational marriages, as a legal gateway to migration – “marriages of convenience” (D'Aoust, 2013; see also Gaspar et al, 2021 and Lèvy, 2022) and bezness (Sportel, 2021) – and as a way to access the nation (Qureshi, 2020), run counter the continued legal precariousness of migrant partners in transnational families after a marital break‐up in their receiving countries (Fresnoza‐Flot, 2021; Gaspar et al, 2021; Lévy, 2022), or in their cross‐border social spaces (Kim et al, 2017). Whether and how migrants can address this legal precariousness also depends on their transnational family networks.…”