‘To Have Security, to Have Access to Life’: Queer Ambivalence at the Borders of Marriage and the Nation

Abstract

This chapter explores the financial, personal, and relational costs of marriage migration to the United States from a queer point of view. The analysis draws from in-depth interviews, online community forums, and content created by LGBTQ+ people and/or same-sex couples who have petitioned for status based on a fiancé or spousal relationship. The chapter specifically asks: How do the normative and normalizing systems of marriage and immigration impact the individual and the couple? To construct a ‘bona fide’ marriage in the eyes of the State, couples must meet an economic threshold and perform marital and family roles in ways that are intelligible to immigration officials, often sanitizing their relationships and identities in the process. Naturalization scripts are also sanitized and romanticized in the image of a colonial fantasy—US citizenship as an object of pure and even lifelong desire, rather than a complicated step and one compelled by the State. The focus here is on the affective experience of such normalization and the ambivalence people feel toward both the marriage and immigration systems in which their security is entangled.