Same-sex marriage and migration: politics of belonging, state regulations, and new ways of doing family across borders

Abstract

The expansion of marriage rights for same-sex couples has coincided in many countries with increasingly restrictive marriage migration policies. These differentiated approaches to marriage – relatively inclusive towards LGBTQI + people and their families, yet increasingly exclusionary towards migrants and their families – intersect when same-sex couples seek to migrate through family migration routes. Exploring the relationship between same-sex marriage and migration, this introduction examines the tensions that arise at this intersection and how LGBTQI + people and their families navigate the resulting constraints and opportunities for family migration. Bringing family migration research and queer migration studies into dialogue, it examines the limitations of both fields, which have largely developed in isolation from one another, and argues that the study of same-sex marriage migration offers new analytical perspectives on the relationships between marriage, migration, and sexuality. In doing so, it expands the conceptual and empirical horizons of both fields, prompting family migration scholarship to address its heteronormative biases and queer migration studies to better account for family dynamics and relationality. The introduction concludes with an overview of the contributions to this Special Issue.