Agency and Citizenship in Cross-border Marriages

Agency and Citizenship in Cross-border Marriages Dr Lucy Williams Lecturer The European Centre for the study of Migration and Social Care The School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Research University of Kent Canterbury Kent CT2 7LZ [email protected] 01227 823092 (direct line) 01227 763674 (fax) 01843 845672 (home) 1 Agency and Citizenship in Cross-border Marriages This paper discusses the role of marriage in facilitating the crossing of international borders and the subsequent effects of cross-border marriage on notions of citizenship. Cross-border marriage is understood as potentially both a strategy to facilitate migration and a strategy that requires migration and, once in the destination country, migrant spouses face highly individual challenges and opportunities that shape their formal and informal citizenship. Using examples drawn from ethnographic studies of cross-border marriages contracted within ethnic communities and marriages contracted between ethnic groupings I will discuss some of the opportunities for citizenship experienced by female migrant spouses and use of the notion of ‘agency’ to help understand the significance of these marriages to the individuals involved. Key words: cross-border marriage, migration, citizenship, transnationalism Introduction The study of citizenship “recognises that the specific location of people in society – their group’s membership and categorical definition by gender, nationality religion, ethnicity, ‘race’, ability, age or life-cycle stage – mediates the construction of their citizenship as ‘different’ and thus determines their access to entitlements and their capacity to exercise agency.” (Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999:5) The women whose experience is discussed in this paper are clearly identified as ‘different’ by the majority populations they live amongst and also by the political and legal institutions that govern their rights to participate and enjoy the social and economic benefits of their country of settlement. Some may live in families and communities that are also perceived of as ‘different’ by the majority and, through their personal communities, may experience a sense of citizenship in their domestic lives that is more meaningful 2 than in their public lives. Others may be perceived as ‘different’ even in their private world and yet others, may be assumed to be part of social groups they live within but themselves feel alien to. Lister (1997:6 following Giddens) writes that “… the study of citizenship has to involve both agency and structural constraints and the interplay between the two” - in this paper I discuss this interplay emphasising the everyday ways in which cross-border spouses find ways to express agency despite the structural constraints which contribute to their marginalisation, limit their freedom and emphasise their relative powerlessness. In this way, I argue that the expression of agency is in itself a form of citizenship. I will start my discussion by arguing, with Joppke (1999), Castles and Davidson (2000), Schuster and Solomos (2002) among others, that global migration and the rise of transnational communities has challenged traditional assumptions of citizenship as a status entirely dependent on legal membership of a State entity. I acknowledge, however, the continuing importance of the State as a site for negotiating citizenship and identity and recognise the State as the most powerful entity in the negotiation of civic identity. In recent years trans- or post-national forms of citizenship have not replaced State citizenship, rather we have seen increasing control of national boundaries and concern for the perceived loss of national identity has restricted access to full citizenship rights for migrants. At the same time, the demand for dual or multiple nationality from migrants and ‘global citizens’ has not decreased and it remains the case that it is in relation to the State, that alternative identities are forged – be they transnational or cultural identities or family or personal identities. Citizenship theory is often understood as being concerned with democracy and with the extension of civic and political rights to the marginalised of society even while the State may use its power to confer citizenship to turn “… supposedly ‘disloyal’ or 3 ‘troublesome’ minorities into ‘good citizens’” (Kymlicka and Norman 2000:11). Bosniak (1998) similarly argues that the relationship between the theory of citizenship and policy debates is problematic. She writes that “… the current fetishization and devaluation of the figure of the alien” (1998:31), has fed into conceptions of national projects that encourage the exclusion of aliens from citizenship despite a rhetoric of inclusivity. Citizenship of aliens “would require us to confront the nationalist premises that underlie most uses of the term citizenship.” (Bosniak 1998:32 italics in the original) Similarly for Sharma, “Concepts of citizenship … are the ideological cement that holds the repressive power of State practices in place. In regard to the construction of ‘trafficked victims,’ citizenship ‘quietly borrows’ from the fictive community of the nation in order to restructure the labour market.” (2003:62) Schuster and Solomos (2002:47) remind us of the position of ‘non-citizens’ in debates about the nature of citizenship while Kymlicka and Norman reflect that the process of participation has value in itself and minority ‘voices’ can be heard in the “… processes of deliberation and opinion formation that precede voting” as well as in the voting itself (Kymlicka and Norman 2000:9). Such limited and passive participation is a devalued form of citizenship and one that depends to a large extent on the willingness of the powerful to hear minority voices. It inevitably means that the more palatable messages from minorities will be heard at the expense of more radical and perhaps more authentic ones. National policies aimed at controlling or ‘managing’ migration have led to the restriction, and often removal, of the rights of certain migrant groups and have resulted in an under-class of marginalised and vulnerable migrants whose only access to the benefits of citizenship is through their social, cultural and informal communities and networks. The marginalisation of many would-be citizens, living as denizens and margizens, has led them to adopt subversive 4 tactics to promote their interests and some of these hidden ways to establish citizenship will be explored below. Cross-border marriage migration Family migration, defined as migration to reunite families and to allow new family groups to be established, represents a significant, and highly gendered, migration flow around the world. As other avenues of migration have narrowed, family migration streams remain open for some. In this paper, I am concerned with marriages that take place across national boundaries and which result in one partner having a different legal citizenship from the other, at least in the short term. These marriages may be made within existing family and social networks - joining partners already linked by kin or other social group ( for example within South Asian communities see Ballard 2004, Gardner 2006, Kalpagam 2005, Shaw and Charsely 2006). Cross-border marriages that involve migration may also be contracted between individuals who have no previous ethnic, religious or cultural connection but who meet and decide to marry with or without the involvement of their families (Johnson 2007, Lu 2005, Suzuki 2005 and Wang 2007). Marriages both within and between communities may be contracted after long periods of engagement, or courtship, or after the briefest of introductions and the marriage partners may have more or less say in the arrangement of their marriage which they may have actively chosen or have been effectively forced into. I argue that marriages across borders are essentially the same migration phenomenon whether they are made within ethnic or other communities or are made between individuals with no prior connection and argue that instead of categorising marriages by the social networks connecting spouses, marriages should be compared 5 through the degree of agency the potential partners exhibit in the contracting of marriage and in married life thenceforth. Just as families and social groups can and do force women into marriage across national boundaries so marriage brokers, traffickers and others may coerce women to marry virtual strangers abroad. In both cases force may be overt but force may also be more subtle if women feel they have no viable alternative to accepting the marriage proposed. Violence and abuse in the contracting and the lived experience of marriage happens within families as well as outside them and, in arguing for a more nuanced analysis of marriages, I hope to counter stereotypes that see traditions of arranged marriage as either a cultural practice to be accepted uncritically or to be vilified as evidence of cultural backwardness. The degree of agency potential spouses have in the contracting of marriages and in their subsequent lives is dependent on numerous individual and environmental factors which include knowledge and information. The degree of such knowledge and information, and the level of on-going social support that will be experienced post-marriage and migration, is unrelated to how the marriage was contracted. The agency of a new bride and her capacity to continue to act positively and meaningfully after marriage may be a separate issue from the degree of agency she might have exerted during the negotiation of the marriage. I argue that citizenship is inextricably linked with agency as without freedom and the capacity to make choices about one’s own life, and by extension the lives’ of others, then one cannot consent to formal citizenship or gain informal citizenship by participating in the life of a community, however defined. Cross-border marriages are often the target of suspicion and women entering countries as the spouse of a citizen are often stereotyped as either the powerless victims of male oppression or as calculating and 6 manipulative (Robinson 1996). The reality of these marriages is, of course, far more complex and while some women and men are indeed the victims of oppressive and discriminatory traditional practice, others find freedom and self-determination by marrying in culturally significant ways inside or outside their cultural or social group. To challenge stereotypes further, the following section will consider some of the possible meanings placed upon marriage by those who marry across national boundaries. The motivations for cross-border marriage Cross-border marriage may be seen as the result of two different strategies – migration for the purpose of marriage or marriage for the purpose of migration. Teasing apart these motivations is difficult, if not impossible and decisions to marry across international borders result from individual combinations of personal aspirations, local circumstances, community expectation, opportunity and any number of other factors. Those who opt for marriage as a means of migration are prepared to tie their future, at least in the short term, to a foreign partner in the hope that it will earn them the chance to achieve their aspirations. Migrating to marry, however, may involve less risk where connections are already in place and where the move involves little separation from known norms and networks. Crossing national borders to marry, for whatever reason, results in the non-citizen spouse entering a phase of uncertain legal status that can be likened to the state of liminality proposed by van Gennep (1960). This period of liminality may be short-lived, for example while paperwork is completed and legal rights acquired, but for many the acquisition of these rights is a protracted process taking place alongside the more difficult process of evolving from a foreigner to a full and participating citizen. 7 After rights to remain are secured and migrant brides have legal rights to enter, reside, work and enjoy full health and social benefits1, they may still face barriers to full and equal social participation and citizenship even as they find themselves at the very heart of every society – in the centre of its families. Eleonore Kofman has written that “It (the family) is not only the catalyst for a new citizenship, but also the crucible of multiple belongings” (2004:248). Families are the basic building block of every community so it could be expected that migrants who move within extended families would find participation in society easier than migrants who enter as individuals. All cross-border spouses enter social groups that have established structures and hierarchies that may seem alien but even once they have become familiar with the expectations of their family’s members, their role vis-à-vis wider society may be no more settled. Families are both private and public sites and while they have their own logics and behaviours, they are influenced by both their private histories and the histories of their wider social context. Plummer notes that “Families for all their privacies, are structured through laws and politics: they are the site for the reproduction of gender relations and indeed the patterning of power relations between adults and children.” (Plummer 2003:70) The style of power and gender relations reproduced will greatly affect the opportunities for a migrating spouse to participate in society and to transform a liminal state into an active and incorporated one. Cross-border marriage and transnationalism 1 Migrants entering on marriage visas face significant obstacles to accessing rights as citizens. Many countries effectively bind couples together by requiring that they remain married for a fixed period (two years in the UK, at least three years in Taiwan) or forfeit their right of residence. As of 2005, Dutch law, for example, requires sponsors of migrant spouses to earn 120% of the minimum wage (Herman 2006) and some countries set a minimum age for women immigrating for the purpose of marriage (currently 24 years old in Denmark). 8 Many cross-border marriage migrants moving into communities that are to some extent culturally familiar may be said to be moving within transnational social spaces and their migration may be part of a wider, on-going, transnational project (Vertovec 1999). As Faist (2000) has described, transnational communities maintain links for different purposes and cross-border marriage within some transnational groups places different expectations of their member than others. Spouses marrying within extended families, for example, may experience a far greater sense of continuity than may be the case for spouses marrying within a transnational community that shares a common cultural identity and history rather than day-to-day experience. Peter Kivisto (2001:572) has argued for a recognition of the role transnational communities play in the acculturation of migrants into receiving countries and transnational communities can, not only introduce newcomers to the systems and mechanisms of daily life, but also offer them a way of participating in a transnational space that values their experience. Transnational communities may be conservative in outlook and Goldring’s (2001) observations on their reinforcement of traditional gender roles will be discussed further below. Cross-border marriages, then, are made within transnational communities – that is within communities that have a transnational reach and which maintain and actively promote elements of a common cultural, traditional or religious heritage. Cross-border marriages also occur between communities facilitated by transnational links that make the match and help integrate spouses in resettlement countries. Cross-border marriages are common in much of East Asia - between (moslty male) citizens of South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, and women from Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines among others. In these marriages there is usually little shared cultural or 9 other identity and spouses may have very little in common with the families they enter. Many cross-border marriages are contracted between groups with historical and ethnic links, for example women from the Korean minority in China marrying South Korean men or Vietnamese women of Chinese descent marrying Taiwanese men, but while these links may provide some sense of commonality, they may not be close enough to allow for shared language or cultural expression to ease the integration of new brides. In cases of intra-cultural marriage, when the new bride knows little of the society she will join, the family’s role in the introduction of the spouse to her new life is crucial but may be motivated by ensuring she becomes the sort of wife her in-laws want her to be (Williams and Yu 2006, Wang 2007). Nascent transnational communities may still be able to offer some support to new spouses however, and networks of other cross-border wives have been shown to be instrumental in the integration process (Wang 2007). The degree to which cross-border spouses have access to supportive transnational groups depends on a number of factors including the history of the country as a migration destination; the potential for peer support from other marriage migrants; traditions of multiculturalism and insitutional support for newcomers in the country of immigration. Many migrant spouses do not feel adequately supported in their attempts to adapt to their new life in a foreign country and many experience isolation and problems in establishing an identity and a meaningful form of citizenship (Ito 2005, Wang 2007). Cross-border Marriage and Citizenship In the next part of this paper I will consider cross-border marriage in the light of notions of citizenship and in doing this, start from the assumption that most, if not all cross-border marriage migrants will spend at least the first years of their lives in their 10 new country in a state of liminality. I draw on van Gennep’s concept of liminality to describe the state of living between forms of incorporation – where the subject is disconnected from one way of life but not yet incorporated into a new one. The concept of liminality has been employed to inform understandings of the lives of migrants in general (Williams 2006) and by writers describing the experience of cross-border marriage migrants living with their new spouses who have yet to become fully incorporated and accepted in their new homes (Wang 2007; Williams and Yu 2006). Life in states of liminality makes citizenship, as described by Marshall’s classic definition of citizenship, impossible if citizenship is “a status bestowed on those who are full members of the community.” (1950:28-29) Marshall assumes citizens hold full legal status and rights to participate in the political as well as economic life of the country. By this definition, cross-border marriage migrants have clearly limited rights to citizenship. Citizenship, according to Ruth Lister is about practice as well as status (1997) so in discussion of liminal subjects, in this case crossborder marriage migrants, citizenship must be a negotiation of process, as status is often denied or is only a future possibility. Informal citizenship, argues Linda McDowell, carries “ … an assumption of moral worth in which de facto as opposed to de jure rights of citizenship are defined as open to those who are deserving or who are capable of acting responsibly.” (McDowell 1999:150 italics in the original). Citizenship can be understood as “… a term that signifies belonging to and participation in a group or a community” (Plummer 2003: 50) so citizenship can be drawn from a community sense of shared historical and/or social belonging whether or not that fits the national myth of the country of settlement. Citizenship, above all, is about being ‘in place’ however that place is defined and as such migration can lead to people feeling more or less ‘in place’ even as they travel. Moving from a place of 11 origin where one has nationality but no freedom to express one’s cultural or social identity, to a second country where legal citizenship has not been established, may nevertheless confer citizenship if a personal sense of freedom or belonging is established. Scholars have recognised that citizenship is a status generally bestowed on women by men (Anderson 2000, Lister 1997), either directly, through the attainment of economic or political value in ways recognised by masculine authority, or indirectly through association, for example as a wife, daughter or mother. Migrants may not be citizens in Marshall’s sense of being both contributors to and beneficiaries of the State but, especially those who place themselves within transnational communities, may experience a strong sense of citizenship even as they are deliberately excluded from the everyday life of the State. Citizenship for cross-border marriage migrants takes on different forms depending on immigration status, ethnicity, religious affiliation, class, professional status let alone personal circumstances but in considering the types of citizenship open to cross-border migrants, it is important to remember that citizenship, especially legal citizenship, is generally linked to an individual’s capacity for ‘productive labour’ (van Walsum and Spijkerboer 2007). Rights to family reunion within the EU, for example, are in place to eliminate “obstacles to the mobility of the worker” (Community law cited by Ackers 2004:375) and are “derived” and not freestanding. In practice this means that entrants must show they will not be a “burden on the public purse …” (Ackers 2004:377). Forms of temporary and conditional entry not only block citizenship but also emphasise the provisional nature of entry (Kofman 2005:456). Rights can be removed at the whim of the State and, as well as this being a disincentive for migrants to establish a home for themselves, it also throws doubt on 12 the loyalty of migrants who are often accused of lacking commitment and willingness to integrate. So even while there has been a trend towards understanding citizenship as “…based more on personhood than membership of a national and bounded political community” (Kofman 2005:454), there has been a simultaneous resurgence of the nation-state as an exclusionary device, especially in industrialised countries, through increased control over migration and a retreat from multiculturalism (Kofman 2005). Citizenship in cross-border marriage – ethnographic case studies To illustrate some of the ideas of transnationalism, liminality and migrant citizenship discussed above, I will use three published, ethnographic accounts of cross-border marriage to discuss how models of citizenship may play out for migrant brides. It is hoped that by using examples from the real lives of women some general conclusions can be drawn. The following case studies are taken from three separate pieces of primary research and describe different styles of cross-border marriage. Alison Shaw and Katherine Charsley’s (2006) research with transnational Pakistani communities in Pakistan and in the UK presents important qualitative data that demonstrates the role of emotional ties in Pakistani transnational communities in underpinning many cross-border marriages contracted within the community. Shaw and Charsley (2006) contrast prevalent, but stereotypical, images of Pakistani communities forcing marriage on mismatched and unwilling couples with empirical evidence which shows families taking care to find matches that are acceptable to the potential spouses and which reflect the heterogeneous socio-economic nature of families living in Pakistan and the UK. The families making the matches in Shaw and Charsley’s work employ the traditional concept of rishtas which emphasises both 13 “strategic advantage and the emotional aspects of marrying” (Shaw and Charsley 2006:407 italics in the original). In this transnational community, marriage has a particular significance as an important way of maintaining and re-affirming kinship ties stretched and threatened by distance and infrequent contact. A prime purpose of any marriage is to maximise socio-economic advantage and in this example the attainment of full, legal citizenship is an important resource to share within the group. The promise, then, of formal citizenship, obtained through marriage and bringing with it opportunities for employment, education, movement and much else, is an incentive for arranging cross-border marriages. This form of citizenship is, however, only one type of citizenship potentially available to these migrants. Marriage within community rewards partners with new forms of community citizenship by conferring on them full membership of the broader community as adults. In classic anthropological style, these marriages are rites of passage that end the period of liminality between childhood and incorporation into the adult world. Intercommunity marriages, in Shaw and Charsley’s study are further valued for enhancing transnational connections, maintaining family and social bonds and for reaffirming cultural and historical ties. In many of the matches described by Shaw and Charsley, the young people involved were presented with matches arranged by their parents but reported being confident that they would not be forced to accept matches they were not happy with. Taking part in a culturally sanctioned and traditional process gave them a sense of ‘doing the right thing’, of behaving as dutiful children and of taking their place in the adult world. Thus citizenship, as participation in the transnational community, may be seen as of equal or greater importance than participation as a British citizen. 14 A different type of cross-border marriage is described by Maria Balzani (2006) in her study of the Ahmadi Muslim community in the UK. This community is based on religion rather than ethnicity or family ties but marriage has a similarly important role in maintaining and developing a sense of community and transnational citizenship. The Ahmadi sect, as described by Balzani, is South Asian in origin and encourages transnational marriage as a means of strengthening and spreading the sect’s global reach. It welcomes interethnic matches so long as both parties are Ahmadi followers. Marriage, therefore, confers a transnational form of citizenship and also confirms a continuing shared identity. Balzani describes how the lack of a kinship base to the community means that single people have no family mechanism to make matches and that the mosque undertook to “… arrange suitable marriages, or remarriages, and so helped the new converts to find a place in the Ahmadi social network. ” (Balzani 2006:348) Put in other terms, the mosque and its adherents took on the role of family and a ‘religious citizenship’ provided a site for identity and social participation that transcended ethnicity, national or cultural background. Similarly, the mosque provided a site for the development of networks and of building the participatory citizenship of its adherents through its use of volunteers which provided “a ready network of acquaintances and social interactions …” for new migrants who could “volunteer in a mosque and join an instantly recognizable organization with family rituals and events.” (Balzani 2006:350) Balzani’s article gives examples of how the sect and its institutions (chiefly its mosques) provide sites for citizenship practices for its members. Cross-border marriage migrants, as in the Pakistani case above, brought with them transferable skills and knowledge that were valued and which eased their entry into life in their new country. 15 The third case I refer to describes the situation of a group of cross-border marriage migrants contracting inter-ethnic marriages. Hongzen Wang (2007) describes strategies adopted by Vietnamese women married to Taiwanese men in Taiwan. These women do not share language or culture with their husbands and have not migrated as part of any established community. Their marriages have often been facilitated by brokers who may or may not retain an interest in the success or failure of the matches. Wang describes how many of these women live with their husband’s families and may be expected to behave as ‘good’ daughters-in-law – that is behave as their new families determine, often as domestic helpers to the family as a whole. Vietnamese brides, as brides from other Southeast Asian countries, are discriminated against by some sections of Taiwanese society and are stereotyped as being poor, poorly educated and of marrying for money rather than love. Wang argues that despite their marginalised position they are still able achieve a form of citizenship. Wang argues that it is their very liminality that allows them space and a limited form of citizenship, away from their families and “unhinged from the scripted roles like mother, father or daughter” (Wang 2007). For the Vietnamese brides in Taiwan, their ‘private space’ is to be found in the ‘public spaces’ of parks, squares, Vietnamese restaurants and the government sponsored integration classes. Here they can find a marginal form of citizenship and agency in spaces that are more Vietnamese than Taiwanese. Further, the brides’ cultural and social separation can be turned to an advantage as the fact that the brides have been effectively bought by their husbands frees them from their own and local social norms, allowing them to threaten to leave their husbands and behave in ways which would be sanctioned were they more integrated into the mainstream of the community. 16 This third form of ‘marginal citizenship’, insofar as it can be called citizenship, is extremely precarious, but demonstrates that even in positions of weakness, some migrants can exert leverage on the powerful and that there are channels of agency down which power can be diverted. The women described in Wang’s study have to remain three years in Taiwan before they can establish an independent right to stay in the country and even though returning to Vietnam might be a theoretical option, they may have strong reasons for not doing so, including the social conditions, poverty and unemployment that propelled them to marry across international borders in the first place. This degraded and marginal form of liminal citizenship may help these women to build tenable lives in Taiwan until they can achieve some form of formal citizenship to build their future aspirations upon. In the three case studies considered here, spouses marrying across borders all face a period of liminality while their residency status is made permanent and, while marriage to a citizen may make the process easier than for other categories of migrant, they will still face extended periods dependent on their partners for their financial well-being and for their right to remain. Two of the three studies (the Pakistani and Ahmadi groups) describe communities which can provide opportunities for new migrant spouses to participate to a significant degree in the activities and life of the community and within their communities at least, spouses can experience some of the benefits of participative citizenship. In the third case study, of Vietnamese brides in Taiwan, foreign spouses may have very limited opportunities to express any kind of citizenship and, until they become legally and socially able to participate in Taiwanese society, their most effective avenue for independent and autonomous action may be through marginal, unofficial and often subversive networks. 17 Discussion A key point of debate underlying this paper is the question of whether people experiencing states of liminality can ever be said to experience ‘citizenship’. Simon Turner (1999) has described how young men in refugee camps were able to transgress social roles and become powerful beyond their years by virtue of the liminality of refugee camp life. In Turner’s study, liminal subjects gained power and influence through their adaptability to a specific marginal environment – but surely they gained a state far short of ‘citizenship’? There is a tendency for acts of resistance to be romanticised and Wang (2007) warns us not to over-estimate the possibilities of citizenship for marginalised groups, such as the Vietnamese women he describes who may be able to display agency but only achieve a very degraded form citizenship. Citizenship, as described by Lister (1997), is a process as much as an outcome and women’s active participation in movements for political and social change may be evidence of agency that is a step on the road to ‘citizenship’. Bridget Anderson’s (2000) work on migrant domestic labour has shown how women are far from being equally powerless and it is important to identify the nature of power relationships between women as well as in relation to men. Just as it is important not to stereotype all cross-border migrants as abused or abusive it is important not to assume that all women whose marriages appear to make them vulnerable are equally powerless. Local citizenship may offer opportunities for political mobilisation and communitybased action (Schuster and Solomos 2002) and Suzuki (2005) describes how Filipina women married to Japanese men started self-help organisations that acted as a fillip for women’s activism in Japan. Local community-based organisations are particularly important in developing women’s participative citizenship as they reflect an arena of 18 public life that may be more acceptable for women to take a lead in and which may suit women’s skills and interests. Goldring’s study of transnational organisations noted that State promotion of transnational community organisations “plays a key role in gendering citizenship in transnational spaces” (2001:524) as these institutions tend to promote the types of transnational organisations that effectively exclude women and promote participation in a traditionally masculine manner. Goldring continues “…masculine citizenship is privileged in these (transnational) spaces … women’s citizenship is more likely to be practiced in the host country context.” (2001:524) A distinction between masculine and feminine citizenship may be based on men’s use of formal mechanisms (i.e. those State institutions that favour men) while women’s citizenship may be based on informal groupings and networks. These informal groupings – such as those described by Wang (2007) go unrecognised by the powerful allowing them to continue their influence discreetly. Women’s participation, as Goldring notes, may be “shaped by conformity to ‘traditional’ norms … focussing on children and family, health and the local environment…” (2001:526) but may be no less powerful for that. Women with caring responsibilities often by necessity develop networks and Ito’s work with migrant women in Japan shows that although opportunities were rare, public cultural events allowed women to meet “local officials and notables” which raised the status of the women in the eyes of their in-laws and earned them important social recognition (Ito 2005:64). Louise Ackers (1998) found that women, by preference, tend to spread the burden of caring – and their ‘dependence’ – between male partners, the State, other females in their family or social group, their wider family and the market. Migrant women with smaller social networks and narrower forms of citizenship were obliged to depend on fewer of these actors and had less opportunity to spread the burden of care and its attendant burden 19 of dependence. If isolated and marginal, women with caring responsibilities have a great incentive to develop networks of support and may find different solutions to common problems. Peter Kivisto (2001:568) reminds us of the different ‘affective character’ of transnational spaces and of the importance of the trusting relationships that are often a characteristic of transnational spaces (Williams 2006). Transnational spaces are evolving spaces in which social norms are challenged, reaffirmed and renegotiated to meet the demands of changing social and political environments and “Transnational migrants forge their sense of identity and their community, not out of a loss or mere replication, but as something that is at once new and familiar – a bricolage constructed of cultural elements from both the homeland and the receiving nation.” (Kivisto 2001:568 italics in original) Liminal spaces, are spaces that are waiting to be ‘fixed’ and as such are spaces that lend themselves to change and adaptation. Here the different stages of the life course can count, as while younger people, perhaps starting out on their adult lives, may seize the opportunity migration offers to cut links with the past and forge new identities and ways of life, older generations may seek to re-establish a lost or an imagined past even across distance. Stuart Hall cited in Alund (1999:156) describes contemporary identity as “strategic and positional” and nowhere is this more true than for migrants seeking to establish citizenship away from ‘home’. Women may be seeking to attain (and retain) different forms of citizenship in both their country of settlement and country of origin but citizenship may only be achieved after a considerable length of time spent living with sometimes very compromised rights. The compromised or degraded citizenship experienced by many marriage 20 migrants mirrors the experience of migrants living on temporary visas or without documentation across the world. They represent a significant minority whose labour contributes to economies but who have little or no access to the safety nets of welfare provision full, legal citizens can call upon - let alone have access to formal routes of political representation. For women married to citizens, who are perhaps mothers of citizens, their vulnerability may be all the greater as it is often assumed that being positioned within families, and therefore at the ‘heart of society’, they would be protected. Their position in the private, domestic, sphere means that if things go wrong, they may suffer alone beyond the protection of the State. Studies have shown that marriage affects the social status of women in many ways – perhaps increasing their freedom when marriage marks the end of control by their birth family or reducing it as their labour is transferred from their birth family to their husband’s family. For many women, being married is in itself a state to be desired and despite the involvement of family and community, is a personal contract between two people who may wish to raise children together. Marriage has many meanings in different countries, cultures and religions not to mention in the minds of individuals. To learn of what it means to marry across borders, whether it is a goal in itself or a means to another end requires listening to and respecting the experience of women and men who have experienced it. Similarly, the types of formal and informal citizenship that result from marriage and from the processes along the way are complex, worthy of careful study and have the potential to inform broader studies of the citizenship of migrants. There is a clear need for further person-centred and person-sensitive research based on the individual narratives of marriage migrants. Ken Plummer, urges 21 researchers to take on the role of listener as an essential way of understanding the complexity of the experience of others and also of ourselves - “… we do have to learn to listen to one another’s stories of how we make our way through the moral tangle of today …” (2003:145) and this is as true in the study of cross-border marriage as in any other field. 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