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Original article: https://theconversation.com/how-narrow-views-of-romance-inform-which-marriages-are-seen-as-legitimate-247085
Valentine’s Day is sold to us as a moment to celebrate romance: we should buy cards, roses and chocolates. Go for fancy, dimly lit dinners with our significant others. Make loving declarations.
Romance can enhance our lives. Studies have shown the benefits of romance, from companionship to improving our physical, sexual and mental health.
However, romance can also be mobilized to judge and surveil relationships, and determine which are valid and which are not. Numerous countries, including Canada, have laws against what they deem as fraudulent marriages.
To consider the impact of these laws, and to study the colonial legacies within them, I conducted a study of the marriage (and for many, migration) experiences of people of Algerian origin in three contexts: Ghazaouet and Tizi Ouzou in Algeria, a Parisian suburb called Petit-Nanterre and in Montréal from 2011 to 2019. My findings drew on almost 200 personal interviews focused on the marriage partner preferences and ceremonies of my participants.
I was particularly interested in a comparison between France and Canada, where monitoring romance has served as a way to gauge the sincerity of marriages among migrants for whom citizenship is at stake.
Laws targeting fraudulent marriage
In an effort to curb a seeming rise in fraudulent marriages in immigration family sponsorship requests, governments in France and Canada introduced legislation in the 2000s to promote greater surveillance of and penalties for marriage fraud.
In France, this began in 2008 with a law to curb “love fraud with a migratory aim.” Passed in the same year, Canada’s law centred on impeding “bad faith” marriages.
Such legislation often comes with penalties. In France, if one is found guilty of being party to a fraudulent marriage, the penalty can be annulment, five to 10 years in prison, fines or deportation. The impetus for such laws is the unquantified sense that a growing number of foreign nationals take advantage of family unification immigration pathways through disingenuous relationships.
The state’s involvement in France is more acute because the burden of assessment falls primarily on marriage officiants and immigration officers. Civil marriages there must take place in a municipal office and prior to a religious marriage.
A 2010 directive to French marriage officiants is especially revelatory of this surveillance. Evidence of financial and sexual intimacies act as evidence of a sincere marriage. Romance is seen as a reflection of a spontaneous and uncalculated relationship.
Of course, there is no evidence that expressions of romance in an early marriage are signs of success; divorce occurs for almost half of marrying couples, whether couples are transnational or not. Figures in Canada indicate a slightly higher divorce rate than in France.
In Montréal, one can be married outside of a municipal office. Still, my participants in that city shared similar stories of pressures to perform specific sexual politics in the presence of state officials.
One man whose wife wore a hijab was interrogated by first responders about the husband’s involvement when she fainted, while pregnant, outside a grocery store. Bewildered by the situation, he answered their questions about whether theirs was a forced marriage (it was not). In retrospect, he said he would have declined this line of questioning and focused their attention on his wife.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes
Arranged marriages
One of my notable findings is that many marriages in my sample were quasi-arranged — organized with the assistance of family members (often mothers). Yet, these types of marriages often fall outside idealized ideas of romance, rendering these couples more vulnerable to being accused of fraud.
I also found that potential scrutiny from immigration officials did not impede interest in a transnational marriage partner. Many of my interviewees liked the idea of a partner of the same religion or culture, and who spoke Arabic or Tamazight. In addition, for many, a cosmopolitan transnational life linking Algeria with France or Québec was appealing.
Depending on their gender, social class, religiosity, families and personalities, individuals grapple with these politics differently. The social contexts of a Parisian suburb and Montréal further shaped a participant’s sense of longing and belonging. Fewer Algerian women in Montréal were interested in such arrangements. Invariably, however, individuals of Algerian origin in both contexts knew that transnational unions were highly scrutinized.
Despite the attention granted to curbing marriage fraud, the data suggest that few marriages are annulled. The spectre of this surveillance is greater than its enforcement.
Unfairly penalizing migrants
Legislation and scrutiny of marriages seen as fraudulent subtly position romance as a proxy to assess narrow liberal ideals. Some scholars have called this phenomenon a push for a “sexual democracy,” where women’s bodies are subtly expected to remain visible and sexually available as signs of their putative equality.
Perhaps unexpectedly, niqab bans in both France and Québec further reflect these values. Full-face veils are, tellingly, depicted as lacking sexual agency and individualism, and impeding a cisgender woman’s ability to attract men.
Narrow views of what kind of romance should be legitimized and celebrated are not limited to governments. Such views also manifest in consumer culture and in the wedding industry, and are desired and performed by many of us, including among my research participants in arranged marriages. Romance’s pervasiveness, desirability and seeming spontaneity mask its politics.
As we enjoy romantic gestures on Valentine’s Day, we should also consider the cultural specificity of these tropes and their potentially exclusionary politics in determining whose relationships are deemed legitimate. Entrenchments of patriarchal chivalry, monogamy, consumerism and narrow gender roles can run in tandem.