Love as Project of (Im)Mobility: Love, Sovereignty and Governmentality in Marriage Migration Management Practices

Abstract

Marriage migration has recently drawn some attention, notably to the ways in which third-country nationals face increased challenges compared to European citizens when it comes to reunite with their spouse or partner. Foregoing a detailed legal analysis, this article rather seeks to interrogate the following: what connections can be drawn between law, love, mobility and sovereignty? Relying on various instances of management practices in Europe, I examine what marriage migration regulations tell us about their entanglement. On the one hand, I claim that love can and should be accounted for in the governmentality of marriage migration. On the other hand, by being attuned to the ways in which love is connected to different marriage migration management practices, we can see that governmentality cannot fully capture the different forms of power deployed and enacted in specific settings. What we have instead are complex assemblages that highlight a productive tension, as love becomes both a target and object of governmental calculations in projects of immobility, and a movement that participates in projects of mobility. It thus intermeshes with, yet also challenges, attempts at fixity.

About the Author

Anne-Marie D'Aoust is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her recent publications on marriage migration have appeared in International Political Sociology and in Martin Geiger and Antoine Pécoud's Disciplining the Transnational Mobility of People (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Her other projects include issues of language and the sociology of the discipline of IR, and an investigation of “Security and Its Publics,” carried out in collaboration with William Walters.

Notes

1. H.J. Morgenthau, “Love and Power”, Commentary, Vol. 33 (March 1962), p. 247.

2. M. Hardt, in H. Davis and P. Sarlin, “No One is Sovereign in Love: A Conversation between Lauren Berlant and Michal Hardt”, Nomorepotlucks, December 2011, available: <http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/no-one-is-sovereign-in-love-a-conversation-between-lauren-berlant-and-michael-hardt>.

3. Case C-434/09 McCarthy v Secretary of State for the Home Department.

4. For instance, in Great Britain, citizens and permanent residents wishing to sponsor a non-EU spouse or partner must prove since June 2012 a minimum income level of £18,600, which led to the conclusion in 2013 that “47% of the UK working population last year would have failed to meet the income level to sponsor a non-European Economic Area partner.” (BBC News, “UK's New Visa Rules ‘Causing Anguish’ for Families”, 10 June 2013, available <http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22833136>). Europeans residing in the country though—a presence which testifies to their mobility inside the Union, and thus to the effective mobility of labour and capital—are exempted from any such national requirements.

5. H. Wray, “Family Life and EU Citizenship: A Commentary on McCarthy C-434/09 5 May 2011″, EUDO Citizenship, 19 May 2011, available: <http://eudo-citizenship.eu/citizenship-news/479family-life-andeu-citizenship-a-commentary-on-mccarthy-c-43409-5-may-2011>. Author's emphasis.

6. See for instance Y. Pascouau, in collaboration with H. Labayle, Conditions for Family Reunification under Strain: A Comparative Study in Nine EU Member States, European Policy Centre/King Baudoin Foundation/Odysseus Network, Brussels, November 2011, available: <http://www.epc.eu/documents/uploads/pub_1369_conditionsforfamily.pdf>; A. Staver, “Free Movement and the Fragmentation of Family Reunification Rights”, European Journal of Migration and Law, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2013), pp. 69–89; L. Block and S. Bonjour, “Fortress Europe or Europe of Rights? The Europeanisation of Family Migration Policies in France, Germany and the Netherlands”, European Journal of Migration and Law, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2013), pp. 203–224; P.V. Elsuwege and D. Kochenov, “On the Limits of Judicial Intervention: EU Citizenship and Family Reunification Rights”, European Journal of Migration and Law, Vol. 13, No. 5 (2011), pp. 443–466.

7. A. Kraler, “Civic Stratification, Gender and Family Migration Policies in Europe. Final Report”, revised and updated public version (Vienna: BMWF/ICMPD, NODE, 2010), p. 10. What Kraler seems to imply here is not so much that legal analyses cannot be or are never theory informed, but rather that theorising has been limited to analyses of the consequences of actual policies and of the current legal apparatus. Rather than trying to challenge and reconfigure ways of conceiving family migration altogether, most analyses work inside these pre-established parameters.

8. For more on the how migration management is underpinned by a neoliberal rationale of government, see M. Geiger and A. Pécoud (eds.), The Politics of International Migration Management (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

9. M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 108.

10. For a thorough discussion of the concept, see A.-M. D'Aoust, “In the Name of Love: Marriage Migration, Governmentality and Technologies of Love”, International Political Sociology, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2013), pp. 258–274 and A.-M. D'Aoust, “‘Take a Chance on Me’: Premediation, Technologies of Love, and Marriage Migration Management”, in M. Geiger and A. Pécoud (eds.), Disciplining the Transnational Movement of People (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 103–125.

11. The idea of “project of immobility” emphasises attempts at stability (in the case of a desired order or circulation) or actual immobility (in ensuring that some people, some movements are stopped or kept still).

12. S. Mezzadra and B. Neilson, Border as Method or, The Multiplication of Labour (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 195.

13. W. Walters, Governmentality: Critical Encounters (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 5.

14. As Foucault explained: “Problematization doesn't mean the representation of a pre-existing object, nor the creation through discourse of an object that doesn't exist. It's the set of discursive or nondiscursive practices that makes something enter into the play of true and false, and constitutes it as an object for thought (whether under the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.).” M. Foucault, “The Concern for Truth”, in S. Lotringer (ed.), Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961–1984 (New York: Semiotexte/Smart Art, 1996), pp. 456–457.

15. M. Hardt, “For Love or Money”, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 26, No. 4 (2011), p. 676.

16. Walters, Governmentality, op. cit., p. 74.

17. H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958]), p. 242.

18. E. Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 178.

19. L. Berlant, Desire/Love (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012), p. 110. My emphasis.

20. Hardt, op. cit., p. 676.

21. Ibid., p. 679.

22. Ibid., p. 680.

23. J. Cotter, “Bio-Politics, Transspecies Love and/as Class Common-Sense”, The Red Critique, Winter/Spring 2012, available: <http://redcritique.org/WinterSpring2012/biopoliticstransspeciesismandclasscommonssense.htm>.

24. See for instance L. Schartz, “A Conversation with Michael Hardt on the Politics of Love”, Interval(le)s, No. 4–5 (2008/2009), pp. 810–821; and M. Hardt and A. Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).

25. “On the Risk of a New Relationality: An Interview with Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt”, Reviews in Cultural Theory, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Special Issue: New Commons) (2011), p. 6 and p. 11.

26. Ibid., p. 136. Emphasis in original.

27. D.P. Tolia-Kelly, “Affect—An Ethnocentric Encounter? Exploring the ‘Universalist’ Imperative of Emotional/Affectual Geographies”, Area, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2006), p. 215.

28. S. Jackson, “Love, Social Change and Everyday Heterosexuality”, in S. Strid and A. Jónasdóttir (eds.), Proceedings from GEXcel Theme 10: Love in Our Time—A Question for Feminism, 2010, p. 100, available: <http://www.genderexcel.org/?q=webfm_send/77>.

29. F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974 [1887]), p. 262. Emphasis in original.

30. Arendt, op. cit., p. 242.

31. D. Pettman, Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), p. 18.

32. M. Foucault, “Technologies of the Self”, in L.H. Martin, H. Gutman and P.H. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 18. My emphasis.

33. N. Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 52.

34. For examples and discussions of this, see A.-M. Fortier, “Proximity by Design? Affective Citizenship and the Management of Unease”, Citizenship Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2010), pp. 17–30. For a different understanding of affective governance, see M.A. White, “Ambivalent Homonationalisms: Transnational Queer Intimacies and Territorialized Belongings”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2013), pp. 37–54.

35. A.L. Stoler, “Affective States”, in D. Nugent and J. Vincent (eds.), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), p. 5.

36. A.L. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

37. A. Ramos-Zayas, Street Therapists: Race, Affect, and Neoliberal Personhood in Latino Newark (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2012), p. 104.

38. Berlant, op. cit., p. 7; emphasis original.

39. J. Huysmans, “What is in an Act? Dispersing Politics of Insecurity”, p. 39, Paper prepared for The Politics of Securitization, Conference organised by the Centre for Advanced Security Theory (CAST), Copenhagen, 13–14 September 2010, available: <http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/iccm/files/iccm/What%20is%20in%20an%20act%20v1.0.pdf>.

40. See W. Larner, “Neo-Liberalism: Policy, Ideology, Governmentality”, Studies in Political Economy, Vol. 63 (2000), pp. 5–25.

41. Povinelli, op. cit., p. 191.

42. On this, see for example P. Raghuram, “The Difference that Skills Make: Gender, Family Migration Strategies and Regulated Labour Markets”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2004), pp. 303–321; E. Kofman, “Family-Related Migration: A Critical Review of European Studies”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2004), pp. 243–262.

43. A.B. Flemmen, “Transnational Marriages—Empirical Complexities and Theoretical Challenges. An Exploration of Intersectionality”, NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2008), p. 119

44. Ibid.

45. E.A. Christodoulidis, “Law, Love, and the Contestability of European Community”, in H. Petersen (ed.), Love and Law in Europe (Dartmouth and Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), p. 55. Emphasis in original.

46. K. Raes, “On Love and Other Injustices: Love and Law as Improbable Communications”, in Petersen, Love and Law in Europe, op. cit., p. 39.

47. My translation. M. Foucault, Dits et écrits, 1954–1988/Michel Foucault: Volume 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p. 822.

48. M. Rytter, “Semi-Legal Family Life: Pakistani Couples in the Borderlands of Denmark and Sweden”, Global Networks, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2012), p. 100.

49. N.M. Stolzenberg, “Liberalism in Love”, Quinnipiac Law Review, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2010), p. 614.

50. B. Hindess, “Liberalism: What's in a Name?”, in W. Walters and W. Larner (eds.), Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 26.

51. H. Petersen, “The Language of Emotions in the Language of Law”, in Petersen, Love and Law in Europe, op. cit., p. 21.

52. M.-C. Foblets, “Family Reunification: Who Pays for Love in Europe”, in Petersen, Love and Law in Europe, op. cit., p. 64.

53. K. Groenendijk, “Family Reunification as a Right under Community Law”, European Journal of Migration and Law, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2006), p. 191.

54. S.K. Schmidt, “Who Cares about Nationality? The Path-Dependent Case Law of the ECJ from Goods to Citizens”, Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2012), p. 10–11.

55. Ibid., p. 15.

56. I would like to thank one anonymous reviewer for spelling out this distinction so clearly. For more on the geographies of love resulting from these distinct but sometimes intersecting rationalities, see A.-M. D'Aoust, “Fractured Citizenships and Broken Hearts: Marriage Migration Regulations and Geographies of Love in Europe”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (Special Issue: Geographies of Love), forthcoming).

57. L. Berlant, in Davis and Sarlin, op. cit.

58. Ibid.

59. “We know the fascination that the love or horror of the state exercises today: we know our attachment to the birth of the state, to its history, advance, power, and abuse. I think this overvaluation of the problem of the state is basically found in two forms. An immediate, affective, and tragic form is the lyricism of the cold monster confronting us.” Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 109. My emphasis.

60. P. Rabinow, quoted in Walters, Governmentality, op. cit., p. 77.

61. “Church in Wales Clergy Train to Spot Sham Marriages”, BBC News Wales, 1 February 2011, available: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-12328026>.

62. É. Balibar, “The Borders of Europe”, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 219.

63. UK Border Agency, Guidance for Clergy—Issued by UKBA—Foreign Nationals Seeking to Marry in the UK, guidance issued 12 April 2011, available: <http://www.newcastle.anglican.org/userfiles/file/Newcastle%20Website/Mission%20and%20Ministry/Diocesan%20Handbook/Marriage%20ukba%20gdnce.pdf>.

64. Ibid. My emphasis.

65. M.-A. Delauney, L'immigration par escroquerie sentimentale (Paris: Éditions Tatamis, 2006).

66. My translation, and my emphasis. Available: <http://mariagegris.fr/?page_id=16>.

67. National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, “The Judges’ Revolt and The Home Office's Assault on Love”, 18 February 2013, available: <http://ncadc.org.uk/blog/2013/02/the-judges-revolt-and-thehome-offices-assault-on-love/>.

68. UK Border Agency, “Man Jailed for Sham Wedding Plot”, 28 May 2013, available: <http://www.octf.gov.uk/News/Man-Jailed-For-Sham-Marriage-Plot-(1).aspx>.

69. Hugh Muir, “Boat Race Protester Trenton Oldfield Ordered to Leave UK”, The Guardian, 23 June 2013, available: <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/23/boat-race-protester-trenton-oldfield-ordered-leave-uk>.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid. After months of fighting and gathering public support, Oldfield ultimately won his appeal against deportation in December 2013.

72. W. Walters, “Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens”, in N. de Genova and N. Peutz (eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 87.

73. G. Lanzieri, “Merging Populations: A Look at Marriages With Foreign-Born Persons in European Countries”, Eurostat: Statistics in Focus, Vol. 29 (2012), available: <http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-SF-12-029/EN/KS-SF-12-029-EN.PDF>.

74. Pöyry Management Consulting, “Marriages of Convenience: A Comparative Study. Rules and Practices in Norway, Sweden, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands”, Commissioned by the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, 8 November 2010, pp. 28–29, available: <http://www.udi.no/Global/upload/Publikasjoner/FOU/R-2010-053_SAA_Marriages_of_convenience.pdf>.

75. J. Kim, “Establishing Identity: Documents, Performance, and Biometric Information in Immigration Proceedings”, Law & Social Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2011), p. 778.

76. See E. Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: Berkeley University Press, 1997).

77. N. Rose and M. Valverde, “Governed by Law?”, Social and Legal Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1998), p. 546.

78. S. Mezzadra and B. Neilson, “Between Inclusion and Exclusion: On the Topology of Global Spaces and Orders”, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 29, No. 4/5 (2012), p. 64.

79. N. de Genova, “The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement”, in de Genova and Peutz, The Deportation Regime, op. cit., p. 58.

80. H. Kotef, “Movement”, Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2012), available: <http://www.politicalconcepts.org/movement-hagar-kotef/>; emphasis original.