What’s Love Got To Do With It? Emotional Authority and State Regulation of Interracial/national Couples in Ireland

ABSTRACT

Globalization has increased the mobility of people across national borders and this has increased the number of interracial/national couples where partners do not necessarily have the same races, citizenships, cultures or languages across the globe. When interracial/national couples (both same-sex and heterosexual) try to cross borders to put down family roots, nation states often use emotions and citizenship laws to assert their authority to control the boundaries of the population, worker movement and to protect ‘national’ culture from multiracialism. Challenges to state authority are increasing and some states respond by trying to exercise control over interracial couples by using emotions in adjudicating and authenticating love in the crackdown on supposed ‘sham’ interracial/national marriages. States do this through legal and organizational practices to constitute their emotional authority. These processes illustrate collective attitudes towards interracial couples which contain a threat of intimacy that these couples represent to the nation through an examination citizenship laws and the experiences of mixed international couples in the Republic of Ireland as a way to understand the experiences of mixed couples and families within a global context.

KEYWORDS:

• Mixed couples
• interracial couples
• multiracialism
• biracialism
• migration
• globalization
• nationhood
• emotions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Maynooth University. Her research interests are in Asian/Asian American popular culture; people of mixed descent, critical mixed-race studies; race/ethnicity, beauty and Japanese Americans; emotions, technology and globalization. She has published in Global Networks, Ethnicities, Sociology Compass, Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal, Irish Geography, Sociological Research Online and in many edited books. She is the lead editor of Global Mixed Race (New York University Press). Her book Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants (University of Minnesota Press) examined the use of blood quantum rules in Japanese American Beauty Pageants. Her current research explores globalized interpersonal and interactive forms of bodily culture through skin altering practices in Asia and Europe, beauty pageants and Asian popular culture (Korean and Japanese dramas).

Notes

1 I use the terms interracial/national and mixed to mean couples (both same-sex and heterosexual) who define themselves as interethnic, interracial, international, interfaith or multilingual (or sometimes they are all of these!).

2 These experiences are taken from interviews done for a larger project entitled, ‘The Globalization of Love,’ based on 36 interviews done with mixed couples in Ireland. All couples had one member who described him/herself as international and not Irish and half of those considered themselves ‘not white’. Most of the interviewees were self-identified as middle class with two families identifying as ‘well off’. Four families described themselves as ‘struggling’ and seemed to be less well-off.

3 Irishness has long been ‘accomplished’ whiteness, i.e. the Irish were racialized as almost black at one historical point (1860s in the US), but ‘became white’ over time. For more on this see Garner (2003), Ignatiev (2008) and Roediger (1999).

4 I have also experienced this first-hand and have been questioned repeatedly and asked to ‘prove’ employment status, children’s residency status and permanent residency status in order to receive child benefit in Ireland because I am a non-Irish national mother, even though I am an Irish citizen.