them invest in transnational strategies like marriage as insurance against possible expulsion. As the Italian economy moves to more flexible labor practices in which migrants have temporary, part-time, and special contracts that must be renewed, migrants are vulnerable not only to unemployment but also to expulsion, because their legal status depends on their employment. The temporary-permanence that characterizes their work and migration status effectively prevents most Senegalese migrants from imagining their futures in Italy even after long periods of stay. Because of this status, most Senegalese abroad find themselves suspended between home and abroad—propelled out of Senegal through migration, but tethered to home through familial duty and precarity abroad. They are compelled to live their lives oriented towards Senegal and not towards their host country’s definitions of success and honor. They thus are more apt to marry transnationally.
The government of Senegal relies heavily on the “economics of exodus” (Chalfin 2010: 201), and its “techniques” for making “responsibilized” subjects of its citizens directly contribute to transnational marriages. The World Bank estimates, for example, that remittances by overseas migrants from 2010 to 2012 equaled 13 percent of Senegal’s GDP (World Bank 2013). At a time when neoliberal policies and the fallout of structural adjustment have led to the slashing of social services, the shrinking of civil-sector employment, and extreme inflation, the prospect of a mobile workforce that invests at home is both appealing and indispensable to the Senegalese government. Thus, the Senegalese government—like other governments that act as labor brokers (see Rodriguez 2010)—actively promotes a narrative of its overseas citizens as heroes, dutiful sons of their family and of the country, again putting the onus on migrants to provide social welfare services in the vacuum created by the state. This narrative directly pushes young people into migration to meet these expectations and is central to the high incidence of transnational marriage, as Senegalese migrants seek ways to provide for kin and develop meaningful social status markers from abroad.
Outline of Chapters
The following chapters examine transnational marriage from multiple angles and geographic locations. This text locates the phenomenon of transnational marriage within fluctuating local discourses of gender and social class in Senegal, the political economy both of Senegal itself as well as Italy and other destination countries for migrants, and alongside global trends toward the stretching of intimate relationships across great distances. It demonstrates how control and intimacy are navigated long-distance via remittances, international communication, and through kin and illustrates the various challenges and frustrations posed by the distance—asking who stands to benefit when marriages are experienced across national borders.
Chapter 1 argues that Senegal’s “culture of migration” not only creates paths to emigration from Senegal, but that it also promotes myths and notions of success that in turn shape the everyday behavior of those who never leave. Narratives of non-migrant men and women in Senegal, and a recent history of Senegal’s engagement with structural adjustment policies, demonstrate how interrupted pathways to financial security and social status push Senegalese men and women to look outside Senegal for opportunities to build successful social lives within Senegal. Despite years of emigration and return migration in Senegal, non-migrants remain persistently unfamiliar with the realities of life overseas and how capital is accumulated abroad; the world outside Senegal is imagined as a place of limitless wealth and reward. This “culture of migration” has troubled earlier conceptions of class, desirability, and masculinity within Senegal, which serves to further stimulate migration.
Chapter 2 shows that migrants abroad are hardly leading the lives of glamorous decadence imagined by those at home. Rather, transnational migrants face particular challenges in the quest to gain respectability and perform familial duties in precarious economic circumstances. Migrants explain their decision to marry transnationally through discourses of duty, reputation, and a desired eventual return. I combine an analysis of how the political economy of Italy impedes steady employment and residential stability for its immigrants with a discussion of the Senegalese state’s discourses about migrants as development actors to illustrate how migrants find themselves trapped in transnational limbo by neoliberal ideologies and policies.
Migrants are not the only ones who feel caught in an unwinnable game; migrants’ wives face pressures similar to those faced by their husbands. Chapter 3 illustrates how wives of migrants meet with frustration in their attempts to accomplish their own gendered projects of reputation-building and social reproduction. By examining what women wish to do with remittances, this chapter presents a nuanced assessment of migrants’ wives’ demands for material support, arguing that their reputational projects are not merely selfish but are acts of care towards their migrant husbands. Certain troublesome elements of wifehood are exacerbated by a husband’s absence. A Wolof proverb notes that harmony with the family-in-law is as essential for the success of a Senegalese marriage as salt is to a meal (Gueye 2010: 82). Though relations between a Senegalese wife and her in-laws are almost always challenging, transnational wives find it especially hard to be compatible with their “goro” (parents-in-law) and their other in-laws, such as “ñjekke” (sisters-in-law), and “wuju peccior ga” (husband’s brothers’ wives) when their husbands are abroad. Remittances raise the stakes of familial competition, and a husband’s absence can permit normal familial clashes to escalate severely, even to the point of violence. This chapter also returns to issues of class that are raised in Chapter 1. Through case studies it illustrates how newer definitions and calculi of social class produced by emigration prove ephemeral over the course of individual marriages.
One of the most common frustrations that migrants’ wives reported was being subject to extreme scrutiny by their in-laws and, remotely, by their husbands due to fears about infidelity. Chapter 4 examines the specter of infidelity in transnational marriages and argues that migrants’ wives in fact have less opportunity to be unfaithful than do their peers in non-migrant marriages because of this surveillance. It shows how many wives subject to disciplinary surveillance begin to police their own behavior and self-regulate, believing that their husbands are always watching via family, neighbors, and various technologies. Migrant husbands, however, face little restriction on their freedom of movement or the company they keep. Due to the accepted practice of polygyny, they also meet with very different expectations for their sexual fidelity.
These same technologies employed for surveillance purposes—including Skype, cell phones, webcams, and instant messaging—could provide a space for intimacy between husbands and wives living in separate countries. Chapter 5 questions how love grows within transnational marriage in comparison to marriages where couples cohabitate. Marital bonds in Senegal traditionally prize sexual intimacy and emotional sharing between partners. As men and women in Senegal find themselves caught between a desire to reach “honorable adulthood” (Johnson-Hanks 2007: 643) through marriage, and a local and global economy that make it increasingly difficult to accomplish this in Senegal, both parties are turning to transnational marriage. Senegalese express this change as a move away from what traditionally was a more balanced approach to marriage involving companionate values. Transnational marriage can be productively examined alongside other studies of transnational kinship to reassess what is known about social relations in late capitalism more broadly. For citizens of the global South, even the most intimate relationships are being stretched to their limits by economic constraints that push loved ones into global migration.
If the “everyday ruptures” (Coe et al. 2011) of migration inhibit emotional closeness, romance, and physical intimacy especially, then are new possibilities for more companionate marriages created by reunification? Chapter 6 follows one couple as they adjust
