Travail de recherche/Working paper
| Résumé : | Marriages between partners with different nationalities and/or ethnicities are continuously attracting the controlling gaze of many states at the global level. Studies have demonstrated how states govern the intimate lives of ‘mixed’ couples through migration and social policies as well as family laws. When ‘mixed’ couples break up, the way states regulate their conjugal dissolution remains largely unexplored. Using a feminist perspective on social citizenship, the present paper addresses this scholarly gap by examining if, how, and why migrant spouses claim their social rights in their receiving country during and/or after marital breakdown. Analysing interviews with Filipino migrant women in the Netherlands and Belgium shows that divorce does not always result in migrant women’s reliance on legal and social aids in their receiving country, that is, their practice of social citizenship. Filipino women’s decision whether to claim or not their social rights stems not only from micro- and meso-level factors(their resources, their awareness of available social services, and their social capital), but also from macro-level ones such as the presence of negative stereotypes about them in their receiving country and the socio-legal service structures available there. |
