Getting to the Pink Picket Fence: How LGB Migrants Negotiate Same-Sex Marriage

Abstract

Despite the increasing legalization trend, same-sex marriage remains inaccessible to couples in most countries. Such exclusions, however, can be circumvented by migrants who, in the process, also negotiate diverse and even divergent meanings of marriage embedded in different socio-institutional contexts. This study examines such diverse meanings of marriage among LGB transnational migrants based on biographic narrative interviews with nine individuals married to same-sex partners in Belgium and the Netherlands and coming from Central and Eastern European countries with constitutional protection of heterosexual marriage. The study highlights the negotiations of intimate relationships in the context of the new institutional opportunity of marriage and stresses how the similarities between migrants and non-migrants testify to the strengthening of same-sex marriage as a social institution. Focusing further on migrants' unique experiences of marriage in divergent socio-institutional contexts, this study also shows how same-sex marriage empowers LGB migrants even where it is (still) not available.