“<i>Que Dieu facilite l’aventure!</i>”. Ivorian women confronting border regulations and intimate relationships on European adventures

This article investigates the migration stories of four Ivorian women who arrived in Europe irregularly. After claiming asylum in Italy, these women managed to cross internal European borders and settle in Paris, where they started new family lives. In the lived experience of these women, their exhausting “adventures” across and against European borders are described through the intimate relationships that they experienced during their journeys. I argue that affective labour carried out through friendship and marital and reproductive care allows migrant women to disrupt the spatial containment enforced by asylum and border regulations. I address migration from a phenomenological perspective that sees intimacy and border mechanisms as powerful forces that shape my interlocutors’ bodies and subjectivities.