Cross-Border Intimate Mobilities Between the Global South and North: Resetting the Research Agenda Beyond Marriage Migration

Three decades ago, influential marriage migration perspectives emerged that importantly transformed the agenda for studies on how women from the Global South experience intimate relations with men from the wealthier North. Applying feminist gender perspectives, this field centered on a woman's subjective lived experiences of her asymmetrical, unequal union with a foreign man, focusing on reproductive labor and questions of hypergamy. It remains the dominant analytic lens, but we advocate a rethink. First, we argue for extending the marriage migration frame to cross-border intimate mobilities, so that it includes a fuller range of this type of gendered, sexualized, and unequal intimate social relationship. Second, it is necessary to account for the important contextual backstory—opportunity structures—that facilitates the evolution of significant pathways for intimate mobilities between specific Southern and Northern places over time. We demonstrate by reference to Thailand, one of the largest sources and locations for cross-border intimate mobilities.