Special issue: Same-Sex Marriage and Migration

The expansion of marriage rights for same-sex couples has coincided in many countries with increasingly restrictive marriage migration policies. These differentiated approaches to marriage – relatively inclusive towards LGBTQI + people and their families, yet increasingly exclusionary towards migrants and their families – intersect when same-sex couples seek to migrate through family migration routes.

This special issue, published in 2026 in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, sets out to bridge two fields that have developed largely in isolation from one another. Family migration scholarship, despite its critical feminist ambitions, long reproduced heteronormative assumptions by neglecting same-sex couples and queer families. Queer migration studies, for its part, foregrounded sexuality and mobility but paid comparatively little attention to kinship, marriage, and family as structuring forces. By centering same-sex marriage migration, the contributions to this special issue have demonstrated that this intersection is not a niche topic but a generative site of inquiry — one that exposes the blind spots of both fields and opens new analytical horizons.

Together, the articles have shown how cross-border same-sex marriages are shaped by intersecting regimes of migration control, intimate citizenship, and social recognition. They have illuminated how queer couples navigate legal and bureaucratic boundaries, how the "boundaries of legitimate intimacy" are entangled with race, class, and national identity, and how intimacy itself becomes a terrain of struggle across borders. They have also raised critical questions about the limits of the legal category of "same-sex marriage" for capturing the diversity of queer and trans people's intimate lives and mobility strategies.

The link to the introduction of the special issue is here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2026.2708437