Normative Family Formation Under Immigration Law
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This dissertation investigates how immigration law encourages normative family formation for queer and straight binational couples pursuing marriage migration to the United States. The first study considers the case of queer binational couples who became eligible for marriage-based green cards in the United States starting in 2013. Drawing on interview data with members of queer binational couples and legal professionals, I find that queer binational couples enact quotidian family behaviors that embody nationhood as they navigate immigration bureaucracy, which I call quotidian homonationalism. The second study considers how lawyers advise binational couples pursuing the spousal petition. Interviews with legal professionals show that they make intimate and durable changes to clients’ lives over the course of nearly a decade in order to survive bureaucratic scrutiny into marriage fraud. I conceptualize lawyers as domestic counselors who curate, habituate, and archive legitimate marital lifestyles. The third study considers queer family migration in the era of same-sex marriage legalization. In a fractured and evolving global landscape of same-sex marriage recognition and migration, I show that queer binational couples’ transnational mobility and citizenship rights are stratified by the family laws and immigration policies of both spouses. I present a typology of what I call transnational sexual citizenship to articulate the constraints that queer binational couples face when attempting to make claims for citizenship rights.