Gendered Essentialisms and Racial Dynamics among Bi-National Malagasy/French Couples in Southwest France

Over the last twenty years, increasing numbers of women from the African island of Madagascar have begun to use marriage as a strategy for migrating to France. Very frequently, they marry men in rural areas, which traditionally have had low rates of migration from the former French colonies. In many cases, the men they marry are disadvantaged on the marriage market because of their rural occupations and have thus chosen to find a bride in Madagascar. Drawing on recent fieldwork in the areas around Toulouse, this seminar investigates the dynamics of race and gender that play out within these marriages, as well as in the context of these marriage-migrants' interactions with community members. I argue that women who come from Madagascar use a strategic form of gendered essentialism that plays on, but also domesticates, the racially hierarchical colonial past. Precisely because they have some of the forms of sociality and gendered skills that these metropolitan men lack and they are often seen as being 'sweet' and 'hard workers', these women are 'incorporable'. Yet such strategies do not always work, as some French families also seek to extract women's labour without fully incorporating them in ways that give women social benefits. The paper theorizes on the conditions under which these women's efforts succeed as well as those in which they fail.