Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the lived experience of the Canadian spousal reunification process from the perspective Canadian women married to non-Canadian men. It demonstrates how conjugal authenticity and normalcy are being co-constructed throughout the immigration process.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of cumbersome family reunification immigration procedures in Canada and increasing delays in the processing of "foreign" spouses' files, this paper explores the strategies Canadian women married to non-Canadian men have developed in order to "make it" through the Canadian family reunification process despite the tactics exerted by the state to deter such unions. It draws on the conjugal trajectories of thirty Canadian women who are or have been in an intimate relationship with a non-Canadian man living in a "non-western" country, focusing on their experience of the family reunification process. Eighteen months of participant observation in an online community of Canadian women married to or sponsoring the immigration of a non-Canadian man further enrich the discussion.

I argue that the immigration of their spouse to Canada becomes, for the women, a personal and emotionally loaded project to be achieved by all means. First, I explore how the experience of the bureaucratic process of spousal reunification contributes a co-construction of conjugal authenticity and normalcy. Second, I discuss how the online women support community, while facilitating the immigration process itself by providing concrete immigration tips, guidance, support and an emotional outlet, also fosters its own set of norms and values based on the primacy of binational romantic love and conjugality. This puts pressure on members to conform to the ideal of companionate marriage, which may prove difficult to achieve in transnational relationships, and to follow through on the immigration of their spouse in spite of refusals from Immigration Canada.