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Paper short abstract:

This paper follows the stories of two Syrian women refugees in Alexandria and their struggles to gain stability through intimate relations and marriage. The paper argues that love and marriage are central to how these women experience their own (im)mobility and imagine their (lack of) futures.

Paper long abstract:

This paper follows the stories of two Syrian women refugees living in Alexandria, and their struggles to gain stability through intimate relations and marriage. The paper argues that intimacy, love, and marriage, far from being peripheral stories to the main trauma of migration, are in fact central aspects of how these women make sense of their own (im)mobility and imagine their (lack of) futures. For each woman, their intimate personal lives represent the potential for stability, but more often than not, result in further precarity and even at times, threats to their lives. This paper, based off of two years of ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian refugees who came to Egypt since 2012, studies the choices, risks, refusals, and affective states of these two women in their intimate lives over seven years of "temporary" displacement, as they await the potential of resettlement or return. This paper argues that a key aspect of this story is aspiration, for love, stability, success, and happiness, in the face of unexpected circumstances. While this is a not a new topic within migration studies, women's aspirations are often not taken seriously, or even studied at all. I argue that these two women's focus on love and/or marriage is a contradictory, complex, and nonlinear attempt to reorient their relationship to the future, and to extract themselves from precarious present that has foreclosed possibilities once thought guaranteed.