Paper short abstract:

This paper traces how mixed marriages in Jordan trouble ideologies that link paternity and nationality by fueling an activist movement that contests dependent nationality, which forbids women, but not men, from passing their citizenship to children they have with foreigners.

Paper long abstract:

Dependent nationality in Jordan forbids women, but not men, from passing their citizenship to children they have with foreigners. The world's largest host of Palestinian refugees argues that dependent nationality protects their "right of return" to a future Palestine, controverting Israeli claims that Jordan is Palestine. As such, children of Jordanian women married to noncitizen Palestinians become stateless. I trace "extreme" tactics of family-making, like non-normative transactional marriages and strategic juridical divorces, to explore statelessness as a relational formation. Mixed-legal-status families make claims on rights through the relatedness of kinship even if, as de jure stateless persons, some of them do not have their own Arendtian "right to have rights." Because stateless husbands and children cannot own property, or even cell phones, under their own names, their economic and political rights are mediated through their Jordanian wives and mothers. 'Matrimoney' traces how, when spousal rights become mediated through certain property practices and bureaucratic formations, patriarchal gender dynamics can become confounded. Mixed-legal-status marriages unfasten the biogenetic ideologies of kinship, revealing the troubles of heteronormative ideologies that link paternity and nationality in Jordan. In the process, both paternity and nationality are revealed as ideological and unstable criteria for the distribution of personhood. I connect such 'kincraft' (Thomas 2021) to the activist movement "My Mother is Jordanian, and Her Citizenship is My Right" that noncitizen youth and their mothers have mobilized to contest policies that have made the marital choices of potentially all Jordanian women a matter of national security.