Repairing masculinity under symbolic liability: husband performativity and reluctant mobility in Sino–Ethiopian marriages

Why do some Ethiopian women marry Chinese men while initially rejecting migration to China, and how do some couples later relocate despite early reluctance? Drawing on multi-sited ethnography (2018–2020) with 16 Sino–Ethiopian families across Ethiopia and China, this article argues that marriage formation and subsequent mobility are structured by China’s symbolic liability within Ethiopian moral worlds and a globally ranked geography of desirable destinations. I show that husbands’ economic resources and China’s imagined rise do not automatically translate into marriageability or into a shared mobility horizon. Instead, symbolic liability raises the threshold of recognisability: husbands must perform husbandhood through provision, patience, and kin obligations under public scrutiny. Where such practices endure, resources can become convertible into legitimacy, recognised as reliable husbandhood within an Ethiopian kin field. This shift can alter household power and enable mobility decisions initially refused. I describe this pathway as unwanted transnationalism: mobility that emerges less from prior aspiration than from accumulated changes in household power, kin obligations, and the social recognition of husbandhood. The article advances scholarship on transnational marriage and mobility by specifying how place reputations and racialised imaginaries reorganise the performative labour required for husbandhood to ‘count’ across cultural contexts.