Unsettling relationalities: migrant couples’ geographies of attachment

This paper offers new critical insights into migration by instigating dialogue between longstanding interdisciplinary study of intimate, familial, and sexual relations and emerging scholarship on geographies of attachment. We do so via ethnographies of building workers in China and focus on couples as an under-theorized and -researched group. Specifically, we foreground non-human attachments of being and becoming a couple that constitute migrant’ workers responses to, and shaping of, relations of power in and through mundane labor, domestic, and family struggles. Firstly, we analyze couples’ attachments through affective economies and patterned relations with (grand)parents, siblings, children, colleagues, friends, ex-partners, and heterogeneous other non-human actors. Secondly, we interrogate forms, scenes, possibilities, promises, and intensities of couples’ (de)attachments that infuse past, present, and future lives. Thirdly, we explore how being and becoming a couple’ unsettles relational familial, personal, social, and intimate attachments. Overall, we contribute to interdisciplinary momentum in challenging de-humanizing impulses that eclipse the complexities of migrants’ everyday lives. We conclude by signposting new avenues for research.