#WeAreFamilyToo: struggles for temporal cross-border familial physicality during COVID-19

This article examines how COVID-19 border restrictions affected three family types requiring cross-border mobility (globordered families): intended parents and their baby born to a surrogate from another country, binational living-apart couples and transnational multigenerational families. Hundreds of social media posts and tens of media reports from various worldwide sources related to campaigns initiated by members of these family types (March 2020–February 2022) were systematically studied using critical online discourse analysis. Two key themes emerged. First, temporal familial physicality establishes the necessity of physical co-presence across existential, periodic, lifecycle and dependency dimensions. The second theme, contested hierarchies , exposes the deep familial, gendered and economic hierarchies challenged by these families’ resistance efforts. Findings demonstrate national and international law’s failure to adequately address the diverse needs of less privileged globordered families and call for legal frameworks to move beyond unification–separation and citizen–alien binaries and develop more nuanced mechanisms to promote temporal cross-border familial physicality.