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Cross-Border Intimate Mobilities Between the Global South and North: Resetting the Research Agenda Beyond Marriage Migration

Paul Statham & Sirijit Sunanta

Annual Review of Sociology2026https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-011824-031039article
AJG 4*ABDC A*
Weight
0.37

What the paper says

Three decades ago, influential marriage migration perspectives emerged that importantly transformed the agenda for studies on how women from the Global South experience intimate relations with men from the wealthier North. Applying feminist gender perspectives, this field centered on a woman's subjective lived experiences of her asymmetrical, unequal union with a foreign man, focusing on reproductive labor and questions of hypergamy. It remains the dominant analytic lens, but we advocate a rethink. First, we argue for extending the marriage migration frame to cross-border intimate mobilities, so that it includes a fuller range of this type of gendered, sexualized, and unequal intimate social relationship. Second, it is necessary to account for the important contextual backstory—opportunity structures—that facilitates the evolution of significant pathways for intimate mobilities between specific Southern and Northern places over time. We demonstrate by reference to Thailand, one of the largest sources and locations for cross-border intimate mobilities.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-011824-031039

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@article{paul2026,
  title        = {{Cross-Border Intimate Mobilities Between the Global South and North: Resetting the Research Agenda Beyond Marriage Migration}},
  author       = {Paul Statham & Sirijit Sunanta},
  journal      = {Annual Review of Sociology},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-011824-031039},
}

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Cross-Border Intimate Mobilities Between the Global South and North: Resetting the Research Agenda Beyond Marriage Migration

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Evidence weight

0.37

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.16 × 0.4 = 0.06
M · momentum0.53 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.