Intermarriage and Mixed Parenting, Promoting Mental Health and Wellbeing

Crossover Love

R. Singla

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137390783
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Marriages across ethnic borders are increasing in frequency, yet little is known of how discourses of 'normal' families, ethnicity, race, migration, globalisation affect couples and children involved in these mixed marriages. This book explores mixed marriage though intimate stories drawn from the real lives of visibly different couples.

1

Intimate Relationships across Ethnic (and Other) Borders

This book is about the kind of intimate relations across ethnic borders that are gaining attention academically and politically as well as in service provision at international levels. It explores the dynamics of such relations, especially intermarriages between visibly ethnically different couples, characterised by differences in phenotypes such as physical and facial characteristics, skin colour and hair type. This book includes primarily an empirical study (Singla & Holm, 2012), in which one partner is Danish and the other originates from South Asia (India or Pakistan), at times also implying marriage between citizens and non-citizens.

Both study and book were motivated by my search for studies of ‘mixedness’ – partnering and parenting across different ethnic backgrounds which, in a Danish context, was almost futile and indicated a very limited availability of research. The exploratory study covered in the book attempts to answer questions related to intermarriage dynamics and to the negotiation of ‘mixedness’ by couples. Inspired by international studies of these phenomena, the objective is to explore new concepts and understandings of ‘mixedness’ and ‘intermarriage’, which have been relatively ignored in studies of diversity, migration, minority/majority relations as well as in family science in Denmark. A further motivation for this book was the lack of attention given to intermarried couples and the absence of their own voices in public and academic discourses. Thus the main research question I tackle is how ethnically intermarried couples negotiate their everyday lives and the parenting of their children.

Intermarried couples are often seen as problems mainly because their own voices are not heard. As A. Barbara stated in Marriages Across Frontiers, ‘Cross-cultural marriages have the advantage of giving advance warning of what every couple must eventually face – that they are different from each other’ (Barbara, 1989, in Breger & Hill, 1998, p. 186). Partners in all marriages are different from each other, while couples marrying across ethnic borders may be different on some dimensions and similar on others. My goal is to create a nuanced picture of how it is to be an intermarried couple and what kind of dynamics, harmony and struggles they experience. This is an attempt to go beyond ‘problematisation’ to a more balanced and context-sensitive consideration of the dynamics in the nexus between intimate relations and ethnic boundary crossing. Drawing from studies in other parts of the world, especially from Asia, this book challenges the Eurocentrism of the emerging field which intersects Family Studies, Global Studies, Counselling, Psychotherapy and Migration Studies, generating new insights. My aspiration to increase awareness of these intimate relationships across borders has resulted in this book, which covers a relatively new area of study and uniquely expands the remit of research into the applied fields of teaching and practice.

Ethnic ‘mixedness’ is a subject related to the experiences of couples who have formed intimate partnerships across ethnic borders. It focuses on their experiences as parents and weaves in concern for their mental health and wellbeing. I perceive ethnicity as an axis of differentiation and identification, with social, historical and personally felt aspects; aptly termed as ‘ethnicity in the head’ and ‘ethnicity in the heart’ by Banks (1996 in Verkuyten, 2005). This concept is developed further in Chapter 2.

The terms ‘intermarriage’ and ‘mixed marriage’ are used in this book since they are recognised in most of the literature from the UK and Europe and it is accepted that no one term is used by couples who are married across these borders; the issue of terminology is discussed further in the next chapter.

One of the basic premises of this book, inspired by the science of intimate relationship (Fletcher et al., 2013), is that individuals are alone and incomplete but that isolation can be banished or at least ameliorated when humans pair off and experience the intimacy that can only be gained in close, emotionally connected relationships. Giles (2006) invokes the concept of sexual desire as a response to our gendered human conditions. Such intimacy can be experienced as highly romantic, sexual relationships. One understanding is that for most people the goal of forming a permanent or long-term, sexual liaison with another person is a pivotal goal in life in which a massive outlay of energy is invested. The conditions for the search for an intimate partner have changed due to the current process of globalisation, especially the popularisation of the Internet since the 1990s, and this changing pattern is another premise of this book. Globalisation processes – involving increased movements across borders – have broadened the range of potential partners for many people, leading to close intimate relationships among persons who may be geographically distant and may never have met each other without these increased movements.

Mixed marriage could mean marriage between a person originating from South Asia and a native Dane. This book studies marriages in which either spouse has migrated to get married or the spouse’s parents have migrated to Denmark, and thus the spouse is perceived as part of the South Asian diaspora in Denmark – referred to here as the ‘diasporic spouse’ or reunified spouses. Diasporic belonging also implies a prioritising of ethnic identity and that the spouse is from an ethnic minority, while the Danish spouse is from the ethnic majority. The couples in the empirical study are, therefore, from the Global North (Denmark) and Global South (South Asia – India and Pakistan) and are studied in the Danish context. The themes emerging from this research, however, are applicable in many other contexts outside Denmark, albeit with local variations. This is not just another book on marriages because it presents intimate stories from real life, foregrounding the rarely heard voices of migrants as outsiders and thus making an important and unusual contribution.

Internationally there is an increasing political, public and intellectual interest in mixing and mixedness, people from a ‘mixed’ or ‘inter’ racial and ethnic background and people partnering and parenting across different racial and ethnic backgrounds (Edwards et al., 2012). This interest mirrors debates related to difficulties in terms of personal relationships and psychological processes associated with negative assumptions, such as ‘identity confusion’ on one hand and the positive assumption that mixed race people have a stronger genetic profile and are more beautiful, healthy and intelligent on the other. However, both these subnormal and supra-normal conceptualisations stem from the same premise that people from mixed backgrounds are somewhat different from mono-racial people (ibid.).

1.1 Intermarriages in a global perspective

Globalisation is a phenomenon with both geographical and ideological dimensions, being worldwide as well as universal, It involves with many life domains, including social relationships, life course, labour market affiliations, religious belongings and so on. Issues of love, intimate partnership and marriage cross many of these conceptual levels of globalisation. As this book attempts to take a broad view of mixed intimate partnerships, it aims to highlight the challenges and delights of cross-border marriages and intimate relationships that extend over countries and continents.

The phenomena of love and marriage across ethnic and geographical borders are powerful analytical tools as they provide a glimpse into the complex interconnections between cultural, economic, interpersonal and emotional realms of experience (Padilla et al., 2007). These phenomena have implications for people of mixed heritage who could benefit from more optimal social conditions, recognition, support, more sympathetic immigration and legal provisions and better health and social services if these global forces were better understood. These phenomena have hardly been scientifically explored in the Scandinavian/Danish context and this book is an attempt to do so. By focusing on the personal level, it attempts to explore how these people in intermarriages between South Asians and Danes enact, resist or transform social discourses of love and marriage within the specific historical and cultural context of contemporary Danish society.

International migration is a central aspect of globalisation and it facilitates modern, fluid, identities relating to transnational family life. Such family relationships across national borders are characterised by strong and sustainable ties between the person and a network of relatives based in other countries – including the country of origin – and they present new opportunities for family formation and lifestyles. An increasing number of people have ties to networks across geographic locations which may result in, or be the result of marrying across national or ethnic and/or racial borders. Intermarriage can be viewed as a by-product of the movement and migration of people as well as a driver of migration and, for whatever reasons, in the last few decades an increasing number of couples with markedly different ethnic origins and cultural backgrounds have chosen to live together. The global development in transnational family patterns and migration (intermarriage, transnational adoption, etc.) is thus changing and challenging traditional family forms, ideologies and values, as well as the ways of defining ‘family’, ‘kinship’ and ‘marriage’. The boundaries of what is recognised as ‘family’ have become less clear according to sociologist Beck-Gernsheim (2002, pp. 104 ff.) who points to the tension between globalisation and individualisation in relation to the lifestyles and dynamics of new types of family and relationship patterns. She refers to them as the post-familial family (ibid., p. 10) where intermarriage is viewed as a result of free individual choice in a globalised world. The post-familial family is thus characterised and problematised by ethnic and racial differences internally and externally in relation to the majority population and dominant discourses in any given country of residence. Such trends towards ‘intermarriage’ and transnational identity are not just private decisions, they are seen as a challenge to politicians and social researchers in many European countries including Denmark where intermarriage has become a politically explosive issue (ibid., p. 105). It is not my intention to problematise mixing, however, as it offers both challenges and delights, enriching potential at societal, interpersonal and personal levels, but rather to illuminate both the problematic and celebratory aspects. This echoes Palriwala & Uberoi (2008), authors within the field of marriage migration and gender, who write that ‘ . . . without discounting the abuses . . . social scientific attention to the intersection of marriage and migration needs to go beyond “victimisation” to a more balanced and context-sensitive consideration of changing dynamics in the nexus of marriage and migration’ (ibid., p. 24).

At the same time, attention is directed to the increasing role of electronic media in the formation of intimate relationships between partners of different nationalities, races, ethnicities, sexualities and classes on the global scene. The Internet allows individuals to virtually connect and to transcend ethnic and national borders (Whitty & Carr, 2006). However, Agathangelou & Killian (2009) argue that this nullification of borders does not evade sexualising and racialising processes but reinscribes people within the racial and sexual matrices of violence and recolonisation. ‘In crossing of borders to seek sexual intimacies, people do not just pass any borders and do not choose just any people’ (ibid., p. 112).

There has been little scientific research regarding intermarriage and the psychosocial aspects are underexplored, even in the international context. Sookoor, Moodley & Pinto (2011) point out that in the American and Canadian contexts the paucity of mixedness research has led to the reinforcement of mythologies about ethnicity, race, sexuality, gender and identity. Mixed race and interethnic partnerships are seen as exotic, erotic or pathological. Even in Canada, a country with a declared policy of multiculturalism and relatively high degree of mixing across ethnic groups, there is very little research on the lived experiences of individuals in interethnic relationships. In the USA, Sherif, Trask & Koivunen (2007) reflect on how interethnic coupling affects marital processes, the retention of cultural traditions, assimilation and rearing of children.

Studying mixedness in close relationships such as marriage and relationships between parents and children of mixed parentage is significant. It provides a vehicle for examining ideologies surrounding race and ethnicity, ethnic relationships, and the role of social sciences in the construction and deconstruction of categories such as race and ethnicity. Moreover it is important for comprehending the self-understandings and strengths of society as argued by Root (1992). The multi racial/ethnic person’s understanding of her or himself can enhance society’s understanding of intra- and inter-group relations, identity and resilience. According to Wu (2011), in Canada, studying interethnic couple relationships is important not only because they reflect other aspects of diversity in families today, but also because of their potential impact in terms of social inclusion and self-identification within particular visible minority groups, particularly for subsequent generations.

The study of intermarriages provides insights into the lifestyle practices of the modern family, into integration processes and into alternative perspectives on minority and majority processes. Last but not least it provides insights into the intergenerational transmission of ethnic and cultural practices among children of mixed parentage.

Before proceeding further, I elaborate the conceptualisation of intermarriage and the salient terminology being used in the book.

1.2 Towards a conceptualisation of intermarriage

Intimate partnerships across ethnic, national and racial borders are embedded in broad social and historical structures and are also situated in specific geographic and social contexts. This makes the right terminology for the phenomena difficult for an international readership as there is no one term agreed upon by scholars or the lay readers. In a global comparative study of mixedness and multiracialism through census classification in 87 countries, Morning (2012) notes that terminology used in census questionnaires in the Americas, Asia, Europe and Africa varied according to how these regions’ histories of colonialism, slavery, migration and political boundary shift. Race as a census item is used virtually exclusively by New World former slave societies (such as the USA and Brazil) but hardly features on European or Asian censuses. The term race is often conflated with ethnicity in academic, political, media and everyday understandings, although race hinges on beliefs about essential biological characteristics. Multiracialism is thus perceived by Morning (2012) as distinct from multi-ethnic, multicultural or multinational.

In the present study, the dynamic concepts of ‘interracial mixing’ and ‘mixed race’ highlight the contested nature of ‘race’ as a ‘scientific’ idea which attaches hierarchical meanings to physical differences as discussed by Ifekwunigwe (2004). Additionally, these hierarchies create, explain, justify and maintain social inequalities and injustices and underlie differential access to privilege, prestige and power, being differentially informed by structural factors such as gender, generation, social class, locality, colour and sexuality.

These issues, among others, will be taken up further in Chapter 2 of this book through a discussion of the historical variability of racial boundaries (Dencik, 2009; Song, 2009). For now it is important to note that there are different terms in use to denote intimate relations across ethnic borders and that all these terms are to some extent social constructions and axes of differentiations at different levels in different temporal and spatial contexts.

In Denmark, the prevalent term is ethnic intermarriage or intercultural marriage (in Danish – etniske blandede ægteskaber, tværkulturel ægteskab, Poulsen, 2012; Liversage, 2012). In Germany the term is bi-national or mixed nationality marriage (Fleischer, 2012; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2014). In the Americas the term is interracial or multiracial (Karis & Killian, 2009; Rastogi & Thomas, 2009; Kenney & Kelley, 2011). In South Asia, especially in India, the common term is international marriage or Euro Asian/Anglo-Indian which, on another level, has a congruence with terms such as interstate or inter-community marriage to denote marriage between a North Indian and a South Indian (Bhagat, 2009) and when the partners belong to different dominant social groups. Some of these marriages may involve different faiths or religious belongings and may be considered as interfaith/religious marriage. Marriages between Jews and non-Jews have been investigated in Scandinavia – in Sweden, Finland and Norway, where a rising rate of religious intermarriages is indicated (Dencik, 2009).

In agreement with Song (2009), it is noted that in some cases racial, ethnic and religious intermarriage may coincide and it may be difficult to distinguish between them. There may be overlapping between the diverse categories of belonging as a White Christian (Protestant) Dane can marry a person from India who is Christian (Catholic) or a person who is Hindu; in the first case there is crossing of ethnic boundaries, while in the second both ethnic and religious boundaries are crossed.

Song’s conclusion, that the increasing rate of intermarriages between black and white Britons as well as Indians and whites suggests that being ‘mixed’ may be becoming increasingly unremarkable, can be debated but can hardly be transplanted to the Danish con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Intimate Relationships across Ethnic (and Other) Borders
• 2. Setting the Danish Scene and Mixedness Concept
• 3. Intermarried Couples and Their Experiences
• 4. Getting Together – ‘Falling in Love’
• 5. Managing Everyday Life
• 6. Mixed Parenting Ideals and Practices
• 7. Local Lives in a Transnational Context
• 8. Living ‘Private Life in the Public Gaze’: Mental Health and Wellbeing
• 9. Implications for Strengthening Mixed Partnering and Parenting: Counselling and Psychotherapy
• Bibliography
• Index