"Diversi ma non troppo". International Mixed Couples and Cross-Border marriages

This PhD project aims at exploring the complex reality of a social phenomenon that has rapidly characterized modern pluralistic societies, thus, the one of international mixed couples and cross-border intermarriages. Traditionally, intermarriage has been conceived and analyzed as the output of migrants’ process of assimilation and intermingling with local populations. Nowadays, nevertheless, it is presumed that a good portion of contemporary international mixed couples and cross-border marriages are not necessarily the result of an assimilation process, not even of a migratory experience. Today many more different and complex motivations merge together around the conformation of a mixed union. Some of them may comprehend the output of more complexes processes of marriage’s and family life’s transformations such as the internationalization of modern and postmodern marriage/family forms; the opening of new (voluntary and/or forced) heterogamy and exogamy channels; the formation of transnational communities; and the consolidation of multiethnic highly mobile societies. Particular attention is paid to the couple’s formation process and partners’ adjustments through internal/external negotiation processes and adaptation practices, mainly but not exclusively, of gender and cultural differences. The study examined the instrumental and symbolic meaning of the marriage institution within an international context; the social dimensions of marriage migration; and the instrumental role of partners’ human capital in relation to the couple’s settlement and the foreign spouse’ integration process in the host country.