300655 Gendering Mobilities: Marriage, Migration and the Politics of Sexuality (MA: Soziologie und Anthropologie der globalen Welt) (S) (WiSe 2026/2027)

This course explores the intersection of gender, migration, marriage, and sexuality as a central dimension of global mobility. It examines how intimate relationships like marriage, partnership, and other affective ties often facilitate migration, shaping who moves, how, and under what conditions. Through cross-border case studies, the course investigates how these intimate forms of mobility are embedded in broader structures of power, including patriarchy, caste, race, and class.
Drawing on the scholarships of Parvati Raghuram, Patricia Uberoi, Chandra Mohanty, Brenda Yeoh, Eleonore Kofman, Sirma Bilge, Patricia Hill-Collins, Tithi Bhattacharya to name a few, students will engage with theories of gendered mobility, transnationalism, and intimacy, analyzing how migrants’ personal experiences of love, kinship, and sexuality connect to political economies of labour, citizenship, and belonging in both sending and receiving contexts. The course emphasizes how intersectional identities condition migrants’ access to rights, recognition, and agency, revealing how mobility is simultaneously a strategy of empowerment and a site of control.
Drawing on migration scholarship, feminist theories and postcolonial frameworks, the course situates marriage migration and sexual politics within global transformations of care, reproduction, and family. It invites students to critically evaluate how gendered expectations and cultural norms shape migration patterns while reconfiguring notions of home, identity, and social reproduction across borders.
Course pre-requisites: GenMigration is open to students with some background in Sociology/Social Anthropology/Migration studies/Gender Studies/Global Politics/Global South/Global Studies/comparable programs. The course is organized in a way to maximize group readings, discussions and connecting the conceptual with the empirical. The salient requirement is critical thinking and sociological imagination. This is a non-hierarchical course, meaning the students will actively work towards building the last two weeks’ module together with the instructor. For the rest of the thirteen weeks, they are encouraged to add to the readings enlisted by the instructor. Apart from readings, students are encouraged to recommend films and documentaries relevant for the course, that will be included in the course activities (for details, please check the Assessment section).
Course objectives and learning outcome:
To critically examine the intersection of gender, migration, marriage, and sexuality as key dimensions of global mobility, focusing on how intimate relationships facilitate migration and shape mobility patterns.
To analyze the embeddedness of intimate mobilities within broader power structures such as patriarchy, caste, race, and class, using intersectional and feminist theoretical frameworks.
To develop students’ ability to connect conceptual theories with empirical case studies, enhancing critical thinking and sociological imagination in understanding gendered migration experiences.
To equip students with methodological skills for migration research, including questionnaire design, interviews, systematic observation, data documentation, cleaning, and analysis, alongside the capacity to conduct fieldwork and present findings effectively.