Perceptions of transnational arranged marriages among the children of Bangladeshi skilled migrants in Sydney

Transnational arranged marriages among Muslim temporary labour migrants’ children have been problematised in policy, media and public discourses in European migrant-receiving societies. Such problematisation has been driven by concerns regarding forced marriages, sham marriages and continuous migration that arguably hinder integration into host societies. As such, transnational arranged marriages have been essentialised as a marker of ‘Monolithic Muslim Otherness’. While Australia is a classic migration-receiving country (Castles, Vasta & Ozkul 2014, p. 128) and Islamophobic sentiment is on the rise (Blair, Dunn, Kamp & Alam 2017), marriage practices among children of Muslim background in Australia are underrepresented in the literature. This thesis aims to address this gap by exploring the perceptions and attitudes of young adult children of Bangladeshi skilled migrants towards transnational arranged marriages. More specifically, it examines the ways in which young adult Bangladeshi-Australians challenge Western discourses of Muslim practices, particularly in regard to gender roles, agency and homogeneity. Employing semi-structured interviews with seven young adult Bangladeshi-Australians, this thesis provides a rich understanding of the complexity, diversity and dynamism of the spousal selection process. Through a postcolonial and post-structuralist analysis of interview data, I illustrate that not only are young adult Muslim Bangladeshi-Australians heterogeneous in terms of their gender, education, age and religiosity, but their perceptions and attitudes towards transnational arranged marriages are similarly diverse. I argue that spousal selection preferences are intertwined with interactions and negotiations between individual preferences, agency and meso-level structures such as family networks, the Bangladeshi migrant community and peer groups, as well as contextual factors, such as the Australian marriage market and immigration and integration policies. This study is an important contribution to the body of research regarding transnational arranged marriages among Muslim migrants, as it moves beyond the marriage behaviour of descendants of temporary labour migrants in Europe. It also makes important contributions to broader research on migration, settlement, national identity and belonging in its driving argument that the questioning of migrant children’s integration based on their marriage behaviour is narrow and exclusionary