‘The Wedding Ceremony Binds the Spouses in Marital Union.’ Material and Immaterial Flows in the Production of Spouses’ Relatedness

Abstract

What does the marital union do to individuals and their bodies? Addressing this question from the vantage point of Switzerland, my contribution shows that the romantic symbolism of the spouses becoming one through marital union echoes imaginaries of bodies, whose inside (one’s ‘heart and head’) and outside (the visible manifestations of love) must match. Insofar, becoming spouses has effects on allied bodies, which are shaped by a relation that they also contribute to produce. Through the marital union, the state manufacture of a couple gives birth to a new entity where both formerly unrelated individuals become one – a symbolic figure that becomes materialized in the possibility for bodies of foreign spouses to be integrated into the Swiss national body.

The present article proposes that the socio-administrative negotiations surrounding the legal regulation of unions may shed light on the nature of the marital bond. It thus reverses the usual gaze on the continuum between family and nation: instead of analysing how representations of national belonging mobilize imaginaries of biologized family ties, it explores how bureaucratic and legal apparatuses contribute to understanding alliance. Mixing together legal, social and biological features, social relatedness impacts, changes and shapes bodies through the circulation of administrative identity markers, love and sexual substances.

An intersectional perspective proves essential to figure out the meanings of spouses’ relatedness: all legal changes introduced during the last decade are related to racialized figures of abusive foreigners (legal articles on bogus and forced marriages) and gendered issues (introduction of same-sex unions and changes aiming at levelling male / female legal asymmetries). In this regard, what circulates alongside alliance lines can be best addressed by taking into consideration civil servants’ efforts to normalize couples at the margins of the heteronormativity and normative homogamy.