Seeking to overcome the heterosexual bias in marriage-migration scholarship and move beyond individualistic approaches to queer mobility, this article focuses on the lives of same-sex couples that hold unequal residence statuses. In a twofold context marked by the increasing legal recognition of same-sex families combined with heightened hurdles facing certain categories of immigrants, we examine what those simultaneous trends mean for these couples. Based on 42 interviews conducted in France, the Netherlands and the United States with people from a variety of class backgrounds, we show how higher resource levels moderate the impact of constraining legal frameworks without suppressing them. We distinguish between low-resource homogamous, heterogamous, and high-resource homogamous couples. The first configuration often results in forced immobility and separation. In heterogamous couples, conjugality becomes a major pathway to legal status for the migrant spousepotentially feeding suspicions of instrumentality. In contrast, privileged migrants in a homogamous couple tend to relate to law in less of a binary way and experience regulations as more easily surmountable. Yet, for them, securing permanent residence represents but one objective among several (including their careers and studies), an investment often disconnected from their matrimonial relationship and at times in competition with it.

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Understanding regulation is key to identifying and understanding the mechanisms and patterns that (re)produce social inequalities in nightclub production. Roughly speaking, researchers have focused on two forms of regulation: governmental regulation and club-led regulation. First, city councils regulate nightlife through licensing, zoning laws, nightlife districts and urban redevelopment. Second, clubs have their own incentives to regulate spaces of consumption: to ensure safety, to increase middle-class audiences’ spending power and to attract audiences with high subcultural capital. Research in this vein has so far mainly focused on door policies. However, in analysing club-led regulation, a more nuanced, intricate understanding of cultural production is key. Using David Hesmondhalgh’s cultural industries framework, this research argues that existing work on regulation presupposes pre-existing demand, neglecting that nightclubs also actively create demand. First, it highlights that clubs employ other, less visible but nonetheless exclusionary, production practices that are in effect before audiences even reach the door: hiring external organisations, genre-based formatting, locational strategies and guest lists. Second, it decentralises the role of door policies. Understood in relation to other nightclub cultural production practices, door policy research does not account for nightclubs’ assessments of door policies, venues’ financial precarity, social networks and the need to constantly attract new audiences. By doing so, I examine the workings of power in urban cultural economies by understanding cultural production as a form of spatial regulation. The research is based on 29 interviews with 36 Amsterdam-based nightlife promoters and 111 hours of short-term ethnographies in clubs and at industry events.

The accusation that Black Pete-the blackface character at the center of the annual Sinterklaas festival-is a racist caricature has recently become a staple of the Dutch culture wars, leaving media and cultural producers in a quandary over the figure's meaning and fate. This essay focuses on two recent seasons of the widely popular children's television program Sinterklaasjournaal. The show deployed new storylines to maintain the innocence of the traditional celebration in the face of mounting anti-racist critique by refabricating truths that not only erase the colonial roots of Black Pete's blackness, but also deny any connection to race altogether. In so doing, however, these storylines further destabilized the main Sinterklaas narrative, akin to an everyday lie that is about to be discovered. Endeavors by storytellers to disconnect the Black Pete figure from racial Blackness resulted in representing the character as racially white but covered in soot, while conveying the message that the origin of dark skin is dirt. The narrative strife over Black Pete illustrates the fragility of the Dutch absencing of race, as the latter proves to resurface in the very effort to obliterate it. Instead of artificially reconstructing the semantic unity of discrete stories, the essay introduces a deconstructive approach that apprehends consistency as an effect of power. We show how various actors work at making changes in the hegemonic story to maintain its coherence in response to threats from alternative accounts, in the process generating new contradictions and challenges that require further narrative work.