Thetélèphone malgache: Transnational gossip and social transformation among Malagasy marriage migrants in France

Abstract

A B S T R A C TDeepening poverty in Madagascar leads Malagasy coastal women to marry Frenchmen as a way to migrate to France. The télèphone malgache, an informal organizational and communicative structure, connects these marriage migrants to each other and to their families in Madagascar. Drawing from studies of gossip, on the one hand, and telecommunications, on the other, I argue that the télèphone malgache creates highly unstable social ties that regulate and transform Malagasy matrimonial migrants' relationships with one another, their French families, and their Malagasy families back home. I show how the relations that women maintain with one another in France and with their kin in Madagascar are aspects of a single process. Far from simply connecting people to their homelands, these relationships also shape migrants' integration into French society.

Postures of Empowerment: Cultivating Aspirant Feminism in a Ugandan NGO

“…These international circuits and the cosmopolitan social status that accompanies them are both desirable and largely inaccessible for most Ugandan women . As has been long shown in the literature on female migration from the global South to North, when women do travel abroad, it is often as care workers or through transactional sexual arrangements (Cole , ; Cole and Groes ; Ehrenreich and Hoschschild ). Similar paths toward upward career mobility hold true within Ugandan borders as well, as young women are commonly understood to achieve financial success through their relationships with men rather than through jobs of their own.…”

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“…One answer is technological, such as in Jonna Yarrington's () example of a (small) familial network spread out across large geographic distances that are reduced by technologies, the voicemail messages of a father‐in‐law living far away. A more heterogeneous system is described by Jennifer Cole () in her study of the “ télèphone malgache ,” an informal communication network of gossip connecting Malagasy marriage migrants in France to one another and to their families in Madagascar. The women whom Cole described simultaneously negotiate two different sets of social relations and communicative expectations in France and Madagascar, and it is the intersection between the two that affects their integration into French society.…”

Working Mis/Understandings: The Tangled Relationship between Kinship, Franco-Malagasy Binational Marriages, and the French State

“…Malagasy wives view kin relations expansively, often seeking to grow social networks that stretch from Madagascar to France (Cole ). French husbands have a more restricted vision of who counts as kin, focused primarily on the nuclear family.…”