Migration Categories Are Violent and Porous: Sri Lankan Migrants to Italy and Its Effect on Marriage and Intimate Relationships

Abstract

In everyday practice, conceptual categories appear to be neutral, closed and judicious, yet they are porous and violent. It appears through its institutional and structural practices both at home and in host societies. They are violent on the basis that they restrict or deny the right to mobility and disrupt the meaning of existence. In this article, the term ‘migration categories’ denotes the intellectual process of social ordering and classification of the act of human mobility. Violent behaviour of categories is epistemological which is dictated and reproduced by different entities including individuals and trickles down to the lowest level of the society. Yet, migrants challenge it by transgressing the boundaries through multiple techniques which demonstrates the porosity of the categories. Based on the fieldwork among Sri Lankan undocumented immigrants and non-migrants in Wennappuwa to Italy, this article looks at how violence of categories attaches to the trajectory of migration and its effect on family and intimate relationships. Following the methods of discourse analysis and existential philosophy, this article argues that it cannot be understood by dislocating the categories from the trajectory of immigrants, non-migrants and the existentiality of the discursive space.