by Laure Sizaire, Marie Sklodowska-Curie European Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratory of Anthropology of Contemporary Worlds (LAMC) & Université Libre de Bruxelles

This presentation draws on early findings from my Marie Skłodowska-Curie project on privileged mobility and transnational conjugality. Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork in Nouakchott, Mauritania - including interviews with 31 European-Mauritanian couples - I explore how European women’s racial, national, and class privileges are negotiated within intimate relationships with Mauritanian men.

While these women often benefit from their education, whiteness, and access to domestic labor, their partnerships also expose tensions that reconfigure privilege. Women who follow their partners tend to experience upward mobility but professional precarity, whereas those who migrate independently often reverse traditional gender and financial roles. I argue that these unions reveal a distinctive form of “shared privilege,” transmitted through kinship, economic interdependence, and distance from local gender norms. The analysis contributes to understanding how race, class, and gender hierarchies are both reproduced and transformed through transnational intimacy.

Laure Sizaire is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie European Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratory of Anthropology of Contemporary Worlds (LAMC), Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Her research explores intimacy and conjugality, migration and mobility, gender and sexuality. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in post-Soviet spaces (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine) and France, examining the gendered dimensions of transnational relationships through intimate connections, marriages and international matchmaking. Currently, her work extends to West Africa (Mauritania) and Southeast Asia (Malaysia), where she focuses on North-South mobility and transnational conjugality. Using an intersectional and gendered lens, her research sheds light on global transformations in intimacy and the reconfiguration of power relations.

Friday 14 November 2025, from 10:30am until 12pm

Room S.15.215
Campus Solbosch - Building S - 15th floor
Avenue Jeanne 44, Bruxelles

Registration here