Transmitting marriage models across generations: narratives of mothers and daughters between Morocco and Italy

This article explores the processes of construction of gender and sexuality in the life course of two generations of women of Moroccan origin in Italy – mother and daughter dyads – while challenging the most popular constructs within academia and the current policy climate around migrant families. While these approaches are often a combination of evolutionary and polarised assumptions focused on establishing how far behind 'they' are from 'us', with inevitable discriminatory consequences, this article explores the potential of a different frame. Based on 29 biographical narratives collected in Italy and Morocco, it unravels how discourses and practices around marriage models are differently transmitted, reproduced, contrasted and transformed across women's generations in multiple spaces and times. Marriage models are treated as processes to which women may contribute through a variety of intergenerational kin activities, instead of being considered as fixed and static categories.