Portrait of a women’s marriage: navigating between lesbophobia and Islamophobia

This article deals with the legal, political, and cultural barriers faced by a cross-national women’s same-sex couple. The partners are from the Netherlands, where same-sex marriage is legal, and an Asian country in which same-sex relations are gradually being criminalized. Although religion, in this case Islam, poses no problems to the partners themselves, both hard-liner Muslims in Asia and populist right-wing politicians in the Netherlands use their views of Islam to legitimize their growing homophobia and Islamophobia, respectively. Migration is a gendered process; marriage migration also raises issues of sexual rights.