Abstract
Drawing on 10-year ethnographic fieldwork in France and China with Northern Chinese migrants in Paris, this paper analyses the imbrication of divorce and migration. Most women had divorced before leaving China, a smaller group divorced after arriving in France, many of them try to remarry abroad, while men respondents were almost all married in China. Relying on an intersectional approach and a transnational perspective, this paper unveils how married or divorcee status have influenced their choices to move or to remain in China, to stay abroad or return. More generally, it examines how the gendered social norms on family, marriage and divorce shape migrants” agency and how it may vary according to social class, gender, age, marital and migration status. The paper questions the transnational power of gender norms and observes how the scripts on family and divorce in China traverse state borders and continue to structure migrants” transnational experiences.