Simplemente te casas con un alemán y ya tienes tu residencia: Verbal violence, interactive positioning, and the stereotype of the opportunistic marriage migrant in Latin American migration contexts in Germany

Abstract

This contribution focuses on the role of gender stereotypes in the emergence of verbal violence. Drawing upon selected examples from the VIOLIN corpus, a collection of narratives of problematic communicative encounters by Latin American migrants residing in Germany, we apply a combination of Narrative Analysis and Positioning Theory in order to elucidate how the perception of verbal violence can emerge from a sense of being unfairly positioned by members of the mainstream society. For this purpose, we use the stereotype of the “opportunistic female marriage migrant” as a case example. This widespread stereotype, prevalent in both German and many Latin American societies, suggests that women from economically-disadvantaged countries take advantage of their German husbands to secure residency and a better life. As emerges from our analysis, Latin American women often find themselves being positioned as “opportunistic marriage migrants”, but vehemently reject such positioning in their narratives. However, they still tend to reassert and perpetuate the stereotype by using it as a foil to construct their own positions as honest, well-educated and independent, and thus as members of a distinct, and morally superior, category of migrant women in Germany.