The Impact of Migration on Marital Relationships (Gender Roles, Marital Power, Sexual and Intimate Relations) Among Iranian Couples in London

In this study, I investigate the changes in marital relationships among Iranian immigrant couples in the United Kingdom. The transformation of attitudes, expectations, and practices regarding immigrants' sexual lives is explored by applying the assimilation interpretative framework and social-constructionist perspective on gender relations. The former recognises a multipath process and different patterns of immigrants’ integration into the host British society. The latter conceives of gender roles, intimacy, and sexuality as social phenomena reshaped by the social circumstances of people’s lives in a new diasporic setting. The study is based on 36 semi-structured interviews conducted with married and divorced Iranian men (15) and women (21) in London. As the findings of this study reveal, acculturation in relation to gender relations has affected the majority of Iranian immigrants in all socioeconomic strata and both genders. During their life in the UK, most of them have experienced significant changes in the division of roles in their families, the distribution of decision-making power and their understandings and practices of intimate and sexual relations, although the forms of these transformations differ by gender and class position. The study also shows how traditional religious immigrants, especially women, have been much more affected by the challenges of new/different gender and sexual norms and expectations encountered in the host society, compared with non or less religious, modern liberal couples who arrived in the United Kingdom with a considerable degree of advanced socialisation into modern/Western notions of gender roles and relations. Men, on the other hand, have experienced more trauma and alienation regarding their masculinity, stemming from the de-traditionalisation of gender relations as the outcome of couples’ transplantation to the UK, which in some cases leads to separation or divorce. Keywords: Iranians, Migration, Assimilation, Gender Relations, Marital Power, Intimacy, Sexuality