Paused subjects: Waiting for migration in North Africa

In this paper, I reflect on the ways in which waiting for migration requires, nurtures and ultimately produces specific kinds of subjects in a part of the world marked by decades of transnational movement towards Europe. Drawing on my ethnographic research in emigrant areas of Morocco, I trace how waiting is a constitutive element not only of migration, but also of the subjects involved in its encompassing and multidirectional processes. To do this, I trace the ways in which waiting is spoken of, embodied and reckoned with in the areas by not (yet) migrants. Focusing in particular on the experience of women married to absent migrant husbands, the paper shows how waiting in Morocco engenders specific types of people with specific kinds of social relations, interceding into the very ways in which selves in proximity of transnational mobility emerge.