Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage around the World

Published by Rutgers University Press 2023

Opting Out

Women Messing with Marriage around the World

Edited by: Joanna Davidson and Dinah Hannaford
With contributions by: Joanna Davidson , Dinah Hannaford , Julia Pauli , Jacqueline Solway , Sarah Lamb , Laura C. Nelson , Kimberly Walters , Melanie A. Medeiros , Carla Freeman , Akiko Takeyama , Brady G'Sell and Carla Jones

In the series Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts

https://doi.org/10.36019/9781978830134

Overview
Contents

About this book

Women around the world are opting out of marriage. Through nuanced ethnographic accounts of the ways that women are moving the needle on marital norms and practices, Opting Out reveals the conditions that make this widespread phenomenon possible in places where marriage has long been obligatory. Each chapter invites readers into the lives of particular women and the changing circumstances in which these lives unfold - sometimes painfully, sometimes humorously, and always unexpectedly. Taken together, the essays in this volume prompt the following questions: Why is marriage so consistently disappointing for women? When the rewards of economic stability and the social status that marriage confers are troubled, does marriage offer women anything compelling at all? Across diverse geographic contexts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this book offers sensitive and powerful portrayals of women as they escape or reshape marriage into a more rewarding arrangement.

Author / Editor information

Joanna Davidson is an associate professor of anthropology at Boston University. She is the author of Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa.

Dinah Hannaford is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Houston. She is the author of Marriage Without Borders: Transnational Spouses in Neoliberal Senegal.

Reviews

"Grounded in superb ethnographic chapters drawn from all over the world, Opting Out explores the diverse ways in which women exert agency in and against marriage. With fresh insight into practices that occur in every society, this collection delivers a rich and rewarding comparative examination of an astonishingly overlooked aspect of everyday life."

— Daniel Jordan Smith, author of A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria

"Provocatively and engagingly, this volume provides compelling ethnographic evidence of the changes marriage is undergoing around the world. The impact of these changes raises profound questions, not only about the future of marriage itself, but which, as these essays show, go to the heart of gender relations and their intersection with politics, economics and religion."

— Janet Carsten, co-editor of Marriage in Past, Present, and Future Tense

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Series Foreword Péter Berta Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Messing with Marriage Joanna Davidson and Dinah Hannaford Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART ONE. Never Married
1. Almost Married Two Generations of Single Mothers in Namibia Julia Pauli Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
2. Single in Botswana Jacqueline Solway Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	42
3. Freedom to Choose? Singlehood, Gender, and Sexuality in India Sarah Lamb Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
4. Single Women’s Invisibility in South Korea’s First Decades Laura C. Nelson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	74
PART TWO. Outside of Marriage
5. Pathivratha Precarity Sex Work on the Other Side of Marriage in South India Kimberly Walters Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
6. Respectability and Black Brazilian Women’s Decisions to “Opt Out” of Remarriage Melanie A. Medeiros Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	104
7. The Upward Mobility of Matrifocality and the Enigma of Bajan Marriage Carla Freeman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
8. Messing with Remarriage The Problem of Widows in Guinea-Bissau Joanna Davidson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	136
PART THREE. Within Marriage
9. Extramarital Intimacy Juggling Femininity, Marriage, and Commercial Sex in Contemporary Japan Akiko Takeyama Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
10. “What’s Wrong with These Mens?” Reworking Relationships and Finding Foreign Love in the New South Africa Brady G’Sell Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	170
11. The Appeal of Absent Husbands in Contemporary Senegal Dinah Hannaford Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	185
12. “Not a Normal Wife” Marrying Activism and Aberrance in Indonesia Carla Jones Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
Notes on Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239