Paper short abstract:

Mapping the frayed intimate worlds of women, in 'pre', 'present' and 'post' marital heterosexual relationships in Gurgaon, India, the paper shows the experience of managing private violence as centrally the work of managing gendered kinworlds, and attendant forms of social becoming.

Paper long abstract:

Intimate partner violence - its actual occurrence, its looming possibility or its structural presence - acts upon already existing gendered social worlds and women's gendered positioning within marriages and adjacent-kin relations. Far from dramatically disrupting these social worlds, the incidence of domestic violence (or its feared possibility) operates within the existing entanglements of conjugal relations, which are filled with the experience and expectations of love, reciprocity, duty, as also the reality of indifference, hatred, or deeply fraught and conflictual interpersonal dynamics. Private interpersonal violence is perceived as so deeply embedded in the sobering complexity of social relations and people's individual situations, idiosyncrasies, and predicaments, that the issue of violence becomes difficult to isolate and is interpreted less as straight up violence and more often as failed social relations and frayed social worlds. Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork in the city of Gurgaon, India, this paper proceeds through ethnographic exploration of the love, affliction, and violence experienced by three women - an upwardly mobile young professional, a rural housewife and a bottom-end service worker - in their heterosexual relationships with their boyfriend, husband, and estranged husband, respectively. All three relationships are defined in reference to an 'ideal marriage', and its promise of good domesticity. Marriage features as anticipation in the first case, a daily negotiated reality in the second and as the site of ruin and collapse in the third. The paper shows the experience of violence as the experience of managing marriage, kinship, and gendered worlds of intimacies.