Paper short abstract:

This paper traces how mixed marriages in Jordan trouble ideologies that link paternity and nationality by fueling an activist movement that contests dependent nationality, which forbids women, but not men, from passing their citizenship to children they have with foreigners.

Paper long abstract:

Dependent nationality in Jordan forbids women, but not men, from passing their citizenship to children they have with foreigners. The world's largest host of Palestinian refugees argues that dependent nationality protects their "right of return" to a future Palestine, controverting Israeli claims that Jordan is Palestine. As such, children of Jordanian women married to noncitizen Palestinians become stateless. I trace "extreme" tactics of family-making, like non-normative transactional marriages and strategic juridical divorces, to explore statelessness as a relational formation. Mixed-legal-status families make claims on rights through the relatedness of kinship even if, as de jure stateless persons, some of them do not have their own Arendtian "right to have rights." Because stateless husbands and children cannot own property, or even cell phones, under their own names, their economic and political rights are mediated through their Jordanian wives and mothers. 'Matrimoney' traces how, when spousal rights become mediated through certain property practices and bureaucratic formations, patriarchal gender dynamics can become confounded. Mixed-legal-status marriages unfasten the biogenetic ideologies of kinship, revealing the troubles of heteronormative ideologies that link paternity and nationality in Jordan. In the process, both paternity and nationality are revealed as ideological and unstable criteria for the distribution of personhood. I connect such 'kincraft' (Thomas 2021) to the activist movement "My Mother is Jordanian, and Her Citizenship is My Right" that noncitizen youth and their mothers have mobilized to contest policies that have made the marital choices of potentially all Jordanian women a matter of national security.

Paper short abstract:

State and NGO actors present autonomous individuals in nucleated houses as key aspects of African development. Whilst women in Maputo do desire houses of their own, this is not, I suggest, a matter of nucleation, but of re-embedding themselves in alternative networks of hierarchical dependence.

Paper long abstract:

Throughout Africa, state and NGO actors present development goals as tied up with ideals of equality and individual autonomy. The adoption of such ideals is supposed to reconfigure not only public relations, but intimate ones too, fostering affective bonds between autonomous individuals and promoting the nuclear family as the Fukuyaman end of domestic history.

In periurban Maputo, most young women live virilocally, assuming positions as dependents at the bottom of the household hierarchy. Unlike previous generations, however, these women uniformly strive to move away, often to distant suburbs, and into independent houses, which they perceive as the condition of a proper marital family. The desire for physical separation, along with material aspirations for a private plot seem, at first blush, to indicate that the nuclear family has indeed become the ideal personal, as well as political, constellation.

This paper suggests, however, that the desire for a self-built house in fact reflects an alternative form of social change - one embedded in competing notions of marriage and the person. The nucleated home is not a token of autonomous family units, but is rather understood as a necessary step towards strengthening ties of dependence with the husband’s kin. Weaving these ties, women make themselves as wives, mothers and full social persons.

The self-built house is, then, not a space for nucleation and autonomisation, but the materialisation of women’s relational personhood and position in their husbands’ kinship network. Women thus create new intimate spaces that run at cross purposes to liberal democratic models.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on young middle-class men in Pakistan, who fear a difficult future as sole breadwinners in a tough economy. While the male breadwinner model is strong in Pakistan, it may face challenges from young people who dream of marriages in which breadwinning is shared between spouses.

Paper long abstract:

Although the male breadwinner model has been weakened in some parts of the world, in Pakistan, it still dominates the organization of the labour market and the domestic division of labour. However, this paper argues that there are signs of a generational shift in the Pakistani middle class weakening the male breadwinner model, as young men invest their marriages with hopes of escaping the heavy burden of being the sole breadwinner in a difficult economy and labour market.

Becoming a stable breadwinner is a core element of hegemonic masculinity in Pakistan, and becoming financially independent is therefore essential to adult manhood. However, young middle-class Pakistanis look to their future with a great deal of ambivalence. Having observed their fathers, they know the difficulties of making ends meet on one salary, with increasing demands for consumption, rising prices, and widespread job insecurity. Meanwhile, concerns with respectability constitute a significant obstacle to women’s contribution to the household economy.

In response to such bleak prospects, many young men dream of marriages in which the work of breadwinning is shared between the spouses, and where respectability is not a limiting concern. This aspiration is complemented by a strong desire among young women to marry men who will allow them to stay employed even into marriage. The paper therefore argues that while the male breadwinner model remains strong among older generations of middle-class Pakistanis, it is facing ideological challenges from younger generations who seek marriages that can support a more equitable distribution of labour.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the social, political, intimate, and ritual dimensions involved in the practices and representations of Lebanese couples who celebrate civil marriages out of Lebanon. This approach aims at shedding a new light on civil marriage beyond the dichotomy sectarianism/secularism.

Paper long abstract:

In Lebanon, the demand for civil marriage has ceaselessly generated conflicting feelings of hope and frustration. Because of a pluralistic system of personal status codes meant to guarantee sectarian difference, marriage in Lebanon can only be contracted religiously. Nevertheless, couples can marry civilly overseas (Cyprus being the preferred destination). This solution has contributed to shape collective practices of what I call a “deterritorialized marriage”. At the same time, civil marriage has become an important ground for a struggle between supposedly antagonist visions: sectarianism and secularism. The legalization of civil marriage has therefore been at the core of different civil society initiatives whose goal is to put an end to the confessional system and civil marriage winded up embodying the imaginary of a unified society to come. Nevertheless, it is also at the core of a social and commercial phenomenon, which deserves attention. How does the representation of civil marriage change when we move from activists to “moral activists” and regular people? What does civil marriage tell us about the transformation of intimate relationships, social change, and the invention of wedding rituals? Practices of civil marriage provide insights into the complex mechanisms of social reproduction and change. Rather than answering civil right activists’ expectations, they underlie the existing tensions between individual’s and families’ expectations, different moral orders, different ritual patterns and models of family-making, and the co-existence of different temporalities. Along with reproducing social differences, civil marriage represents an “infrastructure of possibilities” for new imaginaries of conjugal intimacy, gender and family-making.

Paper short abstract:

Focussing on ‘mixed marriages’ that bridge religious, cultural and ethnic differences in Penang, this paper explores how negotiations of divergence between individuals, generations, families, and communities reflects and informs wider social transformations in Malaysia.

Paper long abstract:

How do individuals and their social universes come together and/or diverge in marriage? And how do ethical understandings about marriage bridge the familial and the political? This paper considers marriage in the context of social changes in Malaysia over the last 40 years. In part, this is a story about transforming patterns of employment and urbanisation, of shifting gender ideologies, and of palpable tensions between Islam and feminism. We could see these changes as encapsulated in marriage. As an exceptionally diverse locale – culturally, religiously and ethnically - where ‘mixed marriages’ are said to occur more frequently today than in the past, Penang offers a unique perspective on the congruence between marital and social futures. To some degree, all marriage could be said to entail processes of mixing and distinction that enable both stability and innovation. What can narratives and experiences of marriage and conjugality in Penang tell us about such processes? Focussing on religious and ethnic differences in marriage, the paper will explore how the negotiation of divergence between individuals, generations, families, and communities reflects and informs wider transformations over several decades in Malaysia. I suggest that marriage and conjugality offer new ways to grasp how intimate worlds may envision and shape social futures.