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Accepted Paper:
Commodity Intimacies: Marriage and Business at the Crossroads of Asia
Grace Zhou
(Maynooth University)
This paper considers the ways that Islamic second wife marriage across geopolitical borders in Central Asia create spaces of safety and possibility in the face of carceral immobilities, state violence, and gendered limitations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers Islamic second wife marriage (nikoh) between minority Uzbek businesswomen in Kyrgyzstan and persecuted Uyghur traders from Xinjiang. It analyzes the practice of linking business and marriage as a form of mobile intimacy that draws on historical, religious, cultural, and linguistic contiguities across a Central Asian space, while also leveraging the affordances and movement of commodities and goods over present-day geopolitical borders that circumscribe the movement of particular groups of people. Nikoh, in particular, is a practice that extends beyond the conjugal pair by generating broader webs of possibility and security for extended relational networks. Looking at forms of both mobility and immobility, my paper argues that commodity-mediated forms of transnational intimacy create spaces of safety and possibility in the face of carceral immobilities, state violence, and gendered limitations. These alternative spaces—liminal and interstitial—bump up against national borders but do not always conform to them, creating thriving spaces that are “elsewhere and otherwise" in the face of repression and exclusion.