Paper short abstract:

This paper takes secrecy in marriages as a starting point to trace different forms of relatedness and intimacies emerging thereof. By situating the inquiry in the lived worlds of Indian women in Singapore, the paper reimagines the place of marriage in migration and diaspora.

Paper long abstract:

How do secrets in marriages inflect the ways that diaspora women reconstitute their social worlds? How do women navigate the secrets while imagining and working for their imagined futures? This paper takes secrecy in marriages as a starting point to trace different forms of relatedness and intimacies emerging thereof. By situating the inquiry in the lived worlds of Indian women in Singapore, the paper reimagines the place of marriage in migration and diaspora. Drawing on life history interviews and ongoing field engagements with the interlocutors, the presented vignettes and narratives explore the diverse ways that secrets intersect with the processes of marriage, and wider social constellations such as family, community and nation. Silence is often a key method used by women for translating secrecy and its ascribed meanings into the folds of relatedness. However, these silences are simultaneously entangled in intergenerational loss, fragmented migration histories and life stories. Additionally, the paper also demonstrates how navigating gendered social norms for appropriate belonging in the diaspora social context infuse women’s lives with secrecy and the required silence, resulting in a precarious and ambiguous sense of belonging. Consequently, women are constrained by the paradoxes of concealing or revealing secrets, both holding the potential to collapse marriage and other relations, and the hope for making relatedness.