Paper short abstract:

Professional women from Indonesia currently living in Singapore and Australia use imagery of the state in Facebook postings about their marriages. We explore the impact of the state on women's emotional subjectivities around marriage and family within the context of their transnational lives.

Paper long abstract:

The study of marriage in transnational families has explored the impact of wider geopolitical relations on intimacy and partner desire. While transnational female hypergamy has been linked to global political and economic trends, the place of geopolitics on marriage intimacies among transnational professional couples has received far less attention. This paper draws on in-depth interviews and digital ethnography conducted in 2016-2017 with professional Indonesian women living in Singapore and Australia, to describe how women use imagery of the state to talk about their relationships with their husbands. For these women, marriage takes place within transnational social fields, where the woman is highly mobile, often living apart from their equally mobile husbands for extended periods of time as the family pursues global work or educational opportunities. Drawing on insights by Madianou & Miller on the cultural capacities of social media to both challenge and reproduce norms we explore how professional women use images of Singapore, Indonesia, and Australia on Facebook when posting updates about their spouses. In contrast to analyses suggesting geopolitics shapes ideas of desirable mates, we propose that for professional Indonesian women the state is harnessed more to women's subjectivities, with state symbols offering a vehicle for expressing personal intimacies and complex personal ambiguities about their marital relationships. The strong association between state symbolism and Facebook postings about family nonetheless also suggest symbols reinforce normative marital relations that closely adhere to state ideals, and legitimate a highly mobile transnational life.