ABOUT THIS BOOK

Across Asia and its global diasporas, marriage remains a dominant and public institution, and divorce generates widespread comment and concern. Breaking new ground, Divorce Portals reveals divorce to be generative of transformations in individual intimate lives and wider societies. Through compelling, sensitive ethnographic accounts inviting readers into the lives of people undergoing separation and divorce, chapters capture the antecedent-lives of uncoupling – the imaginary, anticipatory, and cautionary – and the afterlives of divorce, in the immediate aftermath and across life courses and generations. Chapters explore the vivid and bold new selves that divorcees are fashioning for themselves and highlight the intersecting inequalities that shape postdivorce predicaments, sometimes belying the hoped-for freedoms of divorce and remarriage. Together, chapters chart nascent and haltering accommodations of the single, repartnered, and queer. Across cases drawn from diverse geographic contexts, this book unlocks new, expansive, and accessible ways to think about divorce and its aftermath.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

SHALINI GROVER is an assistant professorial research fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at London School of Economics and Political Science. She has published widely on marriage, love, kinship, legal pluralisms, labour relations and globalized care. She is the author of Marriage, Love, Caste, and Kinship Support: Lived Experiences of the Urban Poor in India.

KAVERI QURESHI is a senior lecturer at the School of Social and Political Science and co-director of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships at the University of Edinburgh. Kaveri Qureshi works on how gender, race/ethnicity, class, caste and religion shape experiences of health and intimate/personal life. She is the author of two monographs: Marital Breakdown among British Asians: Conjugality, Legal Pluralism and New Kinship and Chronic Illness in a Pakistani Labour Diaspora.

REVIEWS

"This is a groundbreaking and timely volume that reframes the study of divorce and its aftermath in Asia. The collection brings together chapters focusing across different regions of Asia and the diasporas. With remarkable depth, the book conceptualises divorce as a portal, through which individuals and families navigate hopes, constraints, and new possibilities. This is an essential contribution to feminist scholarship. By weaving together questions of temporality and intersectionality this volume opens new pathways for understanding intimacy, kinship, and social change in Asia and beyond."

— Rohit K Dasgupta, associate professor of gender and sexuality, London School of Economics and Political Science

"This compelling collection takes the reader into uncharted worlds in the shadow of divorce. As the authors engage with how marriage patterns of the past unfold in the present, they consider colonial legacies and contested claims about moral decline and renewal. This book offers fresh insights for social scientists and lay readers alike, of Asian heritage or not, ever partnered or not, gay or straight."

— Lynn Jamieson, professor of sociology, University of Edinburgh

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Series Foreword by Péter Berta

Introduction
Kaveri Qureshi and Shalini Grover

1 Marital Impasse, Women-in-Love and Nibhana: The Subterranean Social of Marriage and Same-Sex in Middle-Class Delhi
Geetika Bapna

2 Khula in Pakistan: Evaluating the Legal Remedy of Woman-Initiated Divorce
Livia Holden

3 Ripples of Divorce: Redirecting Family Histories, Contesting Rights, and Shame in the Marriages of British South Asian Adult Children of Divorce
Kaveri Qureshi

4 Divorce Stories: Making Sense of the Past and Imagining the Future in Bangladeshi Women’s Narratives of Marital Breakdown
Katy Gardner

5 “I Did It!” Divorce and Its Afterlives in Urban Middle-Class Sri Lanka
Asha L. Abeyasekera

6 Pleasure Before Duty? The Postdivorce Lives of Privileged Young Women in Contemporary China
Kailing Xie

7 Life at the Crossroad of Intersecting Categories and Relationship Histories: Filipino Women’s Postdivorce Situations in Belgium and the Netherlands
Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot

8 No Murals on the Wall: Artifacts of the Broken Relationships of Gay Men in Small-Town India
Jayaprakash Mishra

Afterword by Janet Carsten
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Index