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    Opting Out
    Women Messing with Marriage Around the World

    Joanna Davidson (Edited by), Dinah Hannaford (Edited by), Joanna Davidson (Contributions by), Dinah Hannaford (Contributions by), Julia Pauli (Contributions by), Jacqueline Solway (Contributions by), Sarah Lamb (Contributions by), Laura C. Nelson (Contributions by), Kimberly Walters (Contributions by), Melanie A. Medeiros (Contributions by), Carla Freeman (Contributions by), Akiko Takeyama (Contributions by), Brady G'Sell (Contributions by), Carla Jones (Contributions by)

    9781978830103

    Paperback / softback, published 11 November 2022

    260 pages, 3 b&w images
    23.5 x 15.6 x 1.8 cm, 0.064 kg

    "Provocatively and engagingly, this volume provides compelling ethnographic evidence of the changes marriage is undergoing around the world. The impact of these changes raises profound questions, not only about the future of marriage itself, but which, as these essays show, go to the heart of gender relations and their intersection with politics, economics and religion."
    - Janet Carsten (co-editor of Marriage in Past, Present, and Future Tense)
    "Grounded in superb ethnographic chapters drawn from all over the world, Opting Out explores the diverse ways in which women exert agency in and against marriage. With fresh insight into practices that occur in every society, this collection delivers a rich and rewarding comparative examination of an astonishingly overlooked aspect of everyday life."
    - Daniel Jordan Smith (author of A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria)

    Women around the world are opting out of marriage. Through nuanced ethnographic accounts of the ways that women are moving the needle on marital norms and practices, Opting Out reveals the conditions that make this widespread phenomenon possible in places where marriage has long been obligatory. Each chapter invites readers into the lives of particular women and the changing circumstances in which these lives unfold - sometimes painfully, sometimes humorously, and always unexpectedly. Taken together, the essays in this volume prompt the following questions: Why is marriage so consistently disappointing for women? When the rewards of economic stability and the social status that marriage confers are troubled, does marriage offer women anything compelling at all? Across diverse geographic contexts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this book offers sensitive and powerful portrayals of women as they escape or reshape marriage into a more rewarding arrangement.

    Series Foreword by PÉ
    ter Berta
    Introduction: Messing with Marriage by Joanna Davidson and Dinah Hannaford
    Part I. Never Married
    1. Almost Married: Two Generations of Single Mothers in Namibia by Julia Pauli
    2. Single in Botswana by Jacqueline Solway
    3.  Freedom to Choose? Singlehood, Gender, and Sexuality in India by Sarah Lamb
    4. Single Women’
    s Invisibility in South Korea’
    s First Decades by Laura C. Nelson
    Part II. Outside of Marriage
    5. Pathivratha Precarity: Sex Work on the Other Side of Marriage in South India by Kimberly Walters
    6. Respectability &
    Black Brazilian Women’
    s Decisions to ‘
    Opt Out’
    of Remarriage by Melanie Medeiros
    7. The Upward Mobility of Matrifocality and the Enigma of Bajan Marriage by Carla Freeman
    8. Messing with Remarriage: The Problem of Widows in Guinea-Bissau by Joanna Davidson
    Part III. Within Marriage
    9. Extramarital Intimacy: Juggling Femininity, Marriage, and Commercial Sex in Contemporary Japan by Akiko Takeyama
    10. “
    What’
    s Wrong with These Mens?”
    : Reworking relationships and finding foreign love in the new South Africa by Brady G’
    Sell
    11. The Appeal of Absent Husbands in Contemporary Senegal by Dinah Hannaford
    12. “
    Not a normal wife”
    : Marrying Activism and Aberrance in Indonesia by Carla Jones
    Acknowledgments
    Bibliography
    Contributors
    Index
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