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Opting Out offers sensitive and powerful ethnographic portrayals of women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America who are quietly opting out of marriage. Across these diverse geographic contexts,this edited volume shows that women are the (often unwitting, mostly unacknowledged) protagonists of profound changes in marriage, gender, and kinship.
List of contents
Series Foreword by Péter 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
About the author
JOANNA DAVIDSON is an associate professor of anthropology at Boston University. She is the author of
Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa.
DINAH HANNAFORD is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Houston. She is the author of
Marriage Without Borders: Transnational Spouses in Neoliberal Senegal.
Summary
Opting Out offers sensitive and powerful ethnographic portrayals of women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America who are quietly opting out of marriage. Across these diverse geographic contexts,this edited volume shows that women are the (often unwitting, mostly unacknowledged) protagonists of profound changes in marriage, gender, and kinship.
