This article explores how marriage and the India-Bangladesh border function as carceral institutions, where familial, social and state structures intersect to restrict and regulate Bangladeshi women’s agency, mobility and autonomy. It begins by enunciating the institutions of marriage and borders in the South Asian context, followed by a conceptualization of the marriage-border carceral archipelago. I then analyze how Bangladeshi women’s mobilities across the India-Bangladesh border—either to get married or because of an untenable marriage—are caught in the web of immigration policies, labor market demands, citizenship laws, family and kinship norms and affective ties. The final section explores women’s accounts of resistance and their negotiations with the marriage-border carceral archipelago as they move across borders. These accounts reveal how women navigate and subvert the entanglements of identity, labor and sexuality that play out on their gendered and sexualized bodies.
Based on the cases of young women held in a “Safe House” in Dhaka, this paper argues that the label “marriage victim” is used discursively to discipline young women who have eloped against parental wishes. Whilst the Bangladeshi 2017 Child Marriage Restraint Act is used to accuse husbands of kidnap and rape, daughters who refuse to return home or divorce are incarcerated as “victims” of under-age marriage, their ages often falsified. Drawing on Hacking’s concept of “making up,” the paper argues that within the assemblage of NGOs, shelters and support centers providing services for women and children in Dhaka, different types of victim are “made-up” via bureaucratic systems and procedures. As the paper shows, the term “victim” allows out-of-place women and children to be sorted and placed in different institutions. Whilst victims of domestic violence are offered shelter, unruly young women who have eloped for love are classified as “marriage victims” and held in carceral institutions, where what Ticktin calls “armed love” generates containment and discipline.
This article relates the institution of marriage and the locality to the gendered implications of state-led politics of urban restructuring and their classed effects. It draws on Hage’s concept of “stuckedness” here created through urban resettlement and the institution of marriage, both enforced by the state’s informalization of rights in residences in marginal neighborhoods. The article discusses confinement in relation to feelings of being “stuck” in homes legally defined through marriage and in neighborhoods, each experienced as extensions of each other. Against the backdrop of “protracted displacement” into legal and spatio-political “gray zones,” the article shows how women are doubly entrapped: in marriage through patriarchal values and by urban restructuring in neighborhoods that are sites of extended collective patriarchal control and state-enforced temporalities of mobility/immobility. Given the legal insecurity of resettlement housing the carceral quality of the home is enhanced by entrapment in marriage, which extends into the street/neighborhood and the slow violence of threatened eviction. Women’s “stuckedness” is crucially entangled in the politics of resettlement and the paperwork that made flats available to families but only registered men as rightful owners of flats. The article argues that urban governance, including resettlement and bureaucratic erasure which create gray zones of informality, throws women back into marriage and “waithood” through gendered legal, spatial and political regimes marked by informality of differing degrees and scales.
Taking the home as the spatial epicenter where state and intimate forms of violence converge, this paper examines how urban planning and social housing policies in Sri Lanka have shaped carceral experiences within kinship and marriage for low-income working-class women living in Colombo. By mapping the historical continuities between mechanisms of constraint built into the architecture and urban planning of colonial and post-independence Colombo and the forced evictions authorized under the post-war Urban Regeneration Program from 2010 onward, I uncover how state power, exercised through urban planning, produced the “carceral geographies” of working-class neighborhoods. Drawing on ethnographic life histories, I show that urban planning not only spatially contains the poorest segment of the city’s working class, but that it also plays a constitutive role in shaping intimate relations. I argue that carceral geographies not only structure urban marginality but also create the conditions of possibility through which domestic violence engenders carcerality within marriage.
This paper uses ethnographic cases of “forced marriage” amongst British women of South Asian origin to explore the experiences within kinship relations that confine or restrict prior to, during and after marriage. I explore “force”—exerted by kin often within close domestic spaces—and seek to contextualize it within other experiences of abuse taking place long before (or indeed after) the forced-marriage event. Specifically, I argue that what is missing in analyses of “forced marriage” is attention to more insidious, mundane constraints exerted by loved ones within families and within everyday kinship relationality that do not necessarily fit conceptions of lock-and-key carcerality but that are nevertheless experienced as “force” and are damaging and restricting. In this paper, I call these everyday forms of kinship abuse and coercion “kinship carcerality”—exercised not within prisons but within South Asian family homes—to identify the potential whereby ostensibly loving ties interweave through kinship to entrap and curtail kin.
