Conjugality Unbound: Sexual Economies, State Regulation and the Marital Form in India

This book questions marriage as a self-evident, timeless, and unitary institution, and considers the complex negotiations of everyday intimate, economic, sexual, domestic, and procreative arrangements that occur under the sign of marriage. What counts as marriage? What s love got to do with it? How are the married and the unmarried marked off from each other in relation to the law and to the gods? Might productive, inventive, subversive relationships and modes of being human take shape outside marriage and/or against its regulatory norms? There are seemingly infinite formulae for addressing such questions. In conversation with materialist feminist theory, queer theory, and postcolonial theory, this book considers the nature of sexual economies and the ways in which the discourses of marriage and conjugality operate within them. The essays launch an interdisciplinary conversation across the historical and ethnographic record in India, analysing marriage as reflected in the deployment of legal, psychiatric, and reproductive governance, in contested boundaries of religion and kinship, in marriage to gods and queer subjects and across castes. These conversations help us think about marriage, its regulation, and its reinventions as windows onto social life and human thriving, as well as social death and individual abjection.