Marriage Migration in Contemporary India: Articulation of a New Form of Gendered Violence
Reena Kukreja, Associate Professor, Queen's University, Department of Global Development Studies
Wednesday, September 27th, 2023
This talk focused on marriage migration undertaken by rural bachelors in North India who seek brides from outside their customary marriage pools such as from development peripheries of India. Drawing on feminist political economy and Dalit feminism, Dr Kukreja connected the macro-political violent process of neoliberalism to the micro-personal level of marriage and intimate gender relations to demonstrate that predatory capitalism dispossesses many poor women from India’s marginalized communities of marriage choices in their local communities. This gendered matrimonial dispossession exposes migrant brides to new forms of gendered and caste violence in conjugal communities that act as disciplining tools to efficiently extract labour from them.
The talk draws on Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage Migration and Dispossession in Neoliberal India (Cornell University Press)