Divorce Portals

Shalini Grover is an assistant professorial research fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at London School of Economics and Political Science. She has published widely on marriage, love, kinship, legal pluralisms, labour relations and globalized care. She is the author of Marriage, Love, Caste, and Kinship Support: Lived Experiences of the Urban Poor in India. Kaveri Qureshi is a senior lecturer at the School of Social and Political Science and co-director of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships at the University of Edinburgh. Kaveri Qureshi works on how gender, race/ethnicity, class, caste and religion shape experiences of health and intimate/personal life. She is the author of two monographs: Marital Breakdown among British Asians: Conjugality, Legal Pluralism and New Kinship and Chronic Illness in a Pakistani Labour Diaspora.

• Series Foreword by Péter BertaIntroductionKaveri Qureshi and Shalini Grover1 Marital Impasse, Women-in-Love and Nibhana: The Subterranean Social of Marriage and Same-Sex in Middle-Class DelhiGeetika Bapna2 Khula in Pakistan: Evaluating the Legal Remedy of Woman-Initiated DivorceLivia Holden3 Ripples of Divorce: Redirecting Family Histories, Contesting Rights, and Shame in the Marriages of British South Asian Adult Children of DivorceKaveri Qureshi4 Divorce Stories: Making Sense of the Past and Imagining the Future in Bangladeshi Women's Narratives of Marital BreakdownKaty Gardner5 "I Did It!" Divorce and Its Afterlives in Urban Middle-Class Sri LankaAsha L. Abeyasekera6 Pleasure Before Duty? The Postdivorce Lives of Privileged Young Women in Contemporary ChinaKailing Xie7 Life at the Crossroad of Intersecting Categories and Relationship Histories: Filipino Women's Postdivorce Situations in Belgium and the NetherlandsAsuncion Fresnoza-Flot8 No Murals on the Wall: Artifacts of the Broken Relationships of Gay Men in Small-Town IndiaJayaprakash MishraAfterword by Janet CarstenAcknowledgementsNotes on ContributorsIndex

"This is a groundbreaking and timely volume that reframes the study of divorce and its aftermath in Asia. The collection brings together chapters focusing across different regions of Asia and the diasporas. With remarkable depth, the book conceptualises divorce as a portal, through which individuals and families navigate hopes, constraints, and new possibilities. This is an essential contribution to feminist scholarship. By weaving together questions of temporality and intersectionality this volume opens new pathways for understanding intimacy, kinship, and social change in Asia and beyond." - Rohit K Dasgupta, associate professor of gender and sexuality, London School of Economics and Political Science"This compelling collection takes the reader into uncharted worlds in the shadow of divorce. As the authors engage with how marriage patterns of the past unfold in the present, they consider colonial legacies and contested claims about moral decline and renewal. This book offers fresh insights for social scientists and lay readers alike, of Asian heritage or not, ever partnered or not, gay or straight." - Lynn Jamieson, professor of sociology, University of Edinburgh