Weddings amidst War: the intimate and insurgent politics of marriage

Abstract

ABSTRACT Putting insights from feminist political economy into conversation with the scholarship on legal identity, this article explores the use and effects of military marriages in reproducing the Kachin revolution. I argue that the organisation of weddings reproduces the revolution in both material and legal ways by creating new legal and political subjects with loyalties and responsibilities towards Kachin authorities. I suggest that the public nature of the weddings creates bonds of allegiance, expectations regarding the performance of particular gendered roles for men and women, and feelings of obligation towards Kachin authorities. These practices also stem from efforts by the KIO to encourage childbirth; although marriages across clan-lines are sanctioned, weddings outside the Kachin community as less acceptable to a leadership invested in reproducing a particular kind of Kachin citizen. This allows me to illustrate how the conferring of legal identity does not rely on documents alone, and turns our attention to how the practice of marriage ceremonies and their effects on everyday married life is generative of legal identity. This in turn shapes the organisation of daily lives in ways that both promote the continuance of the armed revolution and bind people to the nation-in-making.