Making the Right Choice: Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lanka

Making the Right Choice is an intimate portrait of the politics of marriage and gender narrated through the life-histories of three generations of Sinhala-Buddhist families living in urban Sri Lanka. The book demonstrates that marriage is a privileged site to investigate questions about gendered selves, gendered agency, and modern subjectivities.
 

Making the Right Choice unravels the entangled relationship between marriage, morality, and the desire for modernity as it plays out in the context of middle-class status concerns and aspirations for upward social mobility within the Sinhala-Buddhist community in urban Sri Lanka. By focusing on individual life-histories spanning three generations, the book illuminates how narratives about a gendered self and narratives about modernity are mutually constituted and intrinsically tied to notions of agency. The book uncovers how "becoming modern" in urban Sri Lanka, rather than causing inter-generational conflict, is a collective aspiration realized through the efforts of bringing up educated and independent women capable of making "right" choices. The consequence of this collective investment is a feminist conundrum: agency does not denote the right to choose, but the duty to make the "right" choice; hence agency is experienced not as a sense of "freedom," but rather as a burden of responsibility.

Weight: 324g
Dimension: 229 x 153 x 15 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781978810303