ABSTRACT
This chapter involves narratives of marriage and divorce through the interviewees’ diasporic route. In an Iranian context, the institution of marriage is considered to be the only legitimate arena where women and men are permitted to enjoy sexual intimacy. Needless to say, this has never prevented people from interacting sexually outside of marriage in the pre-revolutionary or post-revolutionary Iran. Because of the normative power of the marriage institution and its official and exclusive rights to (hetero)sexual interactions, here, I look at the multiple discourses that inform the interviewee women’s decisions to marry as well as to split up. In the first part of this chapter, by discussing three forms of marriages (they are not necessarily mutually exclusive) amongst interviewee women—romantic based, rational based (with politically motivated roots in early post-revolutionary Iran), and (semi) arranged forms (such as cross border marriage migration)—I discuss the complexities, similarities, and differences between and within each form. In the second part of this chapter, I focus on the interviewee women’ experiences of divorce and pay particular attention to how, and in what ways, marital disagreements affect women’s intimate relationships and to what extent sexual incompatibility or poor sexual communication establish the ground for marital conflicts. I develop this section by looking at issues (such as violence) that lay behind women’s decisions to separate from their husbands, and that have significantly affected the construction of their sexuality and sexual experiences.
