Transnational Divorce

Understanding intimacies and inequalities from Singapore

Sharon Ee Ling Quah

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138389632
• eBook ISBN: 9780429753039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the transnational aspects of divorce experiences.

Transnational Divorce uncovers the stories of four main groups of transnational divorcees at the field site of Singapore, including low-income marriage migrant women from less wealthy countries, low-income citizen men, middle-class living apart together divorced parents and overseas-based citizen divorced mothers. Employing transnational, intersectional feminist perspectives, the book extends the author's earlier conceptualisation of divorce biography to propose a new framework of transnational divorce biography. The transnational divorce biography framework provides readers a useful analytical tool to make sense of transnational divorced individuals' messy experiences in working out their transborder intimacy practices. Meandering through their accounts, the author weaves together a strong narrative of inequalities and privileges at the site of intimate life. The book ends with an epilogue on fire dragon feminism where the author discusses place-based feminist mission of activism and resistance.

Transnational Divorce will appeal to researchers and policy makers interested in transnational relationships, family studies and sociology in general.

1 Introduction

*A poor foreign bride*

Lawan, with tears streaming down her sunken cheeks, packed up her belongings in that one small suitcase she has brought with her years ago when she left her home country, Thailand for Singapore. She has been living in Singapore for the past nine years since her husband paid her family a household maintenance fee and brought her along with him on his return trip to Singapore. Lawan did not want to leave her host country. Singapore has only just begun to feel like home after having gone through a long adjustment period figuring out city living, new languages, diverse cultural norms, different everyday practices, and specific marital expectations. Neither did she want to leave her eight-year-old twin sons behind too. Who would cook for them? Who would iron their school uniforms? Who would tend to their needs after they returned from school? Who would care for them the way she had been as their mother? Who would explain to them about their mother’s departure and whereabouts when they came home from school? This sudden turn of events has caught her by surprise. She knew that things between her husband and her had not been good for quite a while already, but she did not expect her husband to buy her a one-way air ticket and send her packing home. Her protests, soon turned to pleas, fell to deaf ears; her husband has made up his mind and was adamant about sending her back to Thailand. Once Lawan left Singapore, her husband proceeded to file for divorce without her involvement and the divorce was quickly settled in six months. One would probably be quick to conclude that since the termination of marriage was carried out in a rather cruel manner involving the forced ejection of Lawan from her host country and ruthless separation of Lawan and her children, there would be a complete dissolution of familial ties. Little did I expect that this divorced couple not only did not sever ties, they would later enter a reconfigured familial reality across the two countries and figure out their transnational divorce biography through more twists and turns.

***

*A low-income citizen husband*

Ah Huat has moved out of the matrimonial three-bedroom flat he had paid for but co-owned with his Filipino ex-wife. He figured that it would be better for him, instead of his ex-wife to move out. In that way, his two young children who were more dependent on their mother could remain living in the flat and suffer as minimal disruption as possible to their daily routines. Eventually, the government repossessed the flat since neither Ah Huat nor his foreign wife was eligible to keep it after the divorce. Often, life presents a series of unfortunate events at the same time. Ah Huat could not help but lament over his losses. He lost his jobs first as a bartender, then as a part-time food stall helper. He lost his earnings when he found himself with an empty bank account and mounting credit card debts, which he attributed to his ex-wife’s frequent monetary requests for remittances. He lost his marriage when the divorce papers were served to him. He lost his home and had to settle with a rented bed space in a shared room of a government-subsidised flat. He had wanted to marry a foreign wife from less wealthy countries in the region because he understood that he would not be competitive enough in the local marriage market. He had also thought that local women had high material and marital expectations that he would find great difficulty in fulfilling them. Ten years of marriage and two children later, the couple spilt. He concluded that it was his inability to provide for the family and meet his ex-wife’s material demands that broke the marriage. After the divorce, his ex-wife gave up her permanent residency and returned to her home country leaving their two primary school-going children in Ah Huat’s care. That marked the beginning of a transnational divorce biography that Ah Huat, his ex-wife, and children had to work out, negotiate, and navigate. While feeling short-changed, betrayed, and disenfranchised, Ah Huat took on full parental responsibilities to care for his two children and facilitated regular contact between them and their mother. When his two children completed their primary school education and requested to move to the Philippines to live with their mother, he gave permission. Faithfully, he would remit child support maintenance for his two children. However, his elder child changed his mind about living in the Philippines and returned to live with Ah Huat. With his two children now spilt up between parents and across countries, this family remained entangled in a transnational divorce family paradigm.

***

*A middle-class citizen mother*

It was a Saturday morning. Miranda was getting ready to leave her three children at home to spend what she called a ME day. Every Saturday, Miranda would enjoy a personal day where she could hit the gym, get a massage, meet up with friends, or relax by the beach with a book. This was made possible only because Miranda and her overseas-based ex-spouse have agreed on a weekend ‘visit’ arrangement. On Saturday, her former spouse would get undivided contact time with their three children and Miranda would leave home in the morning to give them privacy. This weekend contact time with a non-resident, living abroad parent was certainly an unconventional one. Instead of a face-to-face, in-person weekend visit, the children’s other parent living and working in Europe would log on to a video game platform and play video games with their children the whole of Saturday. The online video game platform therefore served as a family site where the living apart parent could still be ‘together’ with the children and maintain weekly cross-border intimacies with them. The video game platform also had an additional video chat function that they could communicate and catch up with one another. Miranda was rather pleased with this weekly arrangement. Her children’s interaction with their other parent and their use of computer were confined to a day in the week, and she got a day to herself. This amicable, functional, and cooperative transnational co-parenting practice did not come easy though. It certainly did not happen during the initial few years of their transnational divorce. Things between the couple were tense and ugly back then. On her last trip home to visit her parents, Miranda decided to remain in Singapore to file for divorce and not return to Europe with her children. That drove her ex-spouse mad. The acrimonious transnational divorce as a result began and dragged on for a couple of years. During that period, the children barely had any contact with their other parent. To be able to achieve a do-able transnational co-parenting arrangement involving a weekly ‘virtual’ visit and holiday trips together was in fact a vast improvement and the best possible outcome the transnational divorced family could hope for.

***

*A living abroad citizen mother*

Anaya described her past life in Singapore, especially her first marriage and subsequent divorce, as the ‘dark ages’. According to Anaya, the traditional ethnic and religious cultural environment she grew up in and married into keeps women in rigidly defined roles and dictates how they should relate to the men in the family. Transgressing cultural and gender boundaries would oftentimes invite serious reproof from elders, shaming, ostracisation, and even threats of violence from members of the community. The confinement of women in roles of a wife, mother, daughter, and daughter-in-law and the enforcement of women’s role performance are of paramount importance to the upholding of men’s patriarchal position and masculine identity. They are also key to maintaining the family’s reputation. To the family, Anaya has committed a cardinal sin, brought them shame, and disrupted the harmony and order at home when she demanded a divorce. Her family decisively cut her off. The disownment, however, did not deter Anaya from discarding the gendered architectures that have been constricting her life and obstructing her attempt to flourish. Finally, free to soar, she left Singapore to chart out her own life course. She first went to the United States of America. She led a nomadic lifestyle, took up the vocation of a spiritual healer, and married an Australian man. Then she moved to Canada and initiated her second divorce. Her Australian husband who has since returned to Australia, filed for divorce from there and mailed Anaya the divorce papers. This second divorce, despite being transnational, was swift and fuss free compared to her first divorce. In fact, her Australian ex-husband continued to provide her with financial assistance whenever her life situation was dire. In her 50s, she was living an abject existence struggling with homelessness and poverty. Still, she insisted on staying put and not returning to her home country. She could have derived support from her adult children and leveraged her citizenship rights and benefits back home. Resisting the choking grip of restrictive cultural expectations, Anaya has chosen to stay away from her home country for more than a decade now. But she could never turn her back completely from the land she was born and bred in. After all, Singapore was home to her children. Understandably, Anaya had unfinished business with her homeland. Over the years, she stayed connected with her children to weave a web of transnational intimacy practices.

***

These snapshots present a sneak preview of the multiplicity of divorce biographies that I have excavated and gathered. These stories are not ordinary divorce accounts. These divorce stories share a common thread – they are narratives of divorcees who had earlier married someone of a different nationality as them and were in the process of working out post-divorce intimacy practices which traverse geographical, national, and normative borders of doing family and divorce. While their stories share a commonality, they are at the same time vastly different in many complex ways. One obvious observation is that Lawan, Ah Huat, Miranda, and Anaya certainly did not work out their post-divorce intimacy practices on even and equal playing fields. The main task of this book is therefore to unearth the overlapping and interlocking conditions and contexts that reproduce multiple inequalities in transnational divorce intimacies. The book seeks to uncover the ways in which unequal and uneven distribution of life chances and resources shape the study’s divorced subjects’ experiences, trajectories, and outcomes.

Transnational Divorce is a sequel to my earlier book, Perspectives on Marital Dissolution: Divorce Biographies in Singapore. This book extends the earlier conceptualisations of divorce biography in my first book to focus on discussing the transnational aspects of divorce experiences and detailing the messy, shifting intersection of inequalities and intimate practices of a very diverse group of transnational divorcees. Some of them have greater access to structural privileges and resources to navigate and come up with ingenious, workable, and even effective post-divorce, transnational intimacy practices. Some are at the other end of the spectrum where their nationality, geographical location, class position, gender, and ethnicity all conspire to work against them, and despite their most outstanding resistance efforts, their intimacy practices are often limited, constricted, and unstable. Some occupy varying and shifting positions on that spectrum; sometimes, riding on a magic carpet and enjoying various embodied advantages but at times, plunging into a deep hole completely overwhelmed by obstacles they feel powerless to overcome. Transnational Divorce is essentially a feminist project aimed at unpacking divorcees’ messy transnational intimacy practices and intimate encounters at the axes of inequalities. Global hierarchy of citizenship, class and race structures, and gender order all impact divorcees differently; some derive capital and enjoy mobility while others suffer a liminal, abject, and precarious existence. Since the overarching theme of this book is inequalities, telling stories of divorcees from diverse nationality, class, ethnic, and gender backgrounds will present a compelling narrative of how multiple, overlapping, and shifting systems of power, privilege, and oppression shape their experiences, decisions, trajectories, practices, and outcomes.

Transnational divorce as a global family phenomenon has been slow in emerging under the radar of family and migration scholars. The topic being under-researched certainly deserves greater attention by not just academics but also community workers and policy makers. This book arises from an exploratory study on divorcees from transnational marriages conducted in Singapore during the period of 2015–2016. Like my earlier book, this second book emphasises intensely on inductive, empirical research to expose social problems, analyse structural conditions, uncover inequalities, and suggest social justice possibilities. Detailed narrative accounts collected through in-depth, one-on-one interviews with 50 divorcees provide deep insights into the complexities and intricacies of transnational divorce practices. Essentially, the project is about developing a praxiography (Mol 2002; Latham 2017) – recording, describing, decoding, mapping out, and analysing familial and intimacy practices innovated and enacted by transnational divorcees, the meanings they attach to these practices, and the practices imposed upon and enacted on them at the intersection of events, processes, and contexts they are situated in. Case studies are spotlighted throughout the book to unpack the implications of overlapping and interlocking contexts and systems on individual and family lives. The project takes on a decolonial feminist approach to conduct research, analyse data, and discuss lived experiences of the research subjects. By a decolonial feminist approach, it means the project is making its mission and priority the task of understanding and uncovering the needs of the communities and research subjects it studies. The methodological appendix of the book details the epistemological, ontological, and philosophical underpinnings of the project and researcher, as well as ethical considerations and feminist principles in shaping the research approaches and methods. The book, though set in Singapore, is more of a global story of transnational divorce. Transnational divorce reveals hierarchy of citizenship, gender order, intersection of oppressive systems, privileges, inequalities, violence, vulnerabilities, ingenuity, resistance, and optimism. The project therefore uses a transnational, intersectional feminist lens to understand the conditions, contexts, events, and processes these divorce stories are constructed, developed, shaped, constricted, and silenced.

There are different ways of explaining transnational divorce. Transnational divorce could be understood as having divorce proceedings take place across two or more countries. For example, an Italian respondent in the study filed for divorce in two countries; he filed for divorce in his home country, Italy, as well as his host country, Singapore, where he, his wife, and children were residing in. In some instances, transnational divorce refers to divorce and other divorce-related matters like property settlement and child custody being resolved across nation-state borders when parties involved reside in different countries. This scenario is commonly observed in this study’s narrative accounts. Like in the case of Anaya, several respondents had their lawyers mail the divorce papers over to their spouse who was no longer residing in the same country as them. Transnational divorce could also be thought of as a case of a migrant couple filing for divorce in their host country. For example, Al-Sharmani’s research on divorce among Somali Muslim migrants in Finland (Al-Sharmani 2017) and Liversage’s study on Turkish divorces in Denmark (Liversage 2012) examine how the transnational social fields inhabited by migrant couples of the same nationality shape their divorce experiences. In my project, I am interested to discuss transnational divorce in terms of the transnational aspects of divorce biographies of individuals who have dissolved their mixed-nationality marriage. The book extends my earlier conceptualisation of divorce biography to offer a theoretical framework of transnational divorce biography and explain the different elements of a transnational divorce biography.

In terms of organisation, the book first invites readers to consider the experience of transnational divorce using the theoretical framework of transnational divorce biography. Chapter 2 draws from a range of feminist perspectives including intersectional, transnational, and women of colour feminisms to provide a conceptual understanding of transnational divorce biography. This chapter explains the transnational aspects of divorce experience through unpacking the four elements of the transnational divorce biography framework: (a) unequal effects of a global neoliberal economy and global hierarchy of nations; (b) shifting intersection of multiple systems of domination and oppression; (c) transborder flow of intimacies and familial resources; and (d) liminality, resistance, and hopes. Featuring a multiplicity of transnational divorce biographies, the next four chapte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Transnational divorce biography
• 3 Encountering borderland violence: constricted intimacies
• 4 Assembling masculinity projects: instrumental intimacies
• 5 Innovating for the sake of children: privileged intimacies
• 6 Being neither here nor there: entangled intimacies
• 7 Epilogue: fire dragon feminism
• Appendix: Feminist methodological and reflection notes on decolonising research
• References
• Index