Producing Marital Political Intimacy Through Arranged/Forced Marriages and Marital Alliances: Patriarchal Coercive Control, Gender Inequality, and Politics

This article summarizes the most important motivations, mechanisms, and consequences of the production of political intimacy through establishing arranged/forced marriages and marital alliances in the Gabor Roma ethnic population in Romania. In an ideal case, marital political intimacy refers to (a) a sense of closeness, belonging, solidarity, and commitment between the parent couples of the newlywed husband and wife, (b) to an intense post-wedding political, social, and economic cooperation between the parent couples, and (c) to a set of shared interests and values. Marital political intimacy is a highly valued, ethnicized type of symbolic capital that can facilitate the realization of a number of different political—and in some cases economic—plans of a parent couple marrying off their child: from upward social mobility to the search for political patronage and the desire to increase political renown and to the intention of managing political conflicts. The analysis of marital political intimacy highlights how and why Gabor Roma arranged/forced marriages and marital alliances play a key role in the organization of and ongoing (re)negotiation on intra-ethnic political relations, that is, how they can be utilized as a strategic means in political networking, hierarchy-building, and competition between individuals, families, and patrilines. This article also demonstrates that marital political intimacy-building is one of the gendered strategies used for the establishment of patriarchal coercive control over women among the Gabor Roma.