Philippine Prison Marriages: The Politics of Kinship and Women's Composite Agency

This article makes sense of why women marry imprisoned insurgents from the southern Philippines from the perspective of how agency is nested in this choice. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Maharlika Village, the largest Muslim community in Manila. It explores how women negotiate gender relations, family, and insurgency politics in the context of political conflict. The analysis asks how prison marriages feed into the women’s everyday maneuvering of the metropole, and how marrying a political prisoner is embedded in moral and gendered obligations arising from the entangled relationship between kinship and insurgency politics. Theoretically, the article argues that prison marriages are part of the women’s composite agency, which allows them to pursue contradictory desires by fulfilling moral obligations and notions of ideal womanhood