Making Families without Wives: Kinship in the Men’s Rights Movement

Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) in India primarily organized around legal problems with marriage and extended family living, linking their avowed antifeminism to wives’ failures in these settings. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork with MRAs in eight Indian cities, this chapter provides an account of how they conceptualize gendered labour, comportment, responsibility, and resources within the familial realm, often by framing their reckonings of kinship as gender-neutral, just, and attuned to discourses of care. The prospect of wives’ entitlement to affinal family property is one of the flashpoints drawing families to join the movement. In constructing post-divorce futures, some MRAs seek ideal patrilineal kinship, while others reject marriage and establish male communities based in shared trauma. Reading these perspectives through anthropological theories that privilege marriage versus feminist and queer theories that decentre familialism, the chapter considers whether MRAs are re-routing the traffic of marriage, or benefiting from its structural advantages.