(Im)mobile intimacies: Commodities and marriage at the crossroads of Asia

Abstract This article follows traders and entrepreneurs that live and work between Kyrgyzstan and China's northwestern region of Xinjiang. Looking specifically at Islamic marriage and business partnerships forged between persecuted Uyghurs and their Uzbek partners, it argues that commodity‐mediated forms of transnational intimacy create spaces of safety and possibility in the face of political oppression, carceral violence, and gendered limitations. These transnational mobilities are forged in spite of structural immobilities. Taking seriously the imbrications of objects and people, it advances a view of intimacy as a multi‐scalar, trans‐subjective, and multiply entangled field of relationality.