Invisible Money and Gendered Dispossession: Relational Work in Matrimonial Disputes in India

ABSTRACT What is the role and meaning of women’s money in matrimonial disputes? Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I highlight the legal and familial mechanisms through which money becomes gendered. By integrating concepts from economic sociology on relational work and Daniels’ (1987) concept of invisible labor, I conceptualize “invisible money.” I use this frame of “invisible money” to show how women’s tangible economic contributions in the household are rendered invisible in addition to the “invisible labor” they perform in the household. Further, I problematize the notion of economic self-sufficiency as a pathway to economic empowerment, arguing that women’s access to paid labor and assets have to be understood within a broader socio-legal context. Additionally, I examine the gendered and temporal dimensions of relational work, illustrating how women’s economic pasts and futures are evaluated and become crucial deciding factors in these cases. Thus, temporality becomes an important dimension of (in)visibilizing money. Finally, by demonstrating how legal institutions routinely perform gendered relational work on behalf of disputing family members— significantly shaping women’s material reality and contributing to their gendered dispossession—my findings underscore the critical need for empirical research on institutional gendered relational work.