Making marriage livable: Neoliberal intimacy and ethical labor in rural Sri Lanka

Abstract

This article examines how neoliberal discourses of autonomy, individual choice, self‐investment, and companionate marriage are taken up, reworked, and domesticated in the intimate lives of Sri Lankan women who previously worked in Export Processing Zones (EPZs). Drawing on long‐term ethnographic research conducted between 2000 and 2023 among former EPZ workers in rural villages, the article traces how ideas encountered through NGO workshops, popular literature, visual media, and workplace training circulate beyond the factory and reshape aspirations around love, intimacy, and marriage. While these discourses valorize personal fulfilment and romantic partnership, women's post‐factory lives are structured by kinship hierarchies, moral surveillance, and economic constraint. The article shows that rather than simply embracing or rejecting neoliberal ideals, women engage in sustained ethical and emotional labor to negotiate competing moral and emotional regimes. Through practices such as letter writing, storytelling, song, and the selective sharing of reproductive knowledge, former workers preserve desire, circulate intimate knowledge, and recalibrate romantic expectations in ways that are socially intelligible. By foregrounding ordinary ethics and emotional labor, the article challenges celebratory narratives of empowerment and resistance, revealing instead the quiet, relational politics through which neoliberal imaginaries of intimacy are selectively reworked in everyday rural life.