Unveiling Kyriarchy: Misyar Marriage in Post-Migration Istanbul

This paper examines misyar (visiting) marriage among migrant and refugee communities in Istanbul, exploring how gendered, legal, and moral boundaries are negotiated within intersecting structures of migration, precarity, and power. As a contemporary, non-normative arrangement in which spouses may waive rights such as cohabitation, financial support, and inheritance, misyar unsettles dominant understandings of intimacy, legitimacy, and the moral economy of marriage, functioning in practice as an unregistered and legally ambiguous union. Drawing on 33 in-depth interviews conducted between February and October 2024 with Syrian and other migrant participants, including 13 women and 3 men in misyar marriages, as well as 17 individuals who encounter these unions through their professional or social roles, the study offers an empirically grounded account of how people articulate agency and moral reasoning within precarious intimate contexts. Using a grounded-theory approach, it conceptualizes misyar as both a product and a critique of unequal systems of belonging, developing a bottom-up theorization of misyar as a lived experience that links everyday negotiations of intimacy and kinship to broader hierarchies of gender, class, and citizenship. Drawing on Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s concept of kyriarchy, this analysis situates misyar within a recursive matrix of power in which gendered subordination is entangled with economic dependency, legal precarity, cultural discrimination, and social invisibility. Rather than interpreting misyar merely as a deviation from normative marriage, the paper conceptualizes it as a kyriarchal site of negotiation. In this relational space, power operates through intersecting hierarchies rather than a singular patriarchy, and where access to intimacy, legitimacy, protection, and survival is mediated by class, ethnic, legal, and structural inequalities. From this perspective, misyar emerges as a contested arena in which conformity and resistance coexist, functioning as a relational space where femininities and masculinities are continuously reproduced, reconfigured, and resisted within Istanbul’s shifting moral and material economies. Ultimately, the paper argues that women’s agency in misyar marriages is constituted within, rather than outside, the very structures of domination that constrain them, revealing the complex interplay between structural vulnerability and strategic action in post-migration contexts.