“I Had Faith”: Migrant Women’s Use of Religion and Spirituality to Reframe Their Divorce and for Self- Reinvention

ABSTRACT

Migrant women may find themselves highly isolated and marginalized if their marriage ends overseas. For divorcees who are religious or spiritual, drawing upon these belief systems can help them grieve the partnership loss while also planning for their post-divorce future. This article qualitatively examines the biographies of nine migrant women in Melbourne, Australia who constructively used their beliefs during and after divorce to reframe the precarity of their circumstances into ones of possibility. It finds that positive interactions with different forms of faith can be a valuable tool for female migrant divorcees to transcend their difficulties and begin life anew.

KEYWORDS:

• Divorce
• migrant women
• religion and spirituality
• personal reinvention
• Australia
• qualitative
• biographical research

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude for the following financial support, which made this research possible: The University of Hong Kong’s Postgraduate Scholarship (2015–2019), The Rotary District 9800 Global Grant Scholarship funded through The Rotary Foundation of Rotary International (2015–2019), Ernst Mach Eurasia-Pacific Uninet Grant (The Republic of Austria) (2018), Universitas 21 (U21) Graduate Collaborative Research Award (2017), and Golden Key Asia Pacific Post Graduate Study Award (2016).

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Transnational Families and Divorce Conference hosted by Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands in September 2017 and then again at the Australian Association for the Study of Religion (AASR) Digital Conference in December 2020. At both events, I received incredibly valuable feedback from a number of attendees, but I would like to particularly like to acknowledge Dr Quah Ee Ling Sharon whose guidance was pivotal in moving the work forward. I would also like to extend my thanks to the anonymous reviewers of this article for their careful reading of the work along with their incredibly useful recommendations. Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the women in this paper for sharing with me their powerful and unique perspectives on divorce and life thereafter.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The author elects to not share data