The past two decades have witnessed an increasing number of marriage migration worldwide. In conventional ethnic, national endogamies, wives may be sought from families whose statuses are slightly lower than those of their husbands. In contemporary cross-national, cross-ethnic exogamies, numerous women from economically poorer countries marry and join men living in richer countries. Such gendered and classed flows of women have shown certain parallel to the directions of global labor migration. Subsequently, these emerging movements have engendered particular academic and popular discourses about these marriage migrants, who are often placed in a singular category. Dominant images characterize these migrants to be “mail-order brides” whose experiences are very similar to, if not the same as, “trafficked sex workers,” “entertainers,” domestic maids, and “comfort women.” The descriptions have emphasized the women’s economic needs and their culturally-shaped passivity and helplessness within the families and patriarchies both in their homeland and host society. The women are therefore being easily duped by the hands of their husbands and matrimonial brokers.
These narrowly focused representations have then engendered political consequences
in the post-9.11 world. With the heightened desires to protect one’s nation
from external “terrorists” and “invaders,” many policy makers have mobilized
these commonly negative representations to prevent hem from entering their
countries as spouses of home nationals. “Terrorists” and “invaders” in this
context are not Osama bin Laden or Abu Zarqawi, but those who may endanger
“homeland security” by economically, culturally, and racially disturbing the
ideal social orders and national body. This paper considers and problematizes
these political consequences of representations of the increasing number of
global marriage migration in the Asia-Pacific region. Although matrimonies
between women and men living in distant areas within a nation-state are also
rising for similar reasons, my focus here is chiefly on those of international
and cross-ethnic unions, and Filipina-Japanese marriages in particular.