"Asian Cross-border Marriage Migration: Demographic Patterns and Social Issues is an interdisciplinary and comparative study on the rapid increase of the intra-Asia flow of cross-border marriage migration. This book contains in-depth research conducted by scholars in the fields of demography, sociology, anthropology and pedagogy, including demographic studies based on large-scale surveys on migration and marital patterns as well as micro case studies on migrants%7Bu2019%7D liv%7Bu00AD%7Ding experiences and strategies. Together these papers examine and challenge the existing assumptions in the immigration policies and popular discourse and lay the foundation for further comparative research." -- Back cover.
The popular imagination of marriage migration has been influenced by stories of marriage of convenience, of forced marriage, trafficking and of so-called mail-order brides. This book presents a uniquely global view of an expanding field that challenges these and other stereotypes of cross-border marriage.
Illuminating how international marriages are negotiated, arranged, and experienced, Cross-Border Marriages is the first book to chart marital migrations involving women and men of diverse national, ethnic, and class backgrounds. The migrations studied here cross geographical borders of provinces, rural-urban borders within nation-states, and international boundaries, including those of China, Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, the United States, and Canada. Looking at assumptions about the connection between international marriages and poverty, opportunism, and women's mobility, the book draws attention to ideas about global patterns of inequality that are thought to pressure poor women to emigrate to richer countries, while simultaneously suggesting the limitations of such views. Breaking from studies that regard the international bride as a victim of circumstance and the mechanisms of international marriage as traffic in commodified women, these essays challenge any simple idea of global hypergamy and present a nuanced understanding where a variety of factors, not the least of which is desire, come into play. Indeed, most contemporary marriage-scapes involve women who relocate in order to marry; rarely is it the men. But Nicole Constable and the volume contributors demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, these brides are not necessarily poor, nor do they categorically marry men who are above them on the socioeconomic ladder. Although often women may appear to be moving "up" from a less developed country to a more developed one, they do not necessarily move higher on the chain of economic resources. Complicating these and other assumptions about international marriages, the essays in this volume draw from interviews and rich ethnographic materials to examine women's and men's agency, their motivations for marriage, and the importance of familial pressures and obligations, cultural imaginings, fantasies, and desires, in addition to personal and economic factors. Border-crossing marriages are significant for what they reveal about the intersection of local and global processes in the everyday lives of women and men whose marital opportunities variably yield both rich possibilities and bitter disappointments.
How do the Japanese men and Chinese women who participate in cross-border matchmaking—individuals whose only interaction is often just one brief meeting—come to see one another as potential marriage partners? Motivated by this question, Chigusa Yamaura traces the practices of Sino-Japanese matchmaking from transnational marriage agencies in Tokyo to branch offices and language schools in China, from initial meetings to marriage, the visa application processes, and beyond to marital life in Japan. Engaging issues of colonial history, local norms, and the very ability to conceive of another or oneself as marriageable, Marriage and Marriageability rethinks cross-border marriage not only as a form of gendered migration, but also as a set of practices that constructs marriageable partners and imaginable marriages. Yamaura shows that instead of desiring different others, these transnational marital relations are based on the tactical deployment of socially and historically created conceptions of proximity between Japan and northeast China. Far from seeking to escape local practices, participants in these marriages actively seek to avoid transgressing local norms. By doing so on a transnational scale, they paradoxically reaffirm and attempt to remain within the boundaries of local marital ideologies.
This book provides an in-depth exploration and analysis of marriages between Japanese nationals and migrants from three broad ethnic/cultural groups - spouses from the former Soviet Union countries, the Philippines, and Western countries. It reveals how the marriage migrants navigate the intricacies and trajectories of their marriages with Japanese people while living in Japan. Seen from the lens of ‘gendered geographies of power’, the book explores how state-level politics and policies towards marriage, migration, and gender affect the personal power politics in operation within the relationships of these international couples. Overall, the book discusses how ethnic identity intersects with gender in the negotiation of spaces and power relations between and amongst couples; and the role states and structural inequalities play in these processes, resulting in a reconfiguration of our notions of what international marriages are and how powerful gender and the state are in understanding the power relations in these unions.
As globalization and transnational encounters intensify, people’s mobility is increasingly conditioned by intimacy, ranging from love, desire, and sexual liaisons to broader family, kinship, and conjugal matters. This book explores the entanglement of mobility and intimacy in various configurations throughout the world. It argues that rather than being distinct and unrelated phenomena, intimacy-related mobilities constitute variations of cross-border movements shaped by and deeply entwined with issues of gender, kinship, race, and sexuality, as well as local and global powers and border restrictions in a disparate world.
This book analyses how Asian migrants adapt and assimilate into their host societies, and how this assimilation differs across their sociodemographic backgrounds, ethnic profiles, and political contexts. The diversities in Asian migrants’ assimilation trajectories challenge the assumption that given time, migrants will eventually integrate holistically into their host societies. This book captures the diverse patterns and trajectories of assimilation by going beyond marriage migration to look at how family formation processes are shaped by migration driven by reasons other than marriage. Using quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method analyses, not only does this book uncover the nuances of the link between marriage and migration, but it also widens methodological repertoires in research on marriage and migration. It also captures various social outcomes that may have been influenced by migration, including migrants’ economic well-being, cultural assimilation, subjective well-being, and gender inequality vis-à-vis marriages. This book further embeds the studies in the Asian contexts by drawing on individual countries’ unique policies relevant to cross-cultural marriages, the persistent impacts of extended families, the patriarchal traditions, and systems of religion and caste. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
This volume challenges the dominant discourse that perceives Asian women as either "mail-order" brides or overseas workers. Providing the first sustained critique of the artificial analytical division between brides and workers, the book demonstrates women's transition from brides to workers and from workers to brides. Focusing on how women workers use marriage as a strategy to gain citizenship and how migrants for marriage become workers, the authors present these modern Asian women in their multidimensional roles as wives, workers, mothers, and citizens.
Marriages spanning borders are not a new phenomenon, but occur with increasing frequency and contribute substantially to international mobility and transnational engagement. Perhaps because such migration has often been treated as 'secondary' to labor migration, marriage has until recent years been a neglected field in migration studies. In contemporary Europe, transnational marriages have become an increasingly focal issue for immigration regimes, for whom these border-crossing family formations represent a significant challenge. This timely volume brings together work from Europe and beyond, addressing the issue of transnational marriage from a range of perspectives (including legal frameworks, processes of integration, and gendered dynamics), presenting substantial new empirical material, and taking a fresh look at key concepts in this area.
