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.
eISBN: 978-0-8122-0064-5
Subjects: Anthropology
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