Synopses & Reviews
"Nicole Constable has produced a splendid sequel to her much-praised
Maid to Order in Hong Kong. Constable's sensitive ethnography and her international scope insures that we see every Filipino and Chinese woman as a thinking, feeling person, and every American man who is her pen pal and sometimes future husband as far more than a mere cartoon character.
Romance on a Global Stage wonderfully complicates the genderings and globalizings of power and emotions."Cynthia Enloe, author of
Bananas, Beaches and Bases"The rise of feminism in North America has been paralleled by a growth in marriages between Western men and women from the global periphery. Constable's fascinating study explores the multiple desires at work, revealing the anti-feminist reason and feminist surprises in these global romances."Aihwa Ong, author of Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America
"Constable adds a new map to the cartographies of desire in this nuanced and fresh account of 'mail-order marriage.' Her original work carefully attends to emotion, sex, and political economy, offering a complex account of gender, marriage, and globalization."Carole S. Vance, author of Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality
"This innovative and compassionate work maps new formations of desire in the context of globalization. Constable breaks through the stereotypes about transnational pen-pal marriages to enable us to see, in an ethnographically detailed way, how agency and desire are shaped by uneven economic development and how cyber-technologies figure in the production of new global imaginaries."Ann Anagnost, author of National Past-times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China
"Constable is a talented and perceptive anthropologist who has mastered the use of the web both as a research tool and a topic of research. Her sensible and timely examination of transnational marriages of American men with women from the Philippines and China relentlessly debunks commonly-held tales about submissive (or manipulative) Asian women and wealthy (or abusive) American men."Jean-Paul Dumont, author of Visayan Vignettes: Ethnographic Traces of a Philippine Island
Synopsis
Hong Kong is a meeting place for migrant domestic workers, traders, refugees, asylum seekers, tourists, businessmen, and local residents. In Born Out of Place, Nicole Constable looks at the experiences of Indonesian and Filipina women in this Asian world city. Giving voice to the stories of these migrant mothers, their South Asian, African, Chinese, and Western expatriate partners, and their Hong Kongborn babies, Constable raises a serious question: Do we regard migrants as people, or just as temporary workers? This accessible ethnography provides insight into global problems of mobility, family, and citizenship and points to the consequences, creative responses, melodramas, and tragedies of labor and migration policies.
Synopsis
"Every Sunday, in Hong Kong, tens of thousands of young women from the Philippines gather in public places downtown or at the seaside to picnic, chat, enjoy a free day, and dream of a better future. In her moving and gripping study of these migrant workers, Nicole Constable recounts their lives, giving special attention to their reproductive experience. Born Out Of Place tells poignant stories of maternity and infancy, of abortion and adoption, of hardship and abandonment, thus offering a compelling ethnography of the human cost of labour migration."Didier Fassin, Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
Synopsis
Every Sunday in Hong Kong, tens of thousands of young women from the Philippines and Indonesia gather in public places . . . to picnic, chat, enjoy a free day, and dream of a better future. In her moving and gripping study of these migrant workers, Nicole Constable recounts their lives, giving special attention to their reproductive experience.
Born Out of Place tells poignant stories of maternity and infancy, of abortion and adoption, of hardship and abandonmentthus offering a compelling ethnography of the human cost of labor migration.”Didier Fassin, Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study
This book represents an impressive and innovative research effort. The subject matter is timely, and the biographical detail gives a pathos and immediacy to Constables narrative, making it possible for us to see the fault lines within the temporary foreign worker regimes found in Hong Kong and throughout the world.”Rubie Watson, author of Inequality among Brothers: Class and Kinship in South China
This book is so well written and accessible. . . . Constable is a superb ethnographer: she has truly captured the worlds of her informants in a way that very few ethnographers can.”Gordon Matthews, Professor of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
An expert on gendered migration, Constable deftly shines light on the little-explored topic of women migrants who have babies. Passionately and beautifully written, this book is a must-read for all those interested in the inequities of the global economy, the disposability of low-wage labor, and the panic around womens bodies, sex, and citizenship.”Denise Brennan, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Georgetown University
Synopsis
By the year 2000 more than 350 Internet agencies were plying the email-order marriage trade, and the business of matching up mostly Western men with women from Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America had become an example of globalization writ large. This provocative work opens a window onto the complex motivations and experiences of the people behind the stereotypes and misconceptions that have exploded along with the practice of transnational courtship and marriage. Combining extensive Internet ethnography and face-to-face fieldwork,
Romance on a Global Stage looks at the intimate realities of Filipinas, Chinese women, and U.S. men corresponding in hopes of finding a suitable marriage partner.
Through the experiences of those engaged in pen pal relationshipstheir stories of love, romance, migration, and long-distance datingthis book conveys the richness and dignity of women's and men's choices without reducing these correspondents to calculating opportunists or naive romantics. Attentive to the structural, cultural, and personal factors that prompt women and men to seek marriage partners abroad, Romance on a Global Stage questions the dichotomies so frequently drawn between structure and agency, and between global and local levels of analysis.
About the Author
Nicole Constable is Director of Asian Studies and Professor of Anthropology in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and Research Professor in the University Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and "Mail Order" Marriages and Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Making Introductions
2. Ethnography in Imagined Virtual Communities
3. Feminism and Myths of "Mail-Order" Marriages
4. Fairy Tales, Family Values, and the Global Politics of Romance
5. Political Economy and Cultural Logics of Desire
6. Womens Agency and the Gendered Geography of Marriage
7. Tales of Waiting: History, Immigration, and the State
8. Conclusion: Marriage, Migration, and Transnational Families
Notes
References Cited
Index