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.
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