Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and "Mail Order" Marriages [Paperback]

Nicole Constable (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 18, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0520238702 | ISBN-13: 978-0520238701 | Edition: 1

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 relationships--their stories of love, romance, migration, and long-distance dating--this 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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"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

About the Author

Nicole Constable is Professor of Anthropology and Research Professor at the University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh. She is the editor of Guest People (1996) and author of Maid to Order in Hong Kong (1997), and Christian Souls and Chinese Spirits (California, 1994).

Product Details

• Paperback: 293 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (September 18, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520238702
• ISBN-13: 978-0520238701
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #192,633 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Unique Study, October 4, 2004

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Q - See all my reviews

This review is from: Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and "Mail Order" Marriages (Hardcover)

The review column of Amazon is not an approriate place to flame or post such loud propaganda as some of the submitters before me have. In this case, such obnoxious attention-getting, no matter for what purpose, can seriously detract from the worthwhile merits of a profound study such as we have here. While the propagandist(s) only wish to draw attention to something he or she feels is vitally important and releveant, its very brash and 'partisan' (in this case, anti-feminist) style will actually turn people away from reading this book who otherwise might learn a lot from it. Constable's nuanced account of the "mail-order" bride paradigm and the varieties of Pacific Rim cross-cultural marriage issues are presented in a well-studied, first and third person narrative that is rich with real-life examples and specifics. In basic terms, her book makes a strong case for the varied nature of people involved in such relationships, and does not settle for glossing over them with simplistic and often unwholesome generalized demographics. This book is about real individuals, not theories. The conclusions Constable's book offer are based more on observations than philosophies. This is what makes it so engaging and valid to me. I recommend this book to anyone curious about so-called 'mail-order' marriages, and for those who have been around the scholarly block a few times and prefer NOT to read the sort of propagandist headlines as seen elsewhere above in this review column.