Over the past three decades, scholars have paid greater attention to the intensification and complex interconnectivity of local and global processes. Anthropological studies of cross-border ...marriages, migrant domestic workers, and sex workers have burgeoned, demonstrating growing scholarly interest in how social relations have become evermore geographically dispersed, impersonal, mediated by and implicated in broader political-economic or capitalist processes. At the same time, intimate and personal relations—especially those linked to households and domestic units, the primary units associated with reproductive labor—have become more explicitly commodified, linked to commodities and to commodified global processes (i.e., bought or sold; packaged and advertised; fetishized, commercialized, or objectified; consumed; assigned values and prices) and linked in many cases to transnational mobility and migration, presenting new ethnographic challenges and opportunities. This review highlights contemporary anthropological and ethnographic studies of the transnational commodification of intimacy and intimate relations, related debates, themes, and ethnographic challenges.
Born out of place Constable, Nicole
2014., 20140404, 2014, 2014-03-14
eBook
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 Kong–born 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.
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 Stagelooks 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 Stagequestions the dichotomies so frequently drawn between structure and agency, and between global and local levels of analysis.
Illuminating how international marriages are negotiated, arranged, and experienced,Cross-Border Marriagesis 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.
Drawing from stories told by migrant women in Hong Kong, this article builds on previous studies of ‘left‐behind children’ and calls for greater attention to the spectrum of sorts of absent children ...and to the formation of queer or less normative forms of migratory families. Taking a two‐pronged approach, I present an on‐the‐ground ethnographic and affective approach through several vignettes, and consider key elements of a more mid‐range and distanced ‘global assemblage’ approach to the institutions and expert knowledge that shape the experiences and practices of migrant mothers, migratory families, and the spectrum of absent children. This article posits that one's biological children, perhaps the most familial of kin, can become familiar or even unfamiliar strangers through contemporary processes, technologies and practices of migration and separation, and that the process of migration makes and unmakes conventional and unconventional sorts of families. While affective and assemblage approaches are independently valuable, combined they offer richer understandings of the complex interplay of factors – at various levels – that shape normative and queer families and different types of children's absences.
Migrant domestic workers rarely take part in - let alone organize - public protests in the countries where they work. Public protests are virtually unheard of among migrant domestic workers in ...Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, and especially in the Middle East and the Gulf States. Over the past decade and a half, however, migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong - mostly Filipinas and Indonesian women - have become highly active, organizing and participating in political protests. Hong Kong's migrant domestic workers protest in a place where they are guest workers and temporary migrants, denied the opportunity of becoming legal citizens or permanent residents. Increasingly, these workers, their grassroots activist organizations, and the nongovernmental organizations with which they are affiliated frame their concerns in terms of global, transnational, and human rights, not merely local migrant worker rights. This article takes the "Consulate Hopping Protest and Hall of Shame Awards" event - part of the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Hong Kong in 2005 - as an ethnographic example of domestic worker protest and as an entrée through which to ask what it is about Hong Kong and about the position of women migrant workers - whose mobility and voice is both a product and a symptom of globalization - that literally permits public protests and shapes their form and content. The article illustrates how migrant workers' protests and activism have been shaped by domestic worker subjectivities, by the dynamics of inter-ethnic worker affiliations, and by the sociohistorical context of Hong Kong as a post-colonial "global city" and a "neoliberal space of exception."
This article offers a critical analysis of the US 'International Marriage Broker Regulation Act' in relation to its promoters and critics, the women it intends to protect, and the surrounding ...'trafficking' discourse. I argue that the act was supported by faulty logic and inaccurate data, and that its passage was linked to conflations of foreign brides with victims of trafficking and domestic violence and of introduction agencies with human traffickers. Riding the Bush era anti-trafficking moral crusade, the act received strong bipartisan support and was promoted as a weapon in the 'war on trafficking' despite a lack of convincing evidence that US 'international marriage brokers' are linked to trafficking. Like the wider anti-trafficking movement, the protection IMBRA offers is more symbolic than substantive. It echoes moralistic nineteenth-century anti-white-slavery campaigns that cast women as potential victims, while promoting and justifying anti-immigration legislation.
From reviews of the first edition:
"This ethnography is an indisputable contribution to both Asian studies and anthropology and a pioneering work in the field of transnational migration studies. I ...strongly recommend this lively and readable study of the complex lives of domestic workers in Hong Kong as a textbook for use in a variety of classes."-American Ethnologist
"An ethnography with a twist, in that it portrays the domestic workers in their own terms, speaking for themselves through their experiences and reactions, including the strategies of resistance developed by the workers."-China Journal
"Constable undertakes extensive naturalistic and participant observation. . . . The interviews are lively, presenting an array of experiences."-China Quarterly
"Maid to Order in Hong Kong is a stimulating and compellingly written book."-American Anthropologist
"The combination of analyses of the social structural forms of domination and the individual forms of resistance makes Constable's work insightful and useful."-Signs
Middle-class Chinese women in the global city of Hong Kong have entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers over the past three decades, and the demand for foreign domestic workers has soared. A decade ago some foretold the decline in foreign workers and the influx of mainland workers. But today over 120,000 women from the Philippines, over 90,000 from Indonesia, and thousands more from other parts of South and Southeast Asia serve as maids on two-year contracts in Hong Kong, sending much needed remittances to their families abroad.
Nicole Constable tells their story by updatingMaid to Order in Hong Kongwith a focus on the major changes that have taken place since Hong Kong's reunification with mainland China in 1997, the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, and the outbreak of SARS in 2002-2003. Interweaving her analysis with the women's individual stories, she shows how power is expressed in the day-to-day lives of Filipina domestic workers and more-recent Indonesian arrivals.
This article compares the 'power geometry' (Massey 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) of mobility/immobility of foreign domestic workers in Singapore and Hong ...Kong. In both contexts, the policing and surveillance of pregnancy and marriage reflect and reinforce power inequalities of gender paired with migratory, ethnic/racial and employment status. Pregnancy is considered incompatible with employment, but the specifics differ. In Singapore pregnancy results in automatic expulsion of the worker, while in Hong Kong workers are protected by antidiscrimination laws and some labour rights. Legislation of marriages to locals contrast greatly as well, producing subtle but significant differences in im/mobility and citizenship rights. These differences reveal unequal social positioning and different state priorities and regimes of control. While both states aim to restrict migrant workers, Confucian and familial notions of hierarchy reinforce Singapore's approach, while neoliberalism and individual responsibility play a greater role in Hong Kong.
Building on ethnographic research and on studies of noncitizenship, this paper examines ‘excluded belonging’, a condition that is constructed over time, through a process of interactions between ...noncitizens and migratory assemblages. Noncitizens respond to the shifting parameters of inclusion and exclusion in their everyday lives in their attempts to construct a substantive sense of belonging that is often fleeting, fragile and ever challenged. Maintaining this condition entails work, learning, struggles and strategising by noncitizens within spaces of exclusion and with institutional actors who deny them rights and also assist them. Ethnographic research in Hong Kong (2010–2018), among women migrant workers whose pathways shift as they become mothers, overstayers, nonrefoulement (asylum) claimants and rejected refugees, illustrates the lived paradox of excluded belonging, as illustrated by the challenges they face in relation to acquiring food, shelter and children's education while facing increasing migratory exclusion and the growing threat of deportation.
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