As the European powers and the United States advanced into East Asia in the nineteenth century, their advance was accompanied by various kinds of relationships with people in colonies, settlements and treaty ports. Colonising men married or entered into informal relations of concubinage with local women, or they frequented brothels staffed by local women. These […]

Defining militarised sexualities East Asia is now one of the most militarised regions of the planet, hosting the huge standing armies of the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the smaller armies of Taiwan, Vietnam and Mongolia. There are also US troops stationed in Japan […]

In the three East Asian states of South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, the residential status of a non­national spouse is initially temporary, and access to legal citizenship is contingent upon the marriage being maintained during a set waiting period: two years of residence in South Korea and four years’ residency in Taiwan except for those […]

Migrant women’s participation in paid work generally provides financial and emotional fulfilment. As Burgess (2004: 235—36) argues, working outside the home (paid or unpaid) is a process of regaining social capital that was compromised in the process of migration, broadening women’s social networks and their lives in general. Paid work offers migrant women a contact […]

While marriage migration presents a set of similar challenges to all migrant women, details vary in different localities, and the ways in which women make sense of them also differ depending on each individual’s personal and cultural background. Some foresee challenges and subtly negotiate with their fiances, as in the case of a well-educated Filipina […]

Researchers have found a range of often complex reasons for marrying a man abroad. It can be quite unplanned, as in the case of Filipino bar workers in Japan who find themselves in an environ­ment that legitimates courtship with their customers (Faier 2009: 78). It can be a strategy for economic betterment, as with Korean-Chinese […]

Marriages between a national and a foreign spouse started to show a significant increase in the 1980s in Japan (Kosei rodo sho 2009a), and in the 1990s in South Korea and Taiwan with notable numbers of co-ethnic marriages (Belanger et al. 2010: 1110—13). Jones and Shen (2008: 13) estimate that in 2005, international marriages accounted […]

Mahler and Pessar (2006: 42—43) suggest a concept of gendered geographies of power to articulate how gender operates in relation to migration. Geographical scales, social locations, and human agency and imaginations (such as meanings and values) all intersect with each other. Recent studies of marriage migration following such an understanding of power (Constable 2005; Faier […]

Tomoko Nakamatsu Introduction Marriage migration broadly refers to ‘migration within or as a result of marriage’ (Palriwala and Uberoi 2008: 23). It encompasses domestic or cross-border, and intra — or inter-ethnic (or inter-cultural) marriage. A marriage migrant may be female or male. While marriage migration has a long history in Asia, the intra-regional flow has […]

These discussions lead us toward a different way of conceptualising transnational queer Chinese cultures, one that allows us to see areas of commonality across geographically dispersed Chinese communities but focuses on how these arise from rhizomatic cross-flows in the present rather than from ‘deep’ cultural heritage. According to this view, the starting point for approaching […]