Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines the oriental project of imagining migrant women through commercially arranged cross-border marriages. Taking the ‘foreign bride’ in Singapore as a subject of ‘oriental simplicity’, it shows how contemporary orientalism continues to shape practices and beliefs in something as familiar as searching for a wife and having a family. The article questions the gendered, classed and sexualised politics that render the migrant woman from less developed nations an ambivalent figure of desire, further complicating the already problematic articulation of womanhood and selfhood in the post-colonial state. By reinforcing a cultural marketability of ‘oriental simplicity’, commercially arranged cross-border marriages serve to naturalise patriarchal family structures and strengthen the hegemonic ideology of the Asian family.
Source: Gender Place & Culture
Authors: Juan Zhang, Brenda S. A. Yeoh
Institutions: University of Bristol, National University of Singapore
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: green
Funder: Ministry of Education, India
OpenAlex ID: W2996879976