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Paper short abstract:

Pre- or extra-marital love for Malay-Muslims can elicit desires that may transgress religious and legal limits on intimacy. Cross-border marriages in Southern Thailand offer quicker access to "permissible" intimacy by bypassing State bureaucratic processes for marriage, also facilitating polygamy.

Paper long abstract:

Love for Malay-Muslims is an ambivalent sentiment: it is acknowledged as an expected precedent to marriage, but outside of marriage, it can give rise to romantic and sexual desires that may potentially transgress moral, religious, and legal limits on intimacy. A vigilant Vice Prevention Unit, operated by the Malaysian State, which polices and criminalizes any pre- or extra-marital sexual engagement, also makes sexual and physical intimacy a conjugal privilege. Marriage thus acts as a gateway to love that is approved by Islam and the State. However, the path to conjugality -- both monogamous and polygamous -- is wrought with bureaucratic obstacles that make marriage an uncertain possibility. This paper explores how Malay-Muslim couples strategize around such bureaucratic inconveniences by eloping to Southern Thailand, where a cheap, and potentially legal cross-border marriage can be contracted before they fall into the temptation of indulging in illicit pre-marital sexual desires. I argue that cross-border marriages enable Malay-Muslims to bypass the Malaysian State in securing quick -- and discreet -- access to "permissible" intimacy, unbeknownst to disapproving parents and first wives. This makes cross-border marriages instrumental in facilitating secret polygamous unions, which introduces various complexities in the domestic arrangement, emotional management, and resource distribution within polygamy.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the uneasy relationships that African Diaspora, western women and far relatives engage with as a survival mechanism to meet their financial, sexual material drives.

Paper long abstract:

This article focuses on African men who came to Western countries as students and who, due to study-related (financial) hardship and high economic demands from their kith and kin back home, entered romantic relationships with Western women. I argue that students in Australia and European countries function under unprecedented tensions and pressure from home economic demands, and from the host cultural and academic challenges. They are found between and betwixt as on the one hand, they have to adapt and cope within their new milieu in the Diaspora while on the other, they are placed under additional economic demands from their areas of origin. As living in a Western context, paying school fees and sending remittances home is often an unattainable goal. Returning home without financial and/or academic success is often also not an option. As a result, some men feel romantic relationships with Western women is the only option left, as such relationships can lead to significant less financial stress, as well as an eventual Permanent Residency. The western women (often times the elderly) who hardly find love among their peers also exploit the vulnerable African men for their sexual gratification. It is this trio of exploitation that this paper explores. This has escaped the attention of scholars, a lacuna which this paper sets out to fill. This article is based on author's ethnographic research on romantic relationships between Western women and African men.

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Paper short abstract:

While intimate relations with European women are often seen in West Africa as a means for mobility across state borders and some of European values concerning love are inspiring, others are rejected as some men (and women) postulate polygynous arrangements across state borders.

Paper long abstract:

Sometimes romantic intimacies enable mobility across state borders, as is the case with relationships between African men and European women in West African tourist resorts. Migration to Europe being a common dream, such relationships are generally aspired to. Additionally, intimate relations with European women - regarded as synonyms of "true love", faithfullness and non-materialistic attitudes (and associated with "being modern") - for many young men represent an ideal. On entering such a relationship, however, men have to to deal with - obey, challenge or negotiate - the different cultural norms, legislation and religious law regulating intimate relationships in European and African states. Some men postulate retaining their rights to polygamy as immigrants in Europe, proposing its "transcontinental" version: wishing to have one (white) wife in Europe and another (black) one in Africa. How is such an arrangement justified - or contested - by African men and women? To what extent do people refer to religious laws of Islam or indigenous traditions and to what extent to personal experiences and observations (eg. of emotional challenges of living in a polygamous family)? Are claims to a polygamous marriage also constructed on the basis of values derived from the West, like relativism? The paper explores how such intimate arrangements across states and cultures are conceptualised, rationalised, negotiated among (or hidden from) the different actors (the family, the European wife, the African wife or wives). It is based on my long-term research in Guinea-Bissau and the Gambia.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents an analysis of shifting spousal relations among Japanese couples who have elected to retire in Malaysia. The distinctiveness of the site provided a unique place from which my paper addresses larger debates over the politics of intimacy and productivity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents a study of Japanese couples who have elected to retire in Malaysia. Retired baby boomers had lived through Japan's high growth period in which family and firm were strictly demarcated into a normative division of labour between women and men. Men's retirement seemed to have unsettled many taken-for-granted categories including gender and intergenerational norms. I observed that their movement to Malaysia led retirees to reimagine and restructure relations between themselves and their spouses, with their children, and the wider Japanese state. At the same time, it was impossible to observe a single, unified idea of intimacy. On one hand, the discourse of romantic love and spousal equality seemed to play a fundamental role in the crafting of normative 'couple- hood' in retirement. On the other hand, some couples called their relation, sotsukon (graduation from marriage). This paper focuses on the sense of anxiety they felt around these transitions, and how that shaped the new relationships in retirement. I engage with a growing body of literature in feminist economic anthropology that looks at how economic transformations shape people's intimate lives and how their lives in turn shape wider economic practices. The distinctiveness of the Malaysian field site provided a unique place from which my paper addresses larger debates over the politics of intimacy and productivity.

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Paper short abstract:

Governmental recognition of romantic intimacy involves a particular political form of waiting. This paper looks at how couples Hong Kong-Mainland couples, citizens of one country with multiple differentiated categories of citizen manage the emotional labour of their relationship with the state.

Paper long abstract:

The subject in love is supposedly meant to be self-governing, with its new "clock" set to "zero" (Povinelli 2006). When a new marriage between a Mainland Chinese Hukou holder and Hong Kong Permanent resident takes place, the state begins a clock that count downs the number of days (14610 or 4 years in 2014) before the Mainland spouse is eligible for a "one-way permit" to live and work in Hong Kong. In exchanging their wedding vows, they enter complex highly gendered politics of waiting. One that means that thousands of commute through passport control from their workplaces in Hong Kong to apartments in Shenzhen to be with their spouses. This paper explores the state, familial and romantic politics of this seemly arbitrary period of waiting. A state of being deeply entwined with negotiations between colonial powers over Hong Kong's role in the global economy for hundreds of years. The paper focuses on the emotional labour of remaining optimistic that the state will reward the subject for their patience in light of the border and regions turbulent history. Weaving scholarship on optimism and the PRC's transition to capitalism with work on inheritance and intergenerationality with dialogue from cross-border couples, to bring into focus both the fragility and potential of the subject in love under our current regime of global capitalism.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper considers intimate relations between Filipinos and Amerikanos with regards to the discourse of 'colonial mentality'. How Filipinos conceptualise Amerikanos, and in turn, how they perceive themselves - and how this is or is not changing - will be the focus of this paper.

Paper long abstract:

In a nation-state that has experienced over 400 years of colonial rule, and that since Independence in 1946 has retained significant political, economic and socio-cultural ties with its coloniser America, love has been heavily influenced by idealised imaginings of the white 'Other'. Love for, and idealised and romanticised imaginings of, the white 'Other' translate at the intimate level of the self to an internalisation of inferiority referred to in the literature as 'colonial mentality'. The Filipino self is understood in some respects as inferior to the Amerikano (a term widely used in the Philippines to refer to Western foreigners).

Using these ideas as a jumping-off point, this paper explores how idealised and romanticised feelings of love for Amerikanos plays out in a local context. On Siargao Island, Philippines, increasing numbers of young Filipino women and men are entering into romantic relationships with young Western lifestyle migrants as international surf tourism to the region booms. This paper will elucidate how intimate tensions at the level of self are both re-worked and reproduced in such a context. An interesting paradox has been created whereby young local Filipinos - particularly women - gain new confidences in themselves as their opportunities for globalised intimacies expands; yet the idea of the inferior Filipino self is both naturalised and reproduced as young Philippine women unfavourably compare local men to Amerikanos. The women draw on imaginings reminiscent of past colonial stereotypes of the Oriental 'Other' whilst doing so, typically characterising young Filipino men as 'bad' and 'ugly'.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how marriage migration undermines narratives of romantic love and idealized conjugal futures. In particular, African-Australian couples' feelings of lacking important feminine and masculine characteristics that instigated marriage migration threaten the romantic experience.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how marriage migration undermines narratives of romantic love and idealized conjugal futures. In particular, African-Australian couples' feelings of lacking important feminine and masculine characteristics that instigated marriage migration threaten the romantic experience. Prior to marriage migration, Australian women's notions of self do not relate to hegemonic beauty ideals and femininity. And for African men, their lower socio-economic status does not match context-specific hegemonic masculinities. Intercultural relationships seem to compensate feelings of such inadequacy: marriage migration offers men a climb on the socio-economic ladder, and for women, bodies and selves become accepted and celebrated. Simultaneously, or perhaps because of this, African-Australian relationships often start off with romantic first dates, feelings of pure love and finding one's soul mate. While happy endings are imagined and desired, marriage migration and life in Australia is experienced as difficult by both men and women. The migration journey affects men's feelings of being a man, as adjusting to this new reality is much harder than previously envisioned. A lack of control, and feelings of dependency on their Australian partners leave African men feeling emasculated. For Australian women, issues with femininity are not resolved because of their relationships. Everyday life with their partners turns out to be less special, less exotic, and more stressful than imagined. For both African men as well as Australian women, highly romanticized futures of a happily ever after, as well as of their partners, are often crushed by everyday realities of racism, stereotyping and othering.