Based on twenty-month multisited ethnography, this dissertation examines contemporary cross-border matchmaking practices between Japan and northeast China. I theorize marriage migration in terms of negotiations of marriageability in the context of regional histories and local marital values. The marriages researched here were arranged during matchmaking tours to northeast China. These matches were contracted shortly after both partners consented. I ask how Japanese men and Chinese women—virtual strangers lacking even a common language with which to communicate—come to see one another as marriageable and, moreover, how matchings between the former colonizers and colonized of Manchuria have come to be viewed as legitimate unions. In order to answer these questions, I seek to reconfigure our understandings of regional interactions and theorize the dynamics of (1) how colonial legacies play a role in contemporary transnational phenomenon, (2) how particular local marital norms and values, such as notions of endogamy, exogamy, or patrilocality inform transnational processes, and (3) how the construction of marriage is made possible by flexible cultural imaginaries and/or normative marital expectations in societies. Existing work on transnational intimate relations has highlighted gendered imaginings of difference, whereby desire is born of the perception of future spouses as exotic, sensual, traditional, or modern. I argue, instead, that for those involved in the processes of marriage migration between China and Japan, it is the tactical deployment of socially and historically created conceptions of proximity that render their partners marriageable. Current transnational links between Japan and northeast China were originally forged by Japanese colonization of Manchuria and subsequent flows of individuals including repatriation of war orphans and labor migration. Actors on both sides today draw upon these links with conceptions of historical familiarity, racial or cultural similarity, and pseudo kinship terms to legitimate the flows of brides. Moreover, by examining the limits of marriageability in cross-border matchmaking, I also aim to show how such limits reveal marriage normativities. To study these seemingly “uncommon” ways in which marriage is created is to also simultaneously investigate how conceptions of “common” or “regular” marriages are constructed.
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Anthropology
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Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Rutgers University. Graduate School - New Brunswick
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