The New Erotica of International Cyber-dating: Hyper-Feminized Representations of China’s Email-Order Brides

• In Event: 362 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Paper Session. The Business of Desire

Abstract

The spread of the Internet is altering courtship practices and remaking marriage markets worldwide. Today, international cyber-dating agencies that facilitate email exchanges, romance tours, and marriages between women from developing countries and men from economically advanced countries is a $2 billion dollar business equal in size to the entire online-dating industry in the U.S. My study examines China-based matchmaking agencies that provide 20,000+ Chinese women with access to nearly one million Western men online. The women in my study do not speak English and rely on their matchmaking agencies to translate their email exchanges. I examine the process through which the translators use their knowledge of Chinese youth culture and Western popular culture to create hyper-feminized images of their clients that not only mischaracterize the women, but also reinforce the existing stereotypes of Asian women in the Western media as erotic, exotic, and submissive objects. This paper analyzes the process through which global capitalism and technological development empower and constrain migrant women. I suggest that, on the one hand, they enable middle-aged, divorced women who have been marginalized in their local marriage markets to compete on the global dating market as active consumers. Yet, on the other hand, this is achieved at the cost of compromising their authenticity, perpetuating global racial/gender stereotypes, and hyper-commoditizing intimacy, sex, and marriage.

Author

• Haiyi Liu, University of California-San Diego