Battlefields of affection: Gender, global desires and the politics of intimacy in Filipina-Japanese transnational marriages

This dissertation is an ethnography of the increasing number of intermarriages between Filipino women and Japanese men living in urban Japan in the 1990s that situates these marriages in ongoing processes of contemporary capitalist globalization and socio-cultural transnationalization. Most academic research and media reports of the past two decades have situated Filipina-Japanese associations in Japan as part of labor and arranged marriage migration. In these, Filipinas have been commonly portrayed as under Japanese men's sexual subjection, which takes place within national, class, gender and moral hierarchies. By narrowly focusing on economics and highlighting differences, prevailing representations of intermarried Filipina-Japanese couples have worked to efface other important dimensions of their complex realities as well as the women's and men's subjective desires for particular kinds of social relations.;This dissertation, then, inquires into the politics of intimacy among Filipinas, their Japanese husbands in Japan and their Filipino families in the Philippines through a diverse range of the narratives these people tell about family relations and affective ties. These stories elucidate the ways in which the roots---the particular cultural configurations and social relations in which pre-departure experiences took place---and the routes of their life trajectories unfold across national borders. The narratives of roots/routes develop along with new imaginations about people and lifestyles in particular geoeconomic locations that have been constructed by historical and contemporary flows of capital, people, images and material things. Such fantasies, which are highly gendered, account for the emerging desires for transnational affective relations.;In pursuit of transnational mobility and desires as well as because of the lure of marital and family romances, intermarried people and their families mobilize and struggle over the old, new and ideal meanings of their gendered and nationalized social relations. By bringing to the fore the ethnographic minutiae of personal lives, which both refer to wider power structures and cultures and resist having these cast in to rigid and ahistorical categories, I show the telling particulars of the experiences of intermarried Filipinas and Japanese men, who seek and negotiate meanings in married and family lives that have developed in transnational Asia.