More Details

Summary:

"Commercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5-billion-dollar global industry. Ideas about the industry are rife with stereotypes--younger, more physically attractive brides from non-Western countries being paired with older Western men. These ideas are more myth than fact, Monica Liu finds in Seeking Western Men. Her study of China's email-order bride industry offers stories of Chinese women who are primarily middle-aged, divorced, and proactively seeking spouses to fulfill their material and sexual needs. What they seek in their Western partners is tied to what they believe they've lost in the shifting global economy around them. The majority of these women do not speak English, and so rely on translators to help with, especially, the early stages of courtship: email correspondence. Ranging from multi-millionaire entrepreneurs or ex-wives and mistresses of wealthy Chinese businessmen, to contingent sector workers and struggling single mothers, these women, along with their translators and potential husbands from the U.S., Canada, and Australia, make up the actors in this multifaceted story. Set against the backdrop of China's global economic ascendance and a relative decline of the West, this book asks: How does China's rise reshape Chinese women's perception of Western masculinity? Moreover, how do the women's own divergent class positions within China shape the outcome of their marital trajectories differently? Through the unique window of global internet dating, this book reveals how China's rise on the world stage reshapes relationships of race, class, gender, sex, and intimacy across borders. More broadly, Seeking Western Men looks at how the people for whom late-stage capitalism has not provided its promised advantages have sought to take matters into their own hands. The global dating industry, for them, acts as a surrogate for recapturing their agency in a world that has left them behind"-- [Provided by publisher]

Table of Contents:

• Why do Chinese women seek Western men?
• Provider love
• Transnational business masculinity
• Embracing domesticity
• Body of a woman, fate of a man
• Surrogate dating : translators behind the screens.

Author/Creator:

Liu, Monica (Sociologist) , author

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

Item content: English

Main Work:

Seeking Western men: email-order brides under China's global rise [by Liu, M.]

Other Related Resources:

Print version: Seeking Western men [by Liu, M.] (Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022 — ISBN 9781503632479; LCCN 2022007409)

Related Series:

Globalization in everyday life

Subjects:

Intercountry marriage — China

Marriage brokerage — China

Mail order brides — China

Foreign spouses — Western countries

Online dating — China

Women — China — Social conditions

Women — China — Economic conditions

General Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on October 06, 2022).

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Call Numbers:

HQ1032 .L585 2023eb

ISBNs:

9781503633742 (electronic book)
1503633748 (electronic book)
9781503632479 (hardcover) [Invalid]
9781503633735 (paperback) [Invalid]

Library of Congress Control Numbers:

2022007410

OCLC Numbers:

1299401751

Other Control Numbers:

EBC29972952 (source: MiAaPQ)
[Unknown Type]: ybp303057955