‘Mail-order brides’ in popular culture: Colonialist representations and absent discourse

Abstract

Over the past decade clever marketing and wider access to the internet has led to the exponential growth of ‘mail-order’ marriage industries, vastly increasing the number of women who migrate for marriage using these commercial services. Taken within the context of global predatory capitalism, such phenomenon is of interest in that it appears to convene in its dynamics the intersecting operation of gender and class inequality, sexism, racism, and colonialism that, far from diminishing, seems only to further intensify with the increase in transnational cross-border traffic between populations. In this study, we investigate the complicity of knowledge-production practices within popular culture in the perpetuation of such dynamics within the ‘mail-order’ marriage industry. In particular, we focus on the politics of representation around the figure of the so-called ‘mail-order bride’ as produced in various genres and sites in North America over the past 15 years. Our study revealed, as expected, an intensely narrow and colonialist discourse constituting the women involved in such commercial transactions as commodity objects, victims, or victimizers. But, as well, we found five potentially counter-hegemonic works that serve to represent an alternative discourse that at least gestures toward a more diverse and complex representation of these women and of married life, employing devices such as irony, parody, spoofing, and other tongue-in-cheek references. However, as our conclusion demonstrates, despite such admirable interventions, some aspects of agency-arranged marriages remain utterly absent in North American popular culture, thereby perpetuating and ultimately failing to displace the dominant discourse on this population of women.