鈴木 伸枝

Carla Freeman (2001) has recently argued that both globalization theory and the very processes defining globalization are ascribed a masculine gender and as a result, masculine globalization theory has implicitly produced a powerful dichotomous model which is separated from empirical studies of local gendered experiences of globalization. Expanding on this argument, I discuss Japanese men's desires for masculine, national, and modem identities in relation to their Filipino wives in urban Japan. I contend that inquiring into men's experiences as situated in intermediate locations between individual subject formation and local and global structures of power opens up a space for new theoretical imaginations to emerge, contributing to our efforts to destabilize the masculine domination commonly found in theories and depictions of intermarried "First World" men and "Third World" women. In addition to humanizing descriptions of the partners of intermarried women, I situate in broader global historical contexts the polarized pair, First World/Third World, within which FilipinaJapanese liaisons are normally located. My ethnography suggests that such relations not only create personal relationships but also haunt the meanings and power relations of the binary terms, thereby altering the theoretical frame- works. By juxtaposing previously unimaginable actors and attributes, the paper shows the surprisingly transnational dynamics and gendering human relations born of the increasing numbers of cross-national, cross-ethnic marriages at the multiply crisscrossed intersections of the global and the local.

This article traces the discourse on Filipina hanayome (brides) in administratively mediated international marriages (kokusai kekkon) in Japan from the mid 1980s to the present. In narratives of "international marriages" in the late 1980s, "Filipina" came to index the "problem of brides from Asia." As seen elsewhere, various textual and media representations have depicted rural Filipino women as socioeconomic victims and sexually subjugated women. Simultaneously, however, constructions of Filipina hanayome in rural Japan have been given local twists. Drawing on examples from largely neglected written texts in Japanese and from an ethnographic vignette, the article next focuses on sexual subjectivity and economic autonomy, two dimensions of the women's lives in which they struggle to recapture their own ways of imputing meanings to their lives vis-A-vis various social forces. in so doing, this article interrogates certain feminist and popular depictions of hanayome.

While tales about Filipinas in diaspora have attracted a global audience, those living in Japan have been referred to as "entertainers" who work in "the sex industry." Filipinas in Japan have thus been constructed as the "immoral" Other under the gender regimes of Japan and the Philippines. Based on ethnographic research, I explore the meanings and possibilities of the practices of Filipina wives of Japanese in public charity events organized by the women themselves in Japan and the Philippines. Dislocated from their subjective identities, Filipina wives in the Tokyo area have deployed images and symbols of socially sanctioned (Christian) wives and mothers in these events. Although ironically participating in Orientalist and sexist discipline in the context of their events, their practices nevertheless constitute a way to create affirmative spaces for themselves on the margins of the two nation-states. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd.