WUNRN
Johns Hopkins University Offers Course On
Mail-Order Brides
Cristina DC Pastor, Jan
17, 2007
NEW JERSEY – The prestigious Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore is offering a course on Filipina mail-order brides, calling it a
“serious course” that would help explain the stereotyping of Filipino women.
“Mail-Order Brides: Understanding the Philippines in Southeast Asian
Context” will be offered in the Spring, with an expected enrolment of 35
students. British Prof. Fenella Cannell, who has spent 15 years in the
Philippines and has written scholarly books about Southeast Asia, is teaching
the course.
The course is offered by JHU’s Department of Anthropology
and is cross-listed with studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and Political
Science. There have been some inquiries about the course, but the department
said the number of students was not yet available at the time of
interview.
“I can see why people might misread, but this is a serious
academic course,” Cannell told Philippine News. “We want to find out about the
Philippines and address some of the stereotypes and misconceptions and why
people tend to think of Filipinas as transnational migrants or as marrying
partners of distant foreigners.”
She said the course would introduce the
Philippines and examine the different aspects of its culture and history. She
added the course would also give students who don’t know anything about
Southeast Asia, generally, a chance to learn something about the region and
“probably to be surprised and challenge their preconceptions.”
The course
syllabus has a reading list of books, and a list of websites for Filipino mail
order marriages. Cannell, however, cautions prospective students not to submit
fake applications for pen pals and/or spouses and to view the information as
purely part of academic exercise.
The reading list of books and
ethnographic journals, authored by Filipino and foreign scholars, include the
following: “Tripartite desires; Filipina-Japanese marriages and fantasies of
transnational traversal” by Nobue Suzuki; Marriage Customs in Rural Cebu by
Lourdes Quisumbing; and “Power and intimacy in the Christian Philippines,” by
Cannell.
Cannell is a lecturer on Social Anthropology at the London
School of Economics and Political Science, and is on secondment to JHU. She
lived in the Philippines from 1988, and did extensive fieldwork in Bicol. She is
an author and reviewer attached to reputable academic publishing houses such as
Cambridge, Temple, Routledge, and Ateneo.
“I hope the course will be
interesting to anyone who has a meaningful connection with the Philippines, and
to swap insights and ideas,” she said.
Cannell said she offered a similar
course last year at the London School of Economics and the reception from the
Filipino community was one of wholehearted support. The Filipino community at
LSE used it as an occasion to host a Philippine Culture Day graced by no less
than Philippine Ambassador to the Britain Edgardo B. Espiritu.
New
York-based novelist and activist Ninotchka Rosca said the mail-order bride
phenomenon is complex, and that some academics see only half the picture.
“There are two narratives in the mail-order bride phenomenon: thefirst
comes from the Philippine context and the second, from the U.S. (or receiving
country’s) context. By and large, academics see only the first and ignore the
second, and thereby miss the point that the mail-order bride business is a
demand driven, rather than a supply driven, business.
Rosca, spokeswoman
for the Gabriela Network’s Purple Rose campaign against sex trafficking, also
pointed out how the mail-order bride “is only a sliver of the overall phenomenon
of labor export from the Philippines.”
“I worry that they see only the
women’s function in the business and not the men’s – an indication of both
sexism and racism,” she said.
Cannell said a question – What makes so
many Filipinas join on line and catalog agencies which promise to supply them
with Western (or Japanese) husbands, and how are we to understand the men and
women involved in these relationships? – is just one that the course hopes to
analyze and seek answers to.
The mail-order bride as a component of
immigration has prompted studies by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
In 1999, the INS issued a report about more than 200 international matchmaking
organizations in the U.S. that bring together 4,000 to 6,000 couples for
marriage. Most of the petitioned women come from the Philippines and the newly
independent states of the former Soviet Union.
“This volume represents
between 3 and 4 percent of the direct immigration of female spouses to this
country,” the report said.
The INS report puts in context the 1995 murder
of a pregnant Filipino woman who was shot outside a Seattle courtroom. The
gunman was the husband. He was seeking an annulment of the marriage after only
10 days of living together, and the $10,000 he said he spent in bringing his
wife to the
U.S
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