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