Video essay paper by Xinyi Zheng and Navie Nguyen
The mainstream media often misrepresents and underplays the agency of female marriage migrants. However, thanks to social media, these women are now able to reclaim their agency and assert their true identities. Our video aims to explore the misrepresentation of Asian marriage migrants in mainstream media and highlight the efforts made by these women to share their stories and challenge the narrow, stereotypical view of them as solely seeking to marry a foreign man in a new country.
Agency is the capacity of individuals to determine and control their reflective and creative actions, but when scrolling through media and academic findings, we have been witnessing a troubling Asian women's agency in marriage migration. Among international female migration, a recurring phenomenon is observed, and that is cross-border marriage migration between women from the Global South and men from more affluent countries. Such phenomena of Asian women moving abroad due to marriage were often documented from a single point of view.
Hypergamy and marrying up are terms associated with framing their motives to resettle to other countries. And it was commonly used to describe a woman presumed to marry a man who is wealthy and has higher social status, mainly for an abundant life in a more developed country. In the early decades, the 'mail-order bride' phenomenon of subjecting women to commodities, led to the construction of a negative portrayal of female migrants, especially women from developing countries. At the same time, the western media has a deep-rooted manner of depicting Asian women as subservient and submissive in popular culture. While what was on the media was not about them, the hidden effect that comes from a misrepresentation of their motives for being with whites as such is there.
Asian women who move abroad will have to carry such representations, like submissive, exotic, and sexual objects, and eventually can lead them in real life to become inferior to their foreign partners. For example, one study of Thai marriage migrants in the UK revealed that Thai women and their families faced "mail-order bride" discrimination, which is riddled with racial stereotypes. On the other hand, when sensationalist media decide to pay attention to them, they only focus on vulnerable victims, the Asian brides who have been sold as the object of forced and sexual labor with a risk of being abused.
It is factual that women's incentive to migrate from the global south to the global north is often linked to the wish to improve their and their family's social and economic well-being. Nevertheless, it sheds light only on economically disadvantaged and low-education female migrants. Even when it does focus on them, there is little effort made to capture the scale and depth of the personal life transformations of these migrants. In such ways, it eventually put migrants in the role of stereotypes and victims and prevent them from developing into a place of empowerment.
Self-representation and active agency on social media
Now, we will examine how this marginalized group gains back agency and control their self-representation by creating narratives on social media. Self-representation is when individuals present a desired image to their interpersonal network. Social media affordances, with the multimedia format and network effect, allow marginalized groups to create their own narratives, giving them a significant degree of agency in controlling how they are perceived by others.
Among various social media platforms, in this video, we will focus on YouTube and vlogs. Youtube's user-friendly interface and large audience make it an ideal place for individuals to share their stories without distortion from mainstream media. Vlogging, as a creative form of expression and communication, allows individuals to document their lives in an audiovisual format. After analyzing vlogs produced by Asian migrants, four main narratives have been identified and will be explored further.
First, these vlogs are easily discoverable due to the clear naming and labeling of the videos, such as "international marriage life," "German-Filipina couple," and "Canadian husband and Vietnamese wife." Taking advantage of the symbolic resources from Youtube, they increase the visibility of their group. The most common content on their channels is their sharing of their love stories, including how they met their partner and the journey that led to their marriage and migration. This narrative emphasizes the idea of pure love from both sides, and by sometimes allowing their husband to tell the story, it refutes the presumption that the wife got married just for money or social status.
Another narrative is the tips and advice for other Asian women or people thinking about marrying and migrating. By sharing this, they build a community and create a platform for members to support each other. Additionally, it can be a powerful tool for amplifying the voices and concerns of marginalized groups, allowing them to be heard by a wider audience. The last one is the challenges they face when migrating to a new country, such as language barriers and cultural differences. Compared to victimized narratives in the media, these sharings show a more humanizing portrayal. It highlights that these women are not just victims, but also individuals actively working to overcome the difficulties they face.
Conclusion
All in all, the mainstream media has repeatedly portrayed Asian women who migrate for marriage as subservient and motivated by hypergamy, leading to negative stereotypes and discrimination. However, with social media, these individuals have been able to take control of their own representation and use platforms like YouTube to present a more nuanced and accurate portrayal of their experiences and motivations. It is important that society needs to understand that these women are not just one-dimensional stereotypes, but complex individuals with diverse motivations and experiences. Each voice should be recognized, instead of unifying into one single voice to create bias.
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