Western masculinities, foreign brides and romance: Representations of mail-order brides and international marriages in cinema

Mail-order bride is a recurring movie character and the plot of many movies is built up around an international matchmaking: Westward the Women (William Wellman, 1951), Once upon a time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968), The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) or Birthday girl (Jez Butterworth, 2001), to name a few.Our paper is based on an inventory of more than 40 full-length feature films that stage mail-order brides and international matchmaking and an analysis of the scenario and characters in an eight film corpus of post-1945 cinema.As a whole, these films tell how a problem (the lack of women faced by men) is solved in three various social and historic contexts (colonization, immigration and globalization of the marriage market). Despite the various historic eras and the diversity of the marriages staged in films, men and women are represented as opposed and complementary. It also suggests social fantasies about romantic love and norms about marriage in relation with money. Finally, women involved in theses marriages are essentialized (as mothers) or depicted as dangerous (prostitutes) or submissive (housewives). Therefore, these movies embody orientalist and/or sexist representations and reveal gender stereotypes as well as transnational gender issues.The film discourse interpretation is put in perspective with recent fieldwork research conducted among so-called “mail-order brides”, especially those of the two presenters in Russia and in the Philippines. These empirical results highlight how the “arrangement of the sexes” organized by marriage can also be subverted by women through international matchmaking and marriages.