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Cross-Border Intimacies: Affect and Emotions in Marriage Migration Between China and Taiwan
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the new books network.
- [00:07]
B
This is the nordic asia podcast.
- [00:14]
A
Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. I'm your host, Ariona Spiritkanen, a doctoral researcher at the center for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku in Finland. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Lara Momesto, who has recently published a fascinating new book titled Cross Border Affect and Emotions in Marriage Migration between China and Taiwan. The book builds on Dr. Momesso's interdisciplinary background in fields such as gender studies, political science, international relations, and anthropology to examine how families are formed across the complicated political boundary in the Taiwan Strait. Dr. Momesso is an honorary Research fellow at the University of Lancashire and is also affiliated with the European Research center of Contemporary Taiwan and the center of Taiwan Studies at soas. She's also an editor in chief of the Asia Pacific Viewpoint and a host of the podcast called Taiwan on Air, which can also be found here at New Books Network. Dr. Mamesso, welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast.
- [01:17]
B
Hello to everyone and thank you so much for having me here with you.
- [01:21]
A
Thank you. Okay, just to start things off, before we get into the main topic of this episode, which is obviously this interesting new book that you've recently published, could you just talk a bit about your research interests in general? As I mentioned in the introduction, you have a sort of interdisciplinary background dealing with the way marginalized groups navigate various institutional settings in East Asia. So what sort of things have you focused on within this theme in your research?
- [01:53]
B
Yeah, so I'm particularly interested in migrants, ethnic minorities, women as well as older people, but also young people in various settings. Indeed, in East Asia in particular, I look at Taiwan, China, but even the uk when we think about ethnic minorities, these are groups whose social positions are often shaped by overlapping forms of inequality due, for example, example, to their gender, age, ethnic group, nationality. So conceptually, I approach marginalization as something that is actively enacted and reproduced through everyday practices and institutional arrangements that tend to privilege dominant groups. Who wants to preserve these existing hierarchies? In this sense, marginalization is not accidental. It is sustained by either political or cultural or economic interests that benefit those who are in power. However, empirically examine a range of institutional settings. It could be the state, civil and political organization. It could be workplace, but also intimate institutions such as family and marriage. And this is what I talk about in the book we will be talking about. These institutions are key sites where marginalization is reproduced, for example, through policy design, organizational norms, or gendered and generational expectations. The Important point is that I look at these sites as spaces in which marginalized individuals also exercise agency. Therefore, my research is also about the everyday strategies, the negotiation, forms of resistance through which people, marginalized people respond to constraints, make claims, and also sometimes subtly reshape institutional practices. The book I've just published is about a marginalized group in Taiwan. These are migrants from the People's Republic of China who are married to Taiwanese citizens. And this group has historically faced, and continue to face various forms of discrimination and disqualifications of their rights and their status in Taiwan due to their gender, their nationality, and in some cases also their age. So rather than viewing these groups solely as passive recipients of oppression, my work highlights how they engage with institutions in complex and ambivalent ways.
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A
Okay, that sounds like a really interesting combination of different fields in this focus on marginalized groups. And a really important focus also when you focus specifically on the agency of these groups despite their marginalization. Sounds really interesting. But if we then move on to this new book that you've published. The book is titled Cross Border Intimacies, Affect and Emotions in Marriage Migration between China and Taiwan. And as you explain at the beginning of the book, it's sort of a culmination of 15 years of research that you've done on this topic. So first of all, what is the main argument that you make in this book based on this rather extensive period of research?
- [05:12]
B
Yeah, so in this book I develop three main arguments. First of all, that cross strait marriage migration can be fully understood if we take intimacy, affect and above all, long term relational dynamics seriously. Rather than treating these as marriages, these marriages primarily as economic or strategic arrangements. Indeed, the literature look at economic motivations and norms, traditional norms, such as a hypergamy, as the major driver of this form of migration. Marriage migration. And this has been very well documented within the literature. Specific literature of cross strait marriage migration, but also more broader literature on marriage migration. Less attention has been paid to how emotions and affect shape the way migrants establish long term relationships within the family, the broader society and the national community. So this monograph highlights how these relationships evolve. I look at marriage migration in terms of relationship rather than just movements across borders. And I look at how meanings of belonging, inclusion and participation and integration are constantly negotiated. The phenomenon of cross strait marriage migration initially involved a relatively specific social configuration. It started in the late 80s and we have marriages between retired Nationalist soldiers who are in Taiwan, but they come from China and they have the chance to go back to China, particularly in rural areas. And here we have several women from economically disadvantaged Statuses that see in marriage with a Taiwanese retired soldier an opportunity to cross the border and go to Taiwan. Over time, however, this cross straight marriage migration has diversified significantly to encompass a wide range of social backgrounds, identities, motivations and family trajectories on both sides of the strait. So, and here comes the last main argument of the book. The book wants to demonstrate that both migrants and non migrants are mutually involved in producing and transforming social meanings. So cross strait marriages are not simply private arrangements that involve migrants, the decisions of migrants and maybe their spouses. But these are social processes that unfold over years and decades, revealing how intimacy eventually also intersect with the sphere of the political. And here we are talking about migration regimes, nationalism and shifting cross strait relations.
- [08:00]
A
Okay, that sounds really interesting. And I can really tell that the general point of emphasizing the agency of this group or these individuals themselves comes across in this project as well. But as the title of the book implies, and as you mentioned there already, your theoretical approach in the book is grounded in the concepts of affect and emotions. So could you just describe these concepts a bit further, how you define them and how do they relate to each other in the context of this project?
- [08:33]
B
Yes, sure. So traditionally, scholars have treated emotion and affect as two separate things. We have one branch of the literature within anthropology. We have anthropologists like for example, Lila Abu Lugod and Catherine Lutz. They see emotions as socially and culturally shaped. They are tied to language, meaning and power. These are something we are conscious about. They're part of the cognitive part of our feelings. So from this view, emotions become also political and they represent how people negotiate relationships, inequality and moral responsibility. Then there is another branch of the literature that looks at affect. Affect theorists focus on what happens before we put things into word. It's all about bodily sensations, moods, atmospheres that move between people. Without that consciousness, the conscious thought behind. Because affect works beneath awareness, it therefore can be easily shaped by things like media policy or nationalist narratives. So affect becomes very much part of literature on that looks at how politics eventually developed. So more recently I look at these two distinctions and I look at how effect and emotions are the difference between affect and emotions. However, there is also a branch of the literature that quite recently started to question this split. Can we really treat emotions in a factors to separate categories and talk about each without considering the other? And in my book, the answer is no. So rather than focusing on that opposite mind versus body, this literature argued that affect and emotion, they actually constantly feed into each other. So they might be something different, they might reflect some different categories. But they also affect indeed each other. So in this way, sensations can become actually named emotions and emotions, once repeated over and over, they can create new bodily feelings.
- [10:55]
A
Okay, how did you then carry out this research for this book in practice? For example, what methods did you use and were there any special challenges that you had to consider in planning this research?
- [11:08]
B
As we have mentioned at the beginning, this book is actually a long term ethnographic research. It's a collection of many fieldworks. It's the outcome of a collection of many fieldworks developed over many years. I started the first time in 2008 and the book has been just published. And I've been doing constant follow up research until very recently. So this involves my master, PhD and also the postdoctoral projects. I used immersion in depth and life story interviews, participant observation to understand not just what people do, but how marriage migration is also felt and lived. So it's mainly ethnographic methods. What I have applied for this work all over these years, I interviewed about 150 people. These include marriage migrants from China, their Taiwanese spouses and children, but also officials, NGO workers, volunteers, also activists. And through this range of people, I have a multi perspective approach that helped me to see how marriage migration is shaped across families, communities, institutions, and also even across the Taiwan Strait. Because I interviewed people, majority of people in Taiwan, but also I did some field work in China. An important feature of this project is that I collaborated with three organizations, A couple from grassroots groups and one close more affiliated to the government. So in addition to this ethnographic part, I also analyzed policy documents, material provided by these three organizations and also other organizations later on. These are the three main groups I worked with, but I also visited many other organizations and I also analyzed political discourse through government and political parties websites. And this is both in China and Taiwan. And this allowed me to connect those personal stories coming from the ethnographic work to broader structures of power and narratives in the public domain. So as I started to explain at the beginning what is the element that distinguishes this book is the longitudinal dimension. Precisely because it covers a long span of years. I followed peoples and organizations over time, which allowed me to trace changes in migrants lives. Also importantly, especially because this is about family relationship, I saw for some respondents how the life changed, the perspective changed throughout different life stages or relationship stages. I looked at intergenerational dynamics because I was in contact with individuals, but also their children, their spouses. I looked obviously at the shift in political contexts because cross strait relations is constantly going up and down. And also in terms of civic Organizations. I saw that fluctuation between stages in which there is more activism and stages in which organizations work. Under the surface.
- [14:35]
A
You mentioned that you mostly did this research in Taiwan, but you also did some of the field research in the Chinese mainland side. And obviously the complicated political boundary between the two sides is one of the major themes in this book. But what about in terms of your personal research experience? Were there some major differences between carrying out the research on the Chinese side as opposed to the Taiwanese side?
- [15:00]
B
Yeah, definitely. The contrast between doing fieldwork in Taiwan and in China actually was striking. And I also lived in China before, but for other reasons. I was working, I was studying. So doing research, continuing doing what I was doing in Taiwan revealed quite challenges, challenging, but it became eventually part of the analysis itself. Taiwan is a relatively open, accessible place for ethnographic research. Civil society organizations working with marriage migrants are active, visible public debate is easy to follow. It's much easier to build networks. So it was actually despite the challenges, it was a quite smooth process. And then I did fieldwork in China. In China it was very different. I did fieldwork mainly in Fujian and Guangdong provinces. Here informants were more dispersed. Here is a practical reason is because marriage migrants tend to live in Taiwan and in Taiwan they have a need once they are in China, they don't really have the same need because they are Chinese, but still they are present and many also move back and forth and some decide to leave Taiwan. So there were marriage or ex marriage migrants. There are also civil society organizations that have been established by local and central governments. Chinese local and central governments. However, access to these organizations was limited and also access to information was constrained. One reason is because demographically cross straight marriage migration is a minor issue in China, compared for example to massive internal migration. And then anyway is a migration to Taiwan. So it's not really a matter of China. However, the real reason is that it is politically sensitive and here not necessarily in a bad way. Actually, especially after 2012, Cross Strait families have been integrated into official narratives about national unification. So they become a symbol of a harmonic one China or cross strait family. However, this sensitivity shaped what people were willing or able to say, especially at the official level. So during my field work I was interested in understanding whether and how cross strait families were incorporated into a broader nation building narrative that one of one China. However, the sensitivity of this group made it difficult to gather data, particularly at the level of civil society which is closely linked to the government in China. So the officials tended to repeat official lines. Many people framed marriages as purely Private, they have nothing to do with politics. So it was hard for me to match the changes that Beijing was doing that the, sorry, central and local governments were doing with regard to of a change of approach towards marriage migrants. And the answer to my questions that were not these marriages are not important for the political debate. So this contrasting fieldwork experiences highlighted how the political boundary across the strait does not simply regulate mobility, but also shapes what can be said, how we do research, how we talk about cross border, cross strait intimacies and families. And in this sense, the differences that I faced between China and Taiwan, therefore, were not just logistical or methodological, but because they are deeply political, they really informed the analytical framework of the book itself.
- [19:08]
A
Okay, well, it really sounds like this complicated political reality between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait really, really impacts the process of research. But, you know, building up on that theme a little bit more, marriage migration between China and Taiwan, it's obviously, it's a specific case of this more general phenomenon of transnational marriage migration, which has been a growing phenomenon in the region in general. But obviously there is this special dimension between Taiwan and China, this complicated political relationship between them. So it's really different from your standard transnational situation. So were there some special characteristics of this phenomenon between this case in particular, due to this complicated reality in the Taiwan Strait?
- [19:58]
B
Yes, you got really the point this complicated geopolitical reality makes, reflects, shapes the complexity of this phenomenon in a way that in other contexts, whenever we study transnational marriage migration is hard to find. So what are the main distinctive features then? First of all, we have marriages and also movements that involves people who are assumed to be the same. So they often share language, ethnicity, and especially if you are the migrant who move from China to Taiwan, you also expect to be within the same country. Okay. And then you arrive in Taiwan and you see Taiwanese people or the public debate saying that Taiwan is not China, then we have different degrees of this in which this statement is provided. The debate is around that. So that assumed sameness can be misleading, especially for marriage migrants. So there are differences in history, political values, everyday language, also in Taiwan that is not necessarily the same as the migrant language. So they create unexpected forms of distance. And marriage migrants, mainland spouses often find there is very little space to openly negotiate those differences, particularly when these differences are related to the different political upbringing. And here we need to think that most of these mainland spouses grew up in the People's Republic of China, and they learn about Taiwan in a specific way, that is a province of China. They get to know a lot about the tourist spot in Taiwan. There's not much debate about the political discourse in Taiwan, which is so important once you are in Taiwan. So that sameness that is expected at departure time is completely challenged in that performed difference in Taiwan that eventually is also a real difference, but is overperformed, Especially when very often Taiwanese are in contact or have exchanges with Chinese people because of the whole cross strait debate. So what is the other problem? That this phenomenon is intensely politicized. Very often migration is politicized. In many contexts, marriage migration is politicized. But here we are really, these marriages sit right at the heart of contested ideas about sovereignty, national identity, the one China question, but also Taiwan's sovereignty. And as a result, marriage migrants often become symbolic figures in much larger political struggles. And this also shows up very clearly in the law. Chinese spouses in Taiwan face special residency, surveillance and naturalization rules that do not apply to other marriage migrants, for example, from Southeast Asia or other countries. So this is also. This different treatment is particularly unique of the cross strait context. And then. And this is the part about agency, because these marriages are so poly, these families are so politicized. Politics plays a much bigger role here than in many other migration contexts. So not only political parties in Taiwan take a very clear and very different position towards marriage. Marriage migrants from mainland China versus all the other marriage migrants. But what interests me is the response that marriage mainland spouses have developed in this context. So mainland spouses are politically active. They might support specific parties, usually the kmt, but not necessarily. They have built civic organizations. In some cases, they even formed their own parties or entered formal politics. So this level of political mobilization, informal but also formal and also visibility, is relatively rare in other contexts of marriage migration. So all of this shows that cross strait marriage migration isn't just a private or family matter, is deeply shaped by geopolitics, emotional national narratives. This idea of contested sovereignty, and this makes a distinct of this phenomenon a distinct and analytically rich case within the broader study of transnational marriage migration.
- [25:07]
A
Right. The political dimension is actually also one of the three key dimensions that you use to categorize the findings and results of your research. So you have this categorization into the political, the other and the self, and you use these to frame your results. So could you just introduce the main findings of your research in the context of these three different dimensions?
- [25:35]
B
Yeah. So the reason I bring these three perspectives is because I want to move from a purely subjective understanding of marriage migration to an intersubjective perspective. So in this book, migrants experiences are crucial. They are the starting point. But I argue that marriage migration is produced through ongoing interactions between migrants and non migrants. And these occur at different levels, indeed, as you said, political, the other and the self. So the political dimension highlights how the presence of marriage migrants from mainland China in Taiwan generate specific emotional and affective processes, narratives that intersect with Chinese and Taiwanese nationalism and also the question of Taiwan's sovereignty. So in China and Taiwan, political actors use emotional narratives to frame these marriages, to talk about these marriages. In China, as I said before, they are symbols of national unity. But in Taiwan they are a potential threat as individuals who come from the prc, from China. So these stories are meant to shape people's feelings and loyalties. And here I'm talking about the broader society, the way how especially Taiwanese people look at perceive the presence of marriage migrants. Again, migrants are not just passive in this picture. They respond, they organize collectively and they challenge these representations. So at the level of politics, there is this interaction between the broader national community and the migrant community. This is also represented at the level of other that examines how migrants, but also members of the host society, subjectively construct one another through long term intersubjective relationship within families, communities and the national collective. So it's not just about representation, it's about interaction and eventually integration. So everyday interactions in intimate and social settings reveal that migrants and non migrants mutually transform one another over time through a never ending process of knowing each other, interacting with each other and negotiating that difference in this context. In this exchange, the positionalities, especially of migrants, are constantly shifting rather than being fixed. So a migrant that no one in Taiwan at the beginning won't remain no one forever. If they interact with the society, with the family, with the community, eventually they become someone, they establish themselves. The final dimension is the self. A focus on how migrants themselves make sense of their lives emotionally and effectively. And this helps to explain the different ways people build families sense of belonging. And from this perspective, marriage migration isn't just about crossing border or getting married. This is a message I delivered at the beginning of our chat, but is also about this long term work of building relationships, relationships and finding one place, one's place in the society, in the family, in the community. So what the book ultimately show is that all these three dimensions, the political, the other and the self, are always intertwined. And they constantly reshape each other through emotional, affective and relational processes.
- [29:33]
A
Okay, just as a final question to sort of wrap up this episode, what is next in line for you? After completing this book, are you continuing with research on the same theme or will you move on to something completely different?
- [29:49]
B
So it's an interesting moment of transition right now. Definitely. I will continue working on this research agenda. You know that cross trade marriage migration has declined numerically. There are fewer new marriages. But this doesn't mean that the phenomenon is over and is precisely that long term approach that push me to reflect about what's next within the same phenomenon. So one major direction for my future research looks at the second generation, which is the last chapter of the book, but it could be the first chapter of a new research project. And actually I'm planning new ethnographic field work in Taiwan over the summer to explore political participation and civic engagement of second generation. These children grew up in a highly politicized environment and we are now seeing more political activism amongst them. So I'm interested to see how these young people interpret, negotiate or push back against also political parties mobilization towards new generations. At the same time, I want to extend that long term lens to the later lives of first generation marriage migrants. So here we are talking about the cohort I've already interviewed. Indeed, people age, become grandparents, face widowhood, for example, renegotiate family roles and new forms of vulnerability and agency emerge. So looking at these later life stages connects to my broader interest in aging, intergenerational relationships and the long term consequences of migration. I already talked a bit in the book about life stages, but I think that there is a substantial presence of aging migrants and it would be interesting to understand what are their choices and experiences. So while the empirical focus is shifting, the core themes of my work tend to remain the similar. We have marginalization and agency, affect and emotion, and the links between intimate life and political structures. So these remain very much at the center of what comes next.
- [32:14]
A
Okay, well, sounds really interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more about your research in the future. That's it for this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast. Thank you very much Dr. Momesso for taking the time to come to the podcast to talk about your new book.
- [32:29]
B
Look, thank you so much for giving me this chance.
- [32:33]
A
Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.
- [32:42]
B
You have been listening to the Nordic Asia Podcast. Sa.