Premarital intimacy in transnational marriage: Chinese women finding the right South Korean husband

Abstract

This is a paper on the negotiation of premarital intimacy in transnational marriage between Chinese bride and South Korean groom. Theoretically, this paper demonstrates de Certeau’s concept of strategies and tactics, showing the complexities of individuals’ making-do ability in everyday life and their dispersed, tactical and makeshift creativity despite of being caught in the nets of discipline. Despite a recent construction, the ideal of love as natural and essential in marriage has increasingly become an ideology that regulates premarital intimacy. Commercial matchmaking, by which Chinese women find their Korean husband, generates a relationship quickly and efficiently, but conflicting with the requirement of love ideology. This conflict shapes Chinese women’s perception of the newly formed relationship as unusually fragile, which deeply affects their attitude towards marriage, the way that sexual and emotional intimacy are negotiated. For example, Chinese women develop a makeshift attitude towards their marriage in that from the very beginning they are very suspicious of the relationship and prepare for its possible dissolution. But, on the side of man, love ideology provides them a tool to appeal for premarital sex, which, however, generates a dilemma for women not only because the love ideology defuses woman’s resistance but also because in a relationship lacking emotional basis, accepting it is perceived as representing women’s lack of discipline and restraint in the matter of sex. Apart from this, despite lacking an affectionate basis, love ideology still frames their interaction, reflected in the exchange of sweet words in their transnational phone call communication. However, their practice becomes unofficial and tactical in the sense that they perform it in an inventive way and attach more practical meanings to it. All these demonstrate the regulating force of love ideology as well as the creative way individuals using it.