A history of sex and the state in Southeast Asia: class, intimacy and invisibility

Abstract

This essay offers a history of international marriages that questions the definition of marriage and what it meant to belong, as a legal subject or citizen, to a colonial state in Southeast Asia. European imperial states deployed monogamous marriage alongside other weapons of empire as a justification for intervention into Southeast Asian societies. With monogamous marriage came also European notions of belonging that traced surnames and legal subject status (later citizenship) via husbands and fathers. The ramifications for individuals in international marriages between Asian women and European men are well known. However, the vast majority of 'international marriages' were not those between colonial Europeans and Southeast Asian women, but between Southeast Asian women and lower class Asian men from India and China. Colonial states ignored or failed to register these lower class intra-Asian intimacies because their unions did not threaten colonial rule so long as they ensured a continuous pool of labor and promoted the colonial economy. Unlike recent theories which argue for an omniscient state that penetrates into the personal lives of its populations, this essay maintains that states intensely regulated marriage and belonging for some subjects but not for others. This longstanding unevenness in the management of intimate unions provides a historical context for understanding shifts in the marital regimes of contemporary postcolonial states. Taking a long-term view, the essay asks if recent increases in international marriages might be better understood as spikes rather than as absolute increases resulting from 'globalization'. A historical framework ties the rise and fall of international marriage to early modern trade patterns, imperialism's labor requirements, war, and the recent demand for labor that has arisen from low birth rates and economic changes. Each of these 'events' entailed a large-scale movement of populations which resulted in the development of intimate unions.

Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction

“…16. Loos (2008) argues that there was considerable intermarriage between Asians in the colonial period.…”

Everyday Politics of (In)formal Marital Dissolution in Cambodia and Indonesia

“…Whilst colonial regimes in Southeast Asian societies were largely preoccupied with regulating marriage in respect to who was included and excluded from the ruling class (Locher-Scholten 2000;Stoler 2002;Loos 2008), interAsian and indigenous unions for the most part remained invisible to these regimes. Yet in post-colonial societies, many modern-nation states such as Indonesia 1 took it upon themselves to attempt to regulate marriage as a larger project of modernisation and development.…”

Asia-Europe intimate links: Family migrants, binational couples and mixed-parentage children

“…Since the colonial times, Asian-European intimate unions have been documented in European-colonized Asian societies 1 (e.g., Stoler, 2002) and Asian countries that were not subjected to European colonial rule 2 (e.g., Loos, 2008). In Europe, mixed unions between Europeans and Asians also took place during the colonial period but appear less in scale than that observed in European colonies in Asia.…”