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Surrogate Dating and the Translation of Gendered Meanings across Borders: The Case of China’s E-mail-Order Brides

The spread of the Internet is altering courtship practices and remaking marriage markets worldwide. Today, international cyberdating agencies that facilitate e-mail exchanges, romance tours, and marriages between women from developing countries and men from economically advanced countries constitute a $2 billion dollar industry equal in size to the entire online-dating industry in the United States. My study examines China-based matchmaking agencies that provide Chinese women with access to nearly 1 million Western men online. The women in my study do not speak English and rely on their matchmaking agencies to translate their e-mail exchanges. I examine the process through which the translators use their knowledge of Chinese youth culture and Western popular culture to create hyperfeminized images of their clients that reinforce existing stereotypes of Asian women in the Western media as erotic, exotic, and submissive. This article analyzes the process through which global capitalism and technological development empower and constrain migrant women. I suggest that, on the one hand, they enable middle-aged, divorced women who have been marginalized in their local marriage markets to compete on the global dating market as active consumers. Yet on the other hand, this is achieved at the cost of compromising the women’s authenticity, perpetuating global racial and gender stereotypes, and hypercommoditizing intimacy, sex, and marriage.