M. Butterfly follow-up

[kate_nepveu]

As a follow-up to my International Blog Against Racism Week post on M. Butterfly (link to day view to preserve spoiler cut), an article from Harper's Magazine on a Ukrainian bride-hunting tour: "A Foreign Affair". As David Henry Hwang did in 1988, the article points out the intersection of racism and sexism in foreign "mail order bride" companies, and also explicitly demonstrates the role of class: "the more miserable the place, the more capital a visiting man will have to leverage against his prospective wives; that was why we had left the United States for Kiev, and why we had left Kiev for Vinnitsa."

Comments

[aor.livejournal.com]

Well, there was my daily dose of depressing reading.

[kate_nepveu]

You're welcome.

[mdevnich.livejournal.com]

Amanda at the blog Pandagon wrote a good post on this article a while back. I'll have to get to another computer to get the link, the site is blocked on this one.

[kate_nepveu]

http://pandagon.net/2006/07/15/parade-of-delusion-through-the-ukraine/

Yes, she's right the pattern of violence toward women was very obvious, and I should've mentioned it as, first, a difference from Hwang's Afterword, and second, the unfortunately logical end result of those attitudes.

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

Nor is this confined to the West. Exactly the same thing happens in Asia, between people from richer and poorer countries or from richer and poorer groups within the same country.

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

This leapt out at me rather. One wonders what the rest of the story was.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article1209788.ece

[kate_nepveu]

Yes, I do note that there are no quotes from those charged or the families of those charged.

With how the deceased's mother must feel at the moment, I don't like to read too much into her comments. All the same, I got a faint whiff of something unpleasant from her comments about the ex-wife, that "she appeared to fit in. . . . But I became aware their marriage was getting into difficulty due to Pannada living her own life." She is quoted as going to on say that "She was using money from the bar without his knowledge," which would seem to me to be not exactly the same thing as "living her own life."

But as I said, I'm probably overanalyzing.