> info at pulpculture.org wrote:
>
> >Can anyone tell me why there's a faction of feminists that utterly
> >hate Susie Bright?
> >
> >In reponse to something I wrote that was featured on a few feminist
> >blogs, there is this contingent of feminists who think she's the
> >evil incarnate.
> >
> >Others are outraged that she writes for Playboy -- or used to.
> >
> >Others seem to think it's odd that she has socialist roots. When I
> >read her now, it's really clear that her thinking is shaped by
> >socialist/marxist theories, though she's obviously not Yoshie in
> >terms of the breadth of her interets.
>
> It shows up all the time - she described JT Leroy as "lumpen" the
> other week. Who else would use a word like that?
For what it's worth, I love Susie Bright! Even the tragicomic JT Leroy affair shows only the excellence of her character -- the pride she took in queer community building: "There was a tremendous camaraderie and pride in JT’s success. If his story of the extreme dispossessed could make such a dent, it said something about all our efforts, about the lives we knew firsthand" (at <http:// susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2006/01/ my_name_is_susi.html>).
> info at pulpculture.org info at pulpculture.org
> Fri Jan 27 10:58:12 PST 2006
<snip>
> What's going on in the Korean countryside cannot be adequately
> analyzed from the perspective of radical cultural feminism alone.
>
> I'd appreciate Yoshie's and other feminists take on it, that's for
> sure.
Well, I have no special insight into the Korean farmers and women who marry them, but is the situation similar to Japanese farmers'?
Agriculture in Japan when I was growing up there was often referred to as "sanchan nogyo" -- "sanchan" being a reference to jichan (grandpa), bachan (grandma), and kachan (mom), a shorthand for the fact that farming alone was not enough for most farmers to make a living, so tochan (dad) went off to work (sometimes locally, sometimes to faraway cities, taking jobs in construction, factory work, office work, etc.), while kachan, jichan, and bachan worked on the farm. In such farming families that combined farm and non-farm incomes for survival (kengyo noka), the main income increasingly came from non-farm work. (By now, it may be "nichan nogyo," kept up only by jichan and bachan.)
Lack of profitability and family separation the life of kengyo noka imposed on many made agriculture unattractive in many young people's minds. Young people in Japan (like elsewhere) have left the countryside in droves -- to big cities where universities and jobs are. Some young men, especially firstborn sons, remained, however (parents look to firstborn sons for support in their old age in traditional families like farming families). Young men who decided to continue farming had a problem: few young women wanted to marry them (farming is not easy work, it's not very profitable, farming life keeps you at a distance from the pleasures of urban social and cultural life, and, worst of all, women who marry into farming families are often destined to live with their mother-in-law and father-in-law in the same house!). So wifeless men went abroad -- to China, Vietnam, the Philippines, etc. -- in search of wives to import.
I'd not say that such marriages never resulted in happiness for women and men involved, but they structurally put foreign-born brides at a disadvantage in their relation to their husbands, compounded by general discrimination against the foreign-born, which is stronger in conservative, rural areas than liberal, urban areas: e.g., "Four of the 10 arranged marriages in Okura [a small farming town in Yamagata Prefecture -- boy, that's inaka!] have ended in divorce due largely to personal and cultural differences" (Leotes Marie T. Lugo, "Filipinas at Home in Rural Japan," <http://www.asahi.com/english/ asianet/kisha/eng_kisha_008.html>).
Apparently, the same economic trend has led South Korean farmers to turn to foreign-born brides:
<blockquote>A rural province in South Korea plans to give financial aid to help lonely male farmers pay for mail-order brides from overseas. South Kyongsang province plans to start a trial program in which it will give 6 million won ($6,113) to male farmers who marry foreign women, an official said Tuesday.
South Korean farmers have been turning to brides from other parts of Asia in recent years after struggling to woo local women, who are often less than enthralled with the prospect of rural life.
"Young men in the countryside have a hard time finding brides and they started to look elsewhere," said Ryu Kum-ju, an agricultural policy official for the province, located in the southern part of the country.
"We decided to give financial support to those men for a trial period," Ryu said by telephone.
The province also plans to increase courses for foreign brides to help them adjust to life in South Korea.
The local government estimates it costs about 12 million won for a farmer to pay all the fees and travel required to find a bride overseas.
The number of South Korean men who have married foreign women has rocketed in recent years. It hit 25,594 in 2004, more than double the 11,017 in 2002, according to data from the Korea National Statistical Office.
China provides most of the brides, while Vietnam is second on the list.
("Government Support for Mail-order Brides," Reuters, <http:// news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060124/od_nm/korea_marriage_dc>)</blockquote>
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>