“A Home on the Island”: Interbody Performance as a Method to Move beyond Resentment

Introduction: “A Home on the Island,” Parts 1–2

Home is a condition of stasis emerging from the global circulation of bodies. Focusing on the inter-Asian context of East Asia and Southeast Asia, “A Home on the Island,” parts 1–2 is a multisite practice as research (PaR) project that examines the formation of home through commercialized transnational-marriage migration. Part 1, “A Home on the Island: Bodies, Objects, and Narratives,” was conducted on June 28, 2015 as a one-day applied-theatre workshop at National University of Singapore (NUS). Through Boal-inspired theatre games, exercises, image theatre, and scene improvisation, workshop participants explored the notion of home and its formation in relation to migration and globalization. Part 2, “A Home on the Island: The Seal Wife,” was a three-day applied-theatre workshop conducted in Taipei the following year, on October 20–22, 2016. Foregrounding the experience of commercialized transnational-marriage migration, the second workshop examined the structure and internal dynamics of homes created by such migration. During the first two days, this was implemented in the form of process drama through the narrative structure of the seal wife legend. On the third day, playback theatre was implemented to facilitate self-reflections on the workshop process.¹ In its totality, this project used performance to intervene in participants’ understandings of family, sociality, and economic exchange.²

This essay utilizes the PaR project to propose interbody performance, an affect-oriented and body-centered performative process, as a method of generating affective shifts that propel an intercultural relationship beyond resentment. “A Home on the Island” accomplishes this goal by engaging ASEAN marriage migrants with socioculturally privileged participants from Taiwan and Singapore in a workshop setting. Through performative collaborations, the participants compared and interwove diverse affects toward home and migration through disruption, disembodiment, dynamization, and distillation. These affects included perceptions, attitudes, feelings, and sentiments, which were qualitatively documented and measured through objects, maps, improvised scenes, workshop artifacts, audio-visual recordings, follow-up questions, and post-workshop written reflections. As an increasingly multifaceted and multisensorial knowledge about ASEAN marriage migrants emerged, the nonmigrant participants began to adopt affective shifts that question the necessity of resentment.

Commercialized Transnational Marriage as Migratory Routes

Since the 1980s, commercialized transnational-marriage migration numbers have soared. Many women from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), such as Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, have chosen marriage as a means of migrating to newly emergent Asian financial centers.³ Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore are among the popular destinations (Bélanger et al.; Burgess; Chuang et al.; Im et al.; H.-S. Kim; M. Kim; Shu et al.; Tang and Wang; Yeoh et al. 2013a, 2013b). The rise of such marriage migration in Taiwan correlates with the island’s increasing trade relations with ASEAN and its rising status as a financial sub-empire within the global capitalist economy. Currently, there are an estimated 400,000 marriage migrants in Taiwan, with 31.3 percent originating from ASEAN (Neizhengbu Tongjichu).

The directional flow of marriage migration reflects the uneven geopolitical and economic terrains of Asia, which, like other regions, has been reconfigured by the global capitalist economy into core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral states (Hsia 2004, 191). Within this context, commercialized transnational-marriage migration functions as a coping mechanism for the subaltern class; it allows blue-collar working males in core and semi-peripheral states to find wives and continue the family lineage. On the other hand, it provides women from semi-peripheral and peripheral states the prospect of upward social mobility and improved living conditions (Hsia 2000, 58–59; 2004, 199).

In a commercialized transnational marriage, the processes of marriage, migration, and motherhood are pragmatically compressed into an extremely short time span for economic reasons. Subsequently, such a union is often perceived and experienced as a transaction, leading to the commodification of marriage migrants’ bodies (Shu et al. 3). By the patriarchal values of both home and host countries, ASEAN marriage migrants are frequently regarded as servant–wife conglomerates, who are purchased/wedded to perform...