Filipina migrants in rural Japan and their professions of love

During fieldwork in rural Nagano, I regularly heard Filipina migrants assert that they loved their Japanese husbands. Most of these men had been customers the women met while working as “entertainers” at local Filipina hostess bars. Here I explore how, why, and to what ends these women emphasized their love for their husbands as they crafted lives and selves in both Japan and the Philippines. Taking a transnational perspective to feminist work on emotion, I explore how love is made meaningful through global processes and the roles it plays in migrants' efforts to craft new gendered and sexualized subjectivities.