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354 Ingrid Piller

Summary: increased international cultural representations

Orientalist discourses that emerged with the colonial expansion of European
nations and, later the USA, continue to persist. However, while Said’s (1978)
original analysis focused on representations of “high culture” such as novels
and academic scholarship, they are now well and truly engrained and almost
universally disseminated through pop culture. The “Madame Butterfly” stereo-
type is a good example: while the Puccini opera (first performed in 1904) is a
typical product of high-culture with the limited distribution that entails, the
“Miss Saigon” musical ran for over 10 years each in both London and on Broad-
way and toured internationally, ensuring a much wider distribution. It has al-
ways been one feature of Orientalist discourse to represent the relationship be-
tween the colonizer and the colonized as a sexual one where the colonizer is
associated with masculinity and the colonized with femininity (Hyam 1990;
Spurr 1993). The expanded dissemination of Orientalist discourses has also led
to an expansion of sexual relationships between men from industrialized coun-
tries, and women from underdeveloped ones. In the era of globalization, a West-
ern man no longer has to be a colonialist to enjoy “exotic” romance.
While I have focused on the desires expressed by Western men, my discussion
would be incomplete without a short mention of the desires expressed by the
women, even if only to avoid the impression that the women are passive victims
of neo-colonial relations. They are not. Like the men they are part of a similar in-
ternational cultural realm, and many of the women actually mention movie stars
in describing some desired traits of their prospective partners. Many of the women
advertisers are college-educated and, technologically speaking, they have internet
access. It is apparent that it is precisely those Filipinas who have access to inter-
national cultural exchange who choose to seek a partner from elsewhere.

7. Conclusion

Intimate communication is often perceived as an immensely private space that is
not accessible to observation and research. Like others (e.g. Dryden 1999; Gu-
brium and Holstein 1987, 1990; McElhinny 1997), my analysis here, as well as
my previous work with cross-cultural couples (particularly Piller 2002, in press;
Piller and Takahashi 2006) demonstrates that the private–public distinction can-
not hold. The positioning of a cross-cultural intimate relationships occurs within
a societal space in which intermarriage is either seen as the norm, or – usually –
as an exception that needs to be justified and accounted for. Furthermore, large
societal-level processes such as globalization provide the structure within which
individuals can agentively develop and pursue cross-cultural desires. I have here
focused on the ways in which globalization as a macro-process is interlinked