Marriage migration, intimacy and genre in Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) and Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. (2019)

A significant strand of cultural and social studies research on late modernity has focused on intimacies; in particular, ‘mediated intimacies’ (Attwood et al., 2017; Barker et al., 2018; Gill, 2009), exploring how the media, in its various forms, represents and affects intimate relationships. Romance fiction, the most popular global genre, offers a key source text for exploring intimate and romantic relationships and they ways culturally and politically specific forms of intimacy are shared transnationally. Of particular interest is the increase in the twenty-first century of romantic stories that deal with the intersection of intimacy and migration.

This article brings together critical work on intimacy, scholarship on popular romance, and research on migration and transcultural exchange to explore how contemporary Anglophone popular romance fiction mediates intimate relationships in the context of migration. Focusing on two romance novels featuring South East Asian migration to the USA – Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. (2019) and Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) – I explore how these novels represent marriage migration. Both novels use the tropes of the romance novel – its structures and conventions – to uphold and challenge dominant discourses around marriage migration. These texts are concerned with the movement of people and cultures while themselves travelling across borders as products of a transnational, global publishing market. These fictions, then, showcase how romantic narratives are both invested in, as well as a product of transcultural movement.