Dutch Women and Balinese Men: Intimacies, Popular Discourses and Citizenship Rights

Abstract

The present article looks how intimate liaisons between Dutch women and Balinese men are intertwined in complex and sometimes paradoxical ways in regard to class position, gender ideologies and immigration policy in the contemporary Netherlands. Central to this analysis is a dialogue between Dutch women, their Balinese partners and popular discourse about Dutch women who marry ‘the other men’. I examine how citizenship regulations that play a significant role in interfamilial relations of interdependency form complex gender dynamics, and how Dutch women's rhetoric about the emancipation of Dutch women and desire for a companionate marriage tend to collide with the practices of everyday life. I argue that gender ideologies in these cross-cultural liaisons are conceptualised and reconceptualised in relation to ‘gender imaginings’. I suggest that the ideals of companionate marriage, favoured by Dutch women, are linked directly to ideals of modernity and individualism, in which particular scripts of gender relations are used to differentiate progressive individuals from those who are not.

Keywords:

• Citizenship Rights
• Intimacies
• Gender Normalivities
• Compossionate Marriage

Notes

1. There is a vast literature on this subject. See, for example, Constable (2003). The main countries of origin for family reunification of foreigners are Turkey, Morocco and Suriname. The majority of women marrying Dutch men come from the former Soviet States, Poland, Thailand, The Philippines and Colombia (Gulièová-Grethe 2004).

2. However, this classification is crucially important because it is related directly to the question of self-identity: most Balinese generally regard themselves as such, rather than as Indonesians.

3. For Tsing, gender imaginings are ‘both ideas about gender and gender-differentiated deployments of the imagination’. Tsing further argues that these gender imaginings are as much local as they are global (Tsing 1996, p. 295).

4. For a detailed discussion on Occidentalism, see Carrier (1995).

5. ‘Cultural tourism’ was introduced in direct response to the 1970s Balinese government policy on ‘mass tourism’. The main aim of this tourist project was to protect Balinese society in two ways: first, it was to confine foreigners to tourist enclaves; and, second, it proposed ‘isolated movement’ involving the mass transport of tourists to sites of interest (McCarthy 1994).

6. From the 1990s, the Dutch state policy towards foreigners shifted from discourses of multiculturalism towards discourses of integration, which later resulted in new policies (Vermeulen & Rinus 2000, p. 21). From 1998 and implementation of the new policy on integration, the discourse of Dutch ‘common norms and values’ as a measure towards which the ethnic minorities should progress entered the sphere of everyday life (Dragojlovic 2008).