Global householding and the negotiation of intimate labour in commercially-matched international marriages between Vietnamese women and Singaporean men

In their work defining the concept of “intimate labor”, Boris and Parrenas (2010, p. 8) cautioned against moral panics about the “commodification of intimacy” in the current era of capitalist globalisation and instead argued that relations of intimacy “already involve the exchange of money”. Drawing on the perspectives of Vietnamese migrant wives and their Singaporean “host country” husbands involved in commercially-arranged marriages, we examine the way they understand and articulate expectations of “love” and the intimate labour that go into constructing marital relationships within homespace. In subjecting this emerging form of “global householding” to scrutiny, we examine consonance and dissonance in expectations and practices of intimate labour between wives and husbands, giving special attention to the role (both practical and symbolic) of money in these relationships. We also note that the practices of intimate labour within homespace not only reflect but also reinforce larger structural inequalities of gender, race, culture and citizenship in both national and transnational contexts.