Amid progressively restrictive state policies regulating women's mobility and marriage, editors Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot and Gwénola Ricordeau's International Marriages and Marital Citizenship: Southeast Asian Women on the Move is a compelling, multidisciplinary survey of the continuing increase in Southeast Asian women's intimate relationships with foreign men. Centered around citizenship, the volume adds to literature on the “familial, emotional, and social aspects of [international] marriage” (p. 8) and provides insight into issues raised by Mika Toyota's 2008 special issue of Citizenship Studies, which asks “how, in the case of foreign spouses, membership of a nation is determined legally, politically, culturally and socially.”Footnote ¹ Applying a Foucauldian approach through a transnational feminist lens, the contributors aptly demonstrate how the governmentality of states alters migrant women's intimate lives and agency in the redefining of conventional notions of gender roles, marriage, and the family, and the subsequent surveillance and disciplining of ways of belonging.

Organized into three parts, International Marriages and Marital Citizenship follows Southeast Asian women's marriage migration trajectories from the encounter of meeting and dating to the engagement with state policies and gender ideologies and through to the experience of settling in and gaining citizenship in their new countries. Despite an admittedly heavy emphasis on chapters exploring what Fresnoza-Flot and Ricordeau call the “hereafter of marriage migration” (p. 6), or women's experiences post-migration—like that of the “dual rites of passage” in becoming mothers and citizens in Isabelle Cheng's chapter (p. 158)—Julia Meszaros's study of “romance tours” offers a rare look into the inner workings of a US-based international matchmaking agency and women's and men's strategies in participating, getting engaged or marrying, and navigating the US migration system.

While many chapters lack as detailed a focus on both the sending and receiving countries’ socio-legal mechanisms around migration, other chapters meticulously examine cultural and moral ideals emanating from both the sending and the receiving countries that structure migrant women's fashioning of their self and identity as women, wives, mothers, and citizens. For example, Nobue Suzuki's description of so-called deviant Filipino “un-mothers” in Japan richly fills the gap among studies that fail to detail the underside of migrant desires for a modern American way of life.

While the volume explores Southeast Asian women's diverse mobilities that would undeniably attract scholars of Asia, migration studies, and women's studies, the majority of the chapters either solely focus on or include a comparative analysis with Filipino women, which is unsurprising given that marriage migration from the Philippines is considerable, even underestimated.Footnote ² Future work on understudied regions in Southeast Asia as well as the rising phenomenon of nontraditional relationships is thereby needed. This would be a move to study a greater range of intimacy and would allow for the inclusive research Fresnoza-Flot and Ricordeau recognized was needed.