Governing virtual bodies and intimacies : Cybermarriage industries between the United States and Latin America

Abstract

This article explores the ways the foreign emerges as a fantasy of mobility in the Cybermarriage Industry uniting Mexican and Colombian women with U.S. men. While some women use the marketing of their bodies as passionate and erotic to attract opportunities such as marriage with U.S. men, Internet scholars during the 1990s celebrated the Internet as a utopian space for enacting oneself outside the limitations of the physical body. These theories, I argue, lack an analysis of the state and the political economy in their post-body analysis of Internet exchanges.