Mail Order Brides/M.O.B.
AABNAB™ offers the services of three “Professional BridesMaids™ (PBMs™)” to fulfill all requisite support duties as highly photogenic Best Friends™, Background Models™ and/or Maidservants™ while remaining emotionally impartial in the actual matrimonial proceedings. No union too difficult: same-sex, INS ceremonies and dramatic re-enactments our specialty!
AABNAB™ is the foremost authority on peak performance in matrimonial strategies! Our WMDs™ exemplify romance and supportive spectacle at their best! Download a copy of our wonderful brochure right here! Contact us for a Free! Live! Wedding Consultation of your own, and never worry about your commitment issues again!
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Dear M.O.B,
I am really interested in how you are engaging with the stock character of the Asian/American woman as “bride”, not only the mail order bride that is so ubiquitous today but also the “war brides” of the 1940s.
Please tell us about your performance process. Do people respond to your advertisements?
Best,
Jillian
We’ve always thought of ourselves as performative, rather than as “true” performance. Similarly to several other artists here on Losing Yourself, we tend to perform for our videos and photos. While we most definitely staged public events as part of Always A Bridesmaid Never A Bride, we tended to work in concert with willing accomplices who are very enthusiastic about participating in our spectacles, “dramatic reenactments”, and infomercials.
Twelve years ago when started collaborating, “mail order bride” was still synonymous with the fetishization and commodification of asian women, particularly Filipinas,of course. (Much of this does have to do with post-WWII US military presence in the Pacific, yes, but is also of course the consequence of general economic desperation.) For us, it was always a way of playing with cliched notions about Filipinas in our own smart-aleck-y, acronym-happy way, hence our preference for being known as the MOB.
Interestingly, the ubiquity of the Filipina”mail order bride” image seems to have at last jumped the shark! Possibly due to the rise of other brides from Russia, Central America and Eastern Europe, but also due to the fact that no one technically “mails” anything anymore. I shared this work with some young undergrads recently, who had NO idea what a mail order bride was, of any nationality.