Theorizing the Intimacies of Migration: Commentary on The Emotional Formations of Transnational Worlds Lieba Faier* In the course of my fieldwork in rural Nagano, Japan, nearly all the Filipina women I met who were married to Japanese men in this region described dreams of what they called ‘‘a better life’’ for themselves and their families in the Philippines when explaining why they had initially come to Japan as migrant laborers to work in hostess bars. These jobs proved to be doubled- edged swords for the women. On the one hand, they provided a possible route out of the ‘‘squatter areas’’ in the Philippines where many of these women had lived, and they offered prospects of finding a glamorous, exciting, and, as some women characterized it, ‘‘modern’’ life abroad. On the other hand, although bar hostesses in Japan are not necessarily expected to have sexual relations with cus- tomers (Allison, 1994; Faier, 2007, 2009; Parren˜as, 2006), this work involves forms of labour that sometimes place these women in physically and sexually vulnerable situations and that stigmatize them as prostitutes in both Japan and the Philippines. Despite the difficulties of working in hostess bars, many Filipina women I met in rural Nagano also told me that while doing so they had fallen in love with their husbands, who had been their customers (see also Faier, 2007, 2009). They described romantic courtships and, in some cases, deep apprecia- tion for their husbands’ support of their desires to help their families in the Philippines. Yet they also described frustrations with aspects of their married lives in Japan, such as the expectation that they conform to ‘‘Japanese’’ ways of doing things and perform as ‘‘ideal, traditional brides’’. Through my conver- sations with these women, I came to see that I could not understand their transnational lives without considering their emotional worlds and the cultural discourses of gender and affect that shaped them. The aspirations, dreams, commitments, hopes, fears, and shame they shared with me were part of what * Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles. Ó 2011 The Author Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., International Migration Ó 2011 IOM 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, International Migration Vol. 49 (6) 2011 and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. ISSN 0020-7985 doi:10.1111/j.1468-2435.2011.00708.x MIGRATION Edited by Elzbieta Gozdziak, Georgetown University