Digital Masculinity and Transnational Desire: Rethinking Modernity through the Passport Bro Movement

Azura Haynes, UC Berkeley

This paper examines the emergence of the “passport bro” phenomenon as a contemporary site where competing forms of modernity are negotiated through transnational intimacy. The term “passport bro” refers to a growing online-identified group of predominantly Western men who travel to the Global South in search of romantic relationships, positioning these regions as alternatives to what they perceive as the failures of Western dating culture. Situating the movement within a longer historical trajectory, the paper traces how contemporary narratives of “traditional femininity” in Southeast Asia build on earlier formations shaped by U.S. military presence, tourism economies, and colonial imaginaries of gender and sexuality. Rather than treating these dynamics as a unidirectional export of Western ideology, the analysis highlights how local economic conditions, cultural performances of femininity, and global media infrastructures interact to produce new configurations of intimacy. In this sense, the passport bro phenomenon reflects not simply the persistence of Orientalist frameworks, but their adaptation within digitally mediated and economically asymmetrical contexts. The findings show that participants frame their mobility as a response to perceived disempowerment within Western modernity, particularly in relation to feminism and changing gender norms. At the same time, their discourse constructs non-Western spaces as sites where alternative gender orders remain intact, revealing an imagined geography of “multiple modernities” structured by desire, hierarchy, and mobility. By linking historical legacies of imperial power to contemporary digital practices, this paper argues that the passport bro movement represents a reconfiguration of global intimacy in which older colonial logics are rearticulated through new technological and cultural forms.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 142. Contested Intimacies: Gender, Knowledge, Desire, and the Making of Authority Across Modernities