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Sex, Love, and Migration
Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic
Alexia Bloch (Author)
9781501713156
Paperback / softback, published 15 December 2017
272 pages, 18 b&w halftones, 1 table, 2 maps - 1 Tables, unspecified - 18 Halftones, black and white - 2 Maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.454 kg
These estimable monographs on postsocialist space reflect upon the plight of families as they seek ethical and economic identities and develop care-giving practices and strategies in landscapes haunted by globalization. Sex, Love, and Migration makes a significant contribution to the anthropologies of postsocialism, migration, and gendered labor. Using the concepts of affect, emotional labor, and structures of feeling, Alexia Bloch skillfully and engagingly guides readers through many of the positionalities comprising multinational and multigenerational networks of migrant women and those they leave behind. Captivatingly written and rich with thick descriptions that virtually transport the reader to the featured locations and people, Sex, Love, and Migration makes an impressive contribution to the scholarship on gender and transnational migration in postsocialist societies.
Sex, Love, and Migration goes beyond a common narrative of women's exploitation as a feature of migration in the early twenty-first century, a story that features young women from poor countries who cross borders to work in low paid and often intimate labor. Alexia Bloch argues that the mobility of women is marked not only by risks but also by personal and social transformation as migration fundamentally reshapes women's emotional worlds and aspirations. Bloch documents how, as women have crossed borders between the former Soviet Union and Turkey since the early 1990s, they have forged new forms of intimacy in their households in Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, but also in Istanbul, where they often work for years on end. Sex, Love, and Migration takes as its subject the lives of post-Soviet migrant women employed in three distinct spheres—sex work, the garment trade, and domestic work. Bloch challenges us to decouple images of women on the move from simple assumptions about danger, victimization, and trafficking. She redirects our attention to the aspirations and lives of women who, despite myriad impediments, move between global capitalist centers and their home communities.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Translation
Part 1
Introduction
1. Magnificent Centuries and Economies of Desire
Part 2
2. Gender, Labor, and Emotion in a Global Economy
3. "We Are Like Slaves—Who Needs Capitalism?"
Part 3
4. Strategic Intimacy, "Real Love," and Marriage
5. Intimate Currencies
6. "Other Mothers," Grandmothers, and the State
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography