A reminder of today’s talk by Dr. Alexia Bloch, Department of Anthropology, UBC:
Post-Soviet Mistresses and the Turkish State:Negotiating Intimacy, Kinship, and Labor Migration in a Time of Transnationalism
Wednesday, Nov 14, 2007 at 12:00 noon
Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies
1896 East Mall (show me a map)
Abstract:
While historically the Soviet Union had elaborate trade, cultural, and political exchanges with nearby regions, from the 1930s to late 1980s these connections were extremely limited and average citizens were not permitted across the “closed” borders. With the breakdown of the Soviet Union, this radically changed and now more than 15 years later extensive labor migration out of the region both challenges border control efforts and creates new economic and socio-cultural configurations, including in regard to structures of kinship and intimacy. This paper, grounded in ethnographic research (2002-2007), examines how post-Soviet women employed as domestic workers and shop assistants in Istanbul are part of a growing post-Soviet population of undocumented workers who maintain ties to home– frequently in Moldova and Ukraine–but also build long-term strategic kinship relations as wives and mistresses of Turkish men. The paper argues how the strategic kinship and intimacy employed by women who have lived and worked in Istanbul for as long as a decade can be seen as facilitated by a Turkish state that provides laborers with few means of regularizing their status. Many levels of society, including the state, are complicit in maintaining a marginal status for post-Soviet labor migrant women, since their inexpensive labor is directly linked to the expansion of key economic sectors such tourism and textile manufacturing, and, through their domestic service, to the participation of middle-class Turkish women in the paid labor force. The strategic forms of intimacyas long-term mistressesthat are employed by Post-Soviet women demonstrate the ways in which “kinship” is, as Michael Herzfeld has recently written (2007), not a fixed system, but “. . . deeply embedded in the life cycle” (2007:320). In the case of post-Soviet women, labor migration has come to define a normative aspect of one stage in the life cycle, mid-life. Overall, this paper argues that post-Soviet migrants’ efforts to “make kinship” reflect a global pattern whereby transnational flows of women’s labor are contingent upon gender regimes in receiving countries, but are also part of a “global national hierarchy” which enables particular constellations of intimate relations.
Bio:
Alexia Bloch’s current research concerns emerging capitalism and the transformation of gender relations in regions of the former Soviet Union. In particular, over the past five years she has conducted ethnographic research on women labor migrants moving between areas of the former Soviet Union and centers of global capital such as Istanbul, Turkey. Her publications include articles in the journals Canadian Woman Studies and Cultural Anthropology, as well as book chapters in volumes focused on issues of trafficking and international migration. She is also the author of two monographs– Red Ties and Residential Schools: Indigenous Siberians in a Post-Soviet State (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); and The Museum at the End of the World: Encounters in the Russian Far East (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Alexia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology.