Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic
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.

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Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic
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.

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Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic

Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic

Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic

Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9798887194646
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Publication date: 02/06/2024
Series: Contemporary Western Rusistika
Pages: 370
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)
Language: Russian

About the Author

Alexia Bloch is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Red Ties and Residential Schools and The Museum at the End of the World.

Table of Contents

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

What People are Saying About This

Douglas W. Blum

This book is an absolute pleasure to read. Alexia Bloch offers a terrific ethnographic treatment of the interrelated aspects of mobility, intimacy, gender, and capitalism—all of which are central to globalization and identity change.

Jennifer Suchland

Sex, Love, and Migration is accessible yet provides depth and a complex picture of the economic, symbolic, social and moral shifts that accompany transnational migration.

Bruce Grant

Sex, Love, and Migration offers essential insight on a widely observed but rarely studied form of mass migrant labor between Turkey and the densely populated Russian Federation. Gender and affect are at the foundation of this finely tuned analysis, and the ethnographic voice is eminently human.

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