Kinship and Crisis

Embedded Economic Pressures and Gender Ideals in Postsocialist International Matchmaking

Bibliographic Data

ID4205233
AuthorsJ Patico (0000-0003-2932-8707, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume69
Issue1
Pages16-40
Publication date2010-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSlavic Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0037-6779 • E-ISSN: 2325-7784
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0037677900016685
OpenAlexW2586692322
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited36

The rise of the international matchmaking industry has been particularly rapid and noticeable in the former Soviet Union, where the end of the Cold War has intersected with daily socioeconomic pressures to make cross-cultural romance and marriage newly possible and newly desirable for some women of Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet states. Less acknowledged than the role of economics in women's decision making, however, is the fact that postsocialist financial strains are not experienced in social vacuums but are mediated by ideals of gender and marriage, such that the search for a foreign spouse is unlikely to be experienced as a simple desire for increased material comfort. Instead, discourses of gender "crisis" in the home country inform the desires for transnational kinship for both women from the former Soviet Union and men from the United States. When both women's and men's narratives of "crisis" (and how transnational marriage might alleviate it) are taken into account, they significantly complicate our understandings of east-west relations of "commodification" and power

Commodification · Economics · Economy · Kinship · Narrative · Political economy · Political science · Population · Power (physics · Romance · Socioeconomic status · Sociology · Spouse · Demography · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Psychology