Kinship and Crisis

Embedded Economic Pressures and Gender Ideals in Postsocialist International Matchmaking

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4205233
AutoresJ Patico (0000-0003-2932-8707, autor correspondente)
Ano2010
Volume69
Fascículo1
Páginas16-40
Data de publicação2010-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoSlavic Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0037-6779 • E-ISSN: 2325-7784
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0037677900016685
OpenAlexW2586692322
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas16
Referências citadas36

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