CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Fedyuk, Olena |
|---|---|
| Title | BEYOND MOTHERHOOD: UKRAINIAN FEMALE LABOR MIGRATION TO ITALY |
| Summary | Conceptualizing contemporary labor migration from Ukraine as a form of transnational, cross-generational familial project, this dissertation looks into the shifting practices of Ukrainian women’s migration to Italy and asks what kinds of ruptures, coping mechanisms and continuities were triggered and emerged in response to this transnational, feminized migration. Drawing on the fieldwork conducted among Ukrainian care- and domestic workers in Bologna and Naples, my research has indicated the centrality of motherhood in such familial migration projects led by women. To bring out dynamic role of motherhood in imagining, strategizing and carrying migration I introduce an analytical distinction between motherhood as a trope and motherhood as a situational practice. Such distinction between the two allows me to address the very mechanism of justifying, making sense of and dealing with the unequally distributed responsibilities within migrants transnational social fields, and to capture the emotion work and negotiations that shape these fields and the power struggles within them. Though motherhood has been addressed extensively in transnational literature dealing with migration of women from the global South to the global North, neither the studies which analyze Ukrainian migration to Italy under motherhood as trope nor those which analyze through the lens of motherhood as experience are able to capture the multifaceted dynamics of shifting of meanings and practices that allow women to deal with prolonged absences and resist blaming discourses of both Italian and Ukrainian states that often surround female mobility. Shifting within their positions in transnational social fields between the modes of motherhood at home and in migration, women learn to engage in a variety of economic social and intimate relationships and turn migration into a beneficial project worth undertaking. Seeing how motherhood as an idealized trope is translated into the situational practices not only at the intersection of migration and family, but also at the the site where migration brings rupture into women’s professional and personal lives this dissertation explores how women daily shift between various regimes of performativity and identification, which enables them to maximize earnings, maintain personal integrity, keep ties within the transnational families, feel strong about themselves, protect themselves from the pressure of the pubic opinion and various forms of exploitations. |
| Supervisor | Caglar, Ayse; Rajaram Kumar, Prem |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/fedyuk_olena.pdf |
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