Gendered work and socialist pasts: memories and experiences of women repatriates in Germany

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine how migrant women make sense of their new positions in the labour market while drawing on and negotiating past meanings and experiences. I explore the individual biographies of legally privileged co-ethnic women repatriates from the former Soviet Union to Germany through a gendered perspective of work. These women found that the ethnic promise of being ‘real’ Germans given to them proved insufficient to access the labour market on equal terms, while their past Soviet socialisation led to struggles for recognition and marginalisation into low-status jobs. Although their labour-power is oftentimes devalorised, these women actively operationalise different memories of socialist work to reinvent themselves in a new context as worthy, resilient, and adaptable members of a capitalist society. Their stories of work reflect their present- and future-oriented life strategies and demonstrate how they relate different ideologies and systems of value, distant spaces and times in an attempt to challenge dominant discourses on human worth. By exploring individualised life strategies and gendered invocations of the past, this paper contributes to the discussion on post-socialist subjectivities, how they intersect with ambiguous socialist experiences and dilute the neoliberal project.

KEYWORDS:

• Work
• post-socialism
• gender
• repatriates
• Germany

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne, Ekaterina Pankova and Darja Klingenberg for their encouraging comments on my initial research ideas. I am also grateful to journal editors and two anonymous peer reviewers for their useful feedback that helped me develop this paper further. I am most independent to women repatriates who took interest in my project and shared their intimate stories with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Between the 1990s and 2019, over 3.5 million mostly Russian-speaking people from former Soviet Union countries came to Germany, including 2.6 million who arrived under the “(late) repatriate” label (Statistisches Bundesamt 2020). Today, post-Soviet migrants constitute the biggest immigrant group living in Germany.

2 All names of my interlocutors have been changed and their information anonymised in accordance with German Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG) as well as General Data Protection Regulation.

3 Although by focusing in this paper on women only, I am not suggesting that men migrant bodies have not experienced similar structural constraints in the German labour market. The article concentrates furthermore on cis gender women only. A thorough overview on how transgender bodies migrate, and what role the borders and politics play in this process can be found in the book edited by Trystan Cotten (2012).

4 Five life stories represent a longer relationship between the researcher and her interlocutors, spanning over time and through different encounters. For the sake of this article, however, I take a snapshot of our scattered informal conversations and biographical-narrative interviews that took place between April and November 2021 across different cities in Germany. All conversations took place in the Russian language, except for one with Nina.

5 With the introduction of the first Immigration and Integration Law in 2005, followed by subsequent national integration plans, there has been a significant discursive reframing beyond the binary representation of Germanness versus foreignness, creating more possibilities for people to become German (Folgeman 2020).

6 For more on history of Germans on the territory of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union see Krieger (2015) and Sanders (2016). In turn, Panagiotidis (2021), discusses complex socio-demographic profile of repatriates after migration, arguing that their lifeworlds are becoming increasingly differentiated along transnational links, generational lines, the lines of gender as well as interactions with other parts of German society.

7 In line with critical race scholarship, I understand racism as “the creation of hierarchies of worthiness attached to a group of people identified as different in terms of (attributed) racial, or cultural (ethnic) factors” (Essed 2020, 448). We thus speak about racialisation when different categories of belonging become essentialised as immutable and then used to hierarchically order some groups as superior while positioning others as inferior.

8 Although repatriates had the right to recognition of their degrees, about one third to half of all applications were rejected (Kogan 2012). Due to overly complicated recognition procedure, language barriers, hight costs, and the overall lack of transparency and assistance from the institutions, many repatriates have not even considered this process.

9 Importantly, well-educated repatriates who assumed higher work positions in the society prior to migration had more difficulties to establish themselves at the German labour market.

10 A mini-job in Germany is a marginal job for which people cannot earn more than €520 per month.

11 For more on domestic violence and male drinking problems in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia see, for example, Denisova (2010).

Additional information

Funding

This work was conductd within the research network ‘Ambivalences of the Soviet: Diaspora Nationalities between Collective Experiences of Discrimination and Individual Normalization, 1953–2023’ and supported by Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture (Nds. Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur): [Grant Number 4707033].