For Love, Money, or Normalcy: Meanings of Strategy and Sentiment in the Russian-American Matchmaking Industry

Abstract

Public debates about international matchmaking highlight the victimization of impoverished women by western men or the self-interested instrumentalism of women who marry for visas. Meanwhile, agencies and many of their clients portray this as a linking of well-intentioned lonely hearts who just want normal family lives. A meaningful anthropological account must incorporate and move beyond both types of narratives, acknowledging that deeply felt sentiment and ‘strategic’ plans to improve one's life overlap in all kinds of social exchange, romantic or otherwise. How the relationship between self-interest and affect is understood depends upon historically specific and gendered experiences of political economy. Participants’ framings of their own and their prospective spouses’ ‘sincerity’ and ‘seriousness’ are diagnostic of structural pressures each group has experienced, which they seek to address through international marriage.

Keywords:

• Marriage
• matchmaking
• sentiment
• Russia
• United States

Acknowledgements

The ethnographic research presented here was funded by an irex Summer Research Grant (2004) and by Haverford College (2003); ongoing funding for the project has been provided by a Research Initiation Grant at Georgia State University (2007–8). I thank the men and women in Russia and the U.S. who have been gracious enough to share their experiences with me, and the colleagues who have provided feedback on versions of this manuscript, including Banu Nilgun Uygun, Maris Gillette, Anne Allison, Emanuela Guano, Megan Sinnott, Jeffrey Young, Katherine Hankins, and James Bertini. All shortcomings that remain are, of course, my own.

Notes

Rfe/rl 7(16), Part 1, Jan 2003. The same report notes that about 75,000 additional women have migrated to the U.S. with documents other than fiancée visas, though in fact to marry Americans. These figures might be high, however; compare to an Office of Immigration Statistics 2008 report which states that in 2007, a total of 38,507 visas were granted to ‘alien fiance(e)s of U.S. Citizens and children’ from around the world (Barr et al. 2008). This number in-cludes 32,991 k-1 (fiancée) visas and 5,516 k-2 (children of k-1s) visas; the respective figures in 1998 were 12,306 and 1,442 (Office of Immigration Sta-tistics, 2008). See also Scholes 2002.

In 2007, I conducted additional interviews in the U.S. with international matchmaking agency executives, legal advocates and women's group activists involved in tracking the industry, and a number of already married Russian- or Ukrainian-American couples who met through online services. In addition, I have participated actively in an online discussion board where American men, along with some European and Australian men and a few women from the Soviet Union, discuss the pitfalls and promises of dating and marriage across national borders.

As a result of such concerns, the U.S. International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005 has placed limits on the activity of such agencies, including the requirement that men provide substantial personal background information to agencies before meeting or gaining contact information for women. The justifications for and effects of this legislation are a point of contention between women's advocacy groups and anti-imbra activists, as I plan to address in future work.

See also, for example, Russkikh nevest uvoziat za okean; bol'she milliona russkikh zhenshchin uzhe stali zhenami inostrantsev. Peterburg Ekspress, October 13, 1999, front cover and pp. 6–7.

For two sides of this debate, compare http://tjc.neuron.com/legal/docs/Top10imbra faqs(updated32607).pdf with Simons 2001, Suzuki 2006.

More broadly, the opposition between ‘sincere,’ affective motivations for social action and people's self-interested, instrumental, and material concerns has been effectively problematized in anthropological work on kinship, gift-giving, and other exchange relations (Bourdieu 1990a, 1994; Collier et al. 1997; Hochschild 1983; Mauss 1967; Weiner 1992; Miller 2001).

Thus feminist scholars such as Wendy Chapkis (1997) have observed that when acts and emotions more typically associated with the private and the intimate are commodified — as in the realm of sex work — anxiety and moral outrage are of-ten the result (see also Frank 2002; McClintock 1993; Zatz 1997).

The rate of spousal abuse and murder in Russia is report-edly high (the Russian government has estimated that as many as 14,000 women are killed by family members each year; see, for example: http://www.omct.org/pdf/vaw/publications/2003/eng_2003_08_russia.pdf). However, Hemment (2007) observes that local women's activists as well as victims of such abuse often do not see violence against women as one of their most pressing prob-lems; rather, they cite poverty and housing issues as the more fun-damental, underlying pressures.

Many women emphasized that local men simply were not willing to marry women older than in their 20s, especially if — as many of the women who seek foreign spouses — they had one or more children from a previous union.

Roman Kupchinsky, ‘Russia: Tackling the Demo-graphic Crisis.’ Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty May 19, 2006, accessed at http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/05/69f48503-828d-452d-88db-a5ee3e437d33.html.

On the postsocialist politics of gender more broadly, see Gal & Kligman 2000; Temkina & Rotkirch 1997; Lyon 2007; Johnson & Robinson 2007; Hemment 2007.

As Wardlow and Hirsch (2006) point out, the modern ‘companionate marriage model,’ an increasingly global ideal according to which one's mate is chosen for personal compatibility as opposed to explicit financial concerns or with regard to the demands of broader kinship networks, is in many contexts linked with notions of ‘progress’ and an idealized West. However, it is always shaped and constrained by economic and social conditions that are locally particular. While companionate marriage is hardly a new phenomenon in Russia, the post-Soviet context does inflect female clients’ visions of an ideal marriage with specific concerns about the security marriage ideally brings to one's life — both economic and emotional. It often is observed, similarly, that Soviet marriage politics were linked with material pressures such as the limited availability of housing, which forced young married couples to share small spaces with their parents/in-laws and which sometimes discouraged physical separation of a couple, if not legal divorce.

Lindquist (2007) argues that romantic love often is con-strued in Russia as violent and overwhelming; while it ideally leads to marriage, love and marriage are not entirely compatible, since the drudgery of everyday life (byt) can kill passion. Thus ‘love and marriage in Russia form an un-easy alliance’ and ‘[t]he acceptance of this fact is one trait that is different between the Russian and the Western ro-mantic love. The institute of marriage in the West appears to be more morally sanctified than is the one in Russia’ (2007:157).

The word ‘sponsor’ has been adopted in Russian in transliterated form, sponsor, and while it is often used in similar contexts to those in which it would be used in English (that is, to indicate an agent providing material or institu-tional support), it can also refer a man who ‘keeps’ a mistress; see Nazpary 2002.

The response was more mixed when I arrived on an online discussion board and declared myself an anthropologist and feminist. Some participants were eager to share their insiders’ view of the industry in an effort to counter nega-tive media representations; others were quite clear about their skepticism towards me, declaring that I was sure to be another knee-jerk detractor.

Luerhmann (2004) argues that Russian women are per-ceived more broadly as having a ‘middle class’ status that, along with racial concerns, distinguishes them from the Asian women American and European men can also pursue through international matchmaking.