‘Prostitutes’ and ‘Defectors’: How the Ukrainian State Constructs Women Emigrants to Italy and the USA

Abstract

Scholars of sending countries emphasise the role of economics in shaping state policies towards emigration. They argue sending states are converging around a set of discursive strategies that aim to facilitate the influx of remittances from emigrants. One such strategy uses discourses of cultural nationalism to celebrate emigrants as ‘heroes’ of the nation. Drawing on a state-sponsored media campaign and ethnographic data, I found the Ukrainian state does the opposite. It stigmatises its emigrants to both Italy and the USA as ‘prostitutes’ and ‘defectors’, respectively. However emigrants are differentially stigmatised. Emigrants to the USA are simply dismissed, but the Ukrainian state constructs migration to Italy as a shameful social problem. It does this even though emigrants to Italy send back significantly more remittances. Economic interests cannot explain Ukrainian state practices towards emigration. Instead, in the context of post-Soviet transformation, I suggest the Ukrainian state has prioritised the construction of a national identity. The state then constructs policy with an eye to cultural rather than economic outcomes. I argue the Ukrainian state actively stigmatises the migration to Italy because it poses challenges to the nation-building process, whereas the migration to the USA is peripheral to this key state concern.

Keywords:

• Transnational Migration
• Remittances
• Nation Building
• Gender
• Post-Soviet Ukraine

Acknowledgements

I offer my deepest thanks to Michael Burawoy for his careful reading of early drafts of this paper and to Raka Ray and Irene Bloemraad for many productive discussions. Thanks also to Smitha Radhakrishnan, Elizabeth Ferry, Helen Marrow, Bart Bonikowski, Natasha Kumar and Andrea Leverentz for their insightful comments.

Notes

[1] Economic transformation is important to Ukrainian nation-building. I am not suggesting that the state does not have economic concerns or interests but rather that the state understands emigration as primarily causing cultural troubles and not economic solutions.

[2] The migration of grandmothers is a unique phenomenon. For an explanation of why it is older women who migrate from Ukraine and how they are channelled into caring labour at the receiving sites, see Solari (2006a, 2006b, 2011).

[3] Elsewhere I emphasise that this is not a comparison of receiving sites, but rather a comparison of migration patterns in which sending and receiving sites are mutually constitutive. For an explanation of global ethnography and how a global or transnational lens led to this shift in unit of analysis, see Solari (2010a, 2013).

[4] Informants rarely used the term the ‘EU’ but conflated it with ‘Europe’, the term I use in this paper, which for my informants encompasses both the political entity of the European union but also an idealised notion of political freedom, economic prosperity, cultural traditions and ‘First World’ status.

[5] While the televised media campaign was sponsored by Yushchenko's administration, NGOs, such as the IMO, also played a role in the billboard campaign. Andrijasevic (2007) notes that the IMO is a key Europe-wide actor in developing counter-trafficking programmes and, as an intergovernmental agency, collaborates with national governments. The IMO launched a counter-trafficking campaign in Ukraine in 1998. Andrijasevic argues such anti-trafficking campaigns aim to control women's mobility and sexuality by equating women's labour migration with forced prostitution. Andrijasevic (42) writes:

Just when EU citizens are encouraged to undertake greater labour mobility, one of the key attributes of the European community, IMO's counter-trafficking campaigns criminalize the labour mobility of women from eastern European non-EU member states and encourage them to remain at home.

She further suggests the bodies of eastern European women is a site for the contestation of Europe's borders. At a time when European space is being reorganised and anxieties about Eastern Europe's social and economic transformation are running high, anti-trafficking campaigns suggest a yearning for a ‘return to a familiar and reassuring race and gender order in Europe’ (27).

[6] According to Foucault (1983), discourse is one way to think about power in the modern era. Discourse is a set of structured statements that are socially, historically and institutionally specific and they shape behaviours and produce subjects. Women migrants in Rome struggle against subjection to the discourse of prostitution but are nonetheless constrained by it as are women in Ukraine who did not migrate.

[7] Hrycak (2011) argues Western NGOs that focus on ‘women's empowerment’ see sex trafficking as a particularly egregious violation of human rights and are willing to give money to fund anti-trafficking campaigns. In order for the Ukrainian state to access these funds, they must have sex-trafficked women. The perpetuation of the myth that all of Ukraine's migrant women either go abroad as prostitutes to earn high wages or become the victims of transnational prostitution rings then causes problems for these women when they return to Ukraine.

[8] For an analysis of why the Ukrainian state stigmatises rather than celebrates emigrants more generally, see Solari (2012).