Globalizing 'Postsocialism:' Mobile Mothers and Neoliberalism on the Margins of Europe

In recent years, women's transnational labor migration from Moldova has grown exponentially and their absence from families has provoked considerable anxiety over transformations in the social order. Few scholars of postsocialist states have explored transnational labor. Those who have focus on how new economic practices such as trading are anxiety-ridden because they index transformations from socialism to "postsocialism." These scholars have not detailed nor theorized the gendered nature of migrant labor, representations of it, and states responses to it. Using ethnographic research and interviews with Gagauz Moldovan migrant women who travel to work as domestics in Turkey and their village compatriots in Moldova, this paper illustrates a discourse of blame that employs the trope of "mothers as key to the social order," one complicated by notions of socialism, sexuality, ethnicity, work, wealth, and rurality. This trope plays a key role in blaming female migrant laborers for social disorder and in migrants' own justifications for going abroad. I argue that the migrants' gendered justifications constitute a new moral economy that aligns with global and Moldovan state neoliberal rationales. Drawing on a broad feminist and anthropological literature, this article problematizes claims about "postsocialist" transnational labor experiences by specifying them in terms of other overlapping subjectivities, particularly gender. In so doing, it shifts the anthropological gaze from a narrow focus on "postsocialism" in this region to identify problems and processes of globalization that hold wider significance and questions our categorizations of states into "postsocialist," "postwelfare," "third world," "global south," and/or "postcolonial."