by Aino Saarinen and Jana Sverdljuk
Women migrants vary by their social characteristics and their status in the countries of arrival. The situations within the EU memeber states and other Western countries are so different that it is not easy to make valid generalisations. In the south there are numerous refugees and semi-legal or illegal migrants, while in the north most women have come legally for marriage and partnership. In the Alps and Adriatic Sea region and Central Europe much attention has been paid to "irregular" care workers in private homes and trafficked women. Migrant women do care work in Norhtern Europe as well, but mainly as newly trained professionals and co-workers in public institutions. Moreover, trafficking is not a major problem here, yet. Irrespective of these diverging trends, there are also similarities. The construction of gendered and sexualised "others" appears to thrive in binaries of same/different, of equal value/inferior in all parts of Europe.
In spring 2006 the RWN - Russian Women as Immigrants in "Norden": Finland, Norway and Sweden procject (2) inivited twenty scholars to Helsinki for an exploratory workshop for discussions at an all-European level. The workshop was structured around the tree RWN "prisms": thematic and multi-disciplinary problematic on everyday life, citizenship and participation and social justice and cultural recognition. As RWN is targeting the Barents region, we wanted especially to include the other East-West transregions, the Baltic Sea region, Central Europe and the Alps and Adriatic Sea region as well. Among the participants were scholars from two other East-West teams, the Central and South European Grine and the Nordic-Russian-Baltic Feminore (3).
The Nordic countries – “friendly” to immigrant women too?
The Nordic countries have been celebrated for their inclusiveness both in social and gender terms. It was easy to assume that the Nordic countries were a model regime, both in European and global contexts, also in the view of immigrant women. But the Nordic debates on gender have mostly been concerned with the cultural majorities (Saarinen 1996). Throughout the equality- and woman-centred phases in the 70s and 80s the research on migrant women was left to migrants themselves (Knocke 1986; Ålund 1991). The issue was placed on common agendas at the end of the 90s thanks to the cultural turn and the deconstruction of women's sameness. By that time, more migrant women had been included in academia but that did not result in a critical revisiting of the welfare regime theories from the point of view of female immigrants.
Birte Siim's (2006) updated analysis of the recent developments in Denmark and the call for approaching the Nordic regime from the angle of new minorities is therefore both timely and well-grounded. In the 2000s, including cultural rights in the classic list of citizen rights is one of the key issues concerning the Nordic countries as social and political entities. In line with this, we need to explore and theorise how the welfare, political and gender regimes, and, finally, the immigration regime are constructed per se – and, most importantly, how they interrelate when dealing with so many social and cultural inequalities and divisions. New debates on inter-sectionalities are essential in this respect.
Grey zones in the labour markets
In confronting this challenge the RWN research team has become interested in traps in the form of grey zones. Immigrant women's agency can be restricted due to institutional boundaries, time lines and the construction of social categories.
The RWN research team has interviewed altogether 65 Russian women individually, in groups and as so called experts with Russian background working in public and civic institutions. The analysis of the interviews is still going on. The majority of our research participants are marriage migrants. Few of them have sought contacts through agencies or the Internet. In border areas in particular, women have met their future partners in Nordic-Russian enterprises, transregional organisations and on brief visits, through relatives, friends and neighbours.
Under the Soviet regime, work was one of the civic obligations for women as well as men, but it was also a source of personal fulfilment and happiness. In the turmoil of the post-socialist transition, many women have decided to move to the West to live everyday lives, in which both work, family, children and grandchildren have a central place (Hägg 2006). In other words, they look like ”ideal” migrants for the Nordic regime. They are indeed welcomed, above all in the rural areas struggling with ageing and depopulation. “Native” women leaving their villages are replaced by well-educated and work-motivated women aspiring to fully contribute to their new families and communities. However, our analysis of women's inclusion/exclusion in these small-scale labour markets shows that many have ended up in grey zones, in between being/not being a professional, active/non-active, worker/housewife etc. As their professional education is often not fully recognised, they might be employed only part-time, seasonally or occasionally. A downward career move or spending several years on another education are the two other alternatives, besides being unemployed, relying on subsidies or on their Nordic partner.
Comparing the situations in Russia and in the Nordic countries, the migrants have often changed an established work position for a marginalisation in the labour market. Still they do not feel themselves to have gone from bad to worse. The minimum social subsidies and the relatively well-functioning welfare services in the Nordic countries guarantee a better life than the salary below the poverty line and a meagre support from what remains of public safety nets in Russia. Many stress that “there is more socialism here than there ever was in the Soviet Union” (Saarinen 2006).
Gendered violence and citizenships
When asking the immigrants what is brought to their mind by the term ”women-friendly“, the reply tends to be the same: support to lone mothers. Immigrants are assured that they and their children will be able to cope since it is possible “to rely on the state” – as opposed to Russia today.
So, the Nordic welfare regime does offer some social shelter against economic hazards. But migrants are very worried about surviving the first years. “Doing time”, an expression familiar among prison inmates, is repeated in the interviews. If the migrants have arrived as wives or co-habitants, they depend on their partners for the right to stay during the first few years. The RWN interviews confirm the analysis in the Norwegian project When Women Cross the Borders (Lothrington and Fjørtoft 2006). It is worth noting that in Finland the Norwegian “three-year rule” and the Swedish “two-year rule” has become a “four-year rule”. After the Finnish Alien Act became harmonised with the EU regulations in 2004, marriage migrants must wait two more years to get an individual permit for residence (4).
In summary, grey zones are constructed also with regard to time lines. At worst, it is difficult to escape violence in a relationship without undergoing the risk of deportation or possibly leaving the Nordic-born child or children behind. Violations of migrant women's human rights happen at every turn irrespective of global mobilisation against gendered violence. Clearly, within the multilevel order of politics and democracy, the legislation and policies of nation-states and the EU gain the upper hand in relation to the UN women's human rights conventions. For different ”quasi-citizens“ (Castles & Davidson 2000, 88), let alone illegals, it is not easy to navigate within the multilayered and complex orders of the national, EU-European and global citizenships.
Lack of cultural recognition
In addition, immigrant women face many constraints that are linked to the past and the erosion of women's social positions in Eastern Europe. At all ages, they are being confronted with the stigma caused by prostitution in and from Russia. This is especially the case if they live in some specific communities targeted in the mid-1990s by media discourses and local mobilisation against the most visible forms of the organised sex trade (Feminore; Stenvoll 2002). It might even be appropriate to speak about prostitution-related harassment, which in women's own words is comprised of ”dirty looks”, interrogations by strangers, being called a “whore”, being touched in the street, indirect or direct proposals and demands for sex (Saarinen 2007).
Again, these can be described as grey zones, this time constructed of social categories. In a strange way, the division of women into prostitutes and wives, which was again added to legal maps in Europe and in the Nordic countries (Petersen 2006), becomes blurred. All women arriving across the Russian-Nordic border can be suspected of prostitution – or at least of having been involved in it earlier. To put it tersely, during the Cold War the Eastern “enemy” was a male soldier. After the opening of the borders the “enemy” has been transformed into a woman who is coming to the country to “sell sex” (Sverdljuk 2006). Within the Nordic regime, based on the ideal of working woman and mother, this is fatal as it harms women migrants badly in the labour market and consequently as welfare recipients. Normatively seen, the problem here is that lack of cultural recognition and human dignity results in a lack of economic and social justice as well. In fundamental ways, this is in contrast to the basic principles of the “women-friendly” regime, the quest for autonomy, self-respect and bodily and moral integrity. It affects women's political agency negatively as well (Sverdljuk 2006a; Frazer 1997).
Multi-positionalities
Deep-rooted perceptions of the Nordic countries as a region with successful welfare societies constitute a hindrance to facing the factual exclusion of the many minorities. The immigrants can become part of collective identity and acquire a sense of belonging, only if we question the “other definitions” and proceed from open or hidden discrimination and “tolerant” multiculturalisation toward true transculturalisation. RWN turned to the natives as well to see whether they critically approach themselves and the regimes constructed in the presumably homogenous times. In addition to experts, we also interviewed 20 “natives” working in public and civil society institutions.
Transversalism
We look forward to the analysis of these complexities. Hopefully, listening to such a variety of voices will inspire us to a conscious multi-positioned approach – a kind of transversalism (Yuval-Davis 1997), change of subject and object positions, in which “self ” and “other” definitions complete and contradict each other and contribute to critical self/reflections of identities or identifications within all groups. At best, this lays the basis for linking together the micro and macro levels, which is a “must” in exploring the gender, welfare and political regimes, the structures, culture and agency from the perspective of immigrant women.
We also suggest applying transversalism as a critical research practice. Promoting Russian-Nordic dialogue throughout the research process, the RWN team is itself composed of both groups. Jana Sverdljuk (Oslo) is ethnic Ukrainian with Russian citizenship while the rest of the team, Kerstin Hägg (Umeå) and Aino Saarinen (Oulu/Helsinki), are classified as Nordic “natives”. Both have however been involved in development work in North-West Russia and Aino Saarinen has, moreover, been an (academic) migrant worker in Sweden and Norway in the 1990s.
Methodological issues regarding qualitative approaches were discussed at the ESF workshop as well, especially those of interviewing and oral history. They bring up the problematic of inter-subjectivity (Capussotti 2006). It must be confronted in all phases – in sample-making, interviewing and memorising, regarding the languages to be used, transcription, translation, interpretation of meanings and analysis. In our experience, the co-existence of both “we” and “they” in both groups, in the “objects” and the “subjects” of research, is an exciting challenge, sometimes painful but certainly worth facing.
1) Warmest thanks to Kerstin Hägg, the third RWM team member, for her comments.
2) RWN is funded by NOS-S, the Joint Nordic Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and the Social Sciences
for 2004-06.
3) Grine 2004 see http://www.rokkansenteret.uib.no/feminore/
4) In 2005, Sweden introduced a new Alien Act, which states that abused women can preserve a permission to stay even after
the relationship has been ended.
Notes
Capussotti, Enrica (2006): “Inter-subjectivity and Inter-disciplinarity: Oral History and the Present”. ESF SCSS Exploratory Workshop: Eastern European Women as Immigrants in Western European Transregions. Gender Perspectives on Everyday Life, Citizenship and Social Justice. Aleksanteri Institute, Helsinki University, Finland, 31 May- 3 June 2006.
Castles, Stephen & Alastair Davidson (2000): Citizenship and Migration. Globalisaation and the politics of belonging. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York: Palgrave.
Frazer, Nancy (1997): Justice Interruptus. Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist Condition”. London: Routledge.
Hägg, Kerstin (2006): “Everyday Life as Problematic: Russian Immigrant Women in the Three Nordic Countries”. ESF SCSS Exploratory Workshop.
Knocke, Wuokko (1986): Invandrade kvinnor i lönearbete och fack. Stockholm: Arbettslivscentrum.
Lotherington, Ann-Therese & Kjersti Fjørtoft (2006): “Russiske invandrerkvinner i ekteskapets lenker”. NIKKmagasin 1-2006: 30-31.
Petersen, Hanne (2006): “Changing Legal Maps in the Nordic Countries and Europe. Gender and Mobility – Confused Orientations”. ESF SCSS Exploratory Workshop.
Saarinen, Aino (1996): “Omstrukturering av de politiska institutionerna är en utmaning för kvinnor i Norden.NIKK, Oslo, Norge, 21-23 november 1996. Preliminära planer för NIKK's forskningsprogram”. Frø og frukter. Nordisk kvinne- og kjønnsforskning i dag.
Saarinen, Aino (2006): “Citizenship, Gender, Transition – Reflections on the Developments in Barents”. ESF SCSS Exploratory Workshop.
Saarinen, Aino (2007): “Venäläiset maahanmuuttajat “naisystävällisessä” Pohjolassa: kansalaisuus ja stigmatisoitunut identiteetti.” Tuomo Martikainen & Marja Tiilikainen (eds.): Maahanmuuttajanaiset Suomessa. Helsinki: Väestöliitto. (forthcoming)
Siim, Birte (2006): “Den multikulturelle udfordring for velfærdsstaten”. NIKKmagasin 1-2006: 25-27.
Stenvoll, Dag (2002): “From Russia with Love? Newspaper Coverage of Cross-border Prostitution in Northern Norway, 1999-2001”.
The European Journal of Women's Studies, 9 (2): 143-162.
Sverdljuk, Jana (2006): “Vrengebilder av russiske kvinner”. Aftenposten 4.9.2006.
http://www.aften-posten.no/meninger/debatt/article1445013.ece
Sverdljuk, Jana (2006a): “Russian Women as Immigrants in Nordic Countries – Challenging the Ability to Formulate a Just Moral Judgement”. ESF SCSS Exploratory Workshop.
Yuval-Davis, Nira (1997): Gender and Nation: London, Sage Publications.
Ålund, Aleksandra (1991): ''Det Lilla Juga” Etnicitet, familj och kvinnliga nätverk. Stockholm: Carlssons.
First published in NIKK magasin 3 2006 © NIKK
