Between “Europe” and “Africa”: Building the “New” Ukraine on the Shoulders of Migrant Women

Female-led migration is usually explained by a “push-pull” framework. Poverty “pushes” Third World women into domestic labor in First World countries. In this paper I broaden this framework by thinking of gender as “constitutive” of migration and placing the migration of Ukrainian women to Italy in a larger context of post-Soviet transformation. The coming of capitalism has forced many women out of the labor market and necessitated a shift from extended families with working-mothers, peripheral men, and grandmothers as primary caregivers of their grandchildren to nuclear families with mother-housewives, father-breadwinners, and displaced grandmothers. Yet men’s salaries are unable to sustain this new gender order which relies on grandmothers, doubly marginalized from the labor market and their families, to work abroad. Gender is constitutive of migration and the construction the “new” Ukraine. At a time when the definition of Ukrainian nationhood is highly contested, migrant women are working towards a vision of Ukraine as “Europe,” a utopia of consumer capitalism. But the fear that Ukraine will instead become “Africa,” the underbelly of the global economy, is always looming. Migrant women bear the painful contradictions of this nation building project.