The Traffic in Women's Work

East European Migration and the Making of Europe

Anca Parvulescu

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226118413
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

"Welcome to the European family!" When East European countries joined the European Union under this banner after 1989, they agreed to the free movement of goods, services, capital, and persons. In this book, Anca Parvulescu analyzes an important niche in this imagined European kinship: the traffic in women, or the circulation of East European women in West Europe in marriage and as domestic servants, nannies, personal attendants, and entertainers. Analyzing film, national policies, and an impressive range of work by theorists from Giorgio Agamben to Judith Butler, she develops a critical lens through which to think about the transnational continuum of "women's work." Parvulescu revisits Claude Lévi-Strauss's concept of kinship and its rearticulation by second-wave feminists, particularly Gayle Rubin, to show that kinship has traditionally been anchored in the traffic in women. Reading recent cinematic texts that help frame this, she reveals that in contemporary Europe, East European migrant women are exchanged to engage in labor customarily performed by wives within the institution of marriage. Tracing a pattern of what she calls Americanization, Parvulescu argues that these women thereby become responsible for the labor of reproduction. A fascinating cultural study as much about the consequences of the enlargement of the European Union as women's mobility, The Traffic in Women's Work questions the foundations of the notion of Europe today.

1

European Kinship

East European Women Go to Market

An episode in Cristian Mungiu’s Occident (2002) presents us with a scene in a matrimonial agency in Romania: A worried mother is searching for a husband for her twenty-four-year-old daughter, Mihaela. The conversation in the waiting room informs us that she has brought the necessary bribe because the agency offers good choices: “They have doctors and Americans.” Once inside, she is asked what nationality she is looking for. She would prefer “one of ours” but is told that the agency deals only in international marriages. Europe, America, and Asia are on the menu. The mother prefers Europe. The agent shows her a slide with a number of photographs (see fig. 1.1). “Don’t you have anything younger?” the mother pleads. The agent rolls his eyes and pulls out another slide. With a suggestive, almost scientific gesture, he points to a photograph: a distinguished gentleman, from Saudi Arabia. “He’s ugly,” argues the mother. She takes the initiative and gestures toward another face. A sailor, from Cyprus. The mother shows her disappointment: “Don’t you have a doctor?” The agent is irritated; we are not at the market, he protests, the men are human beings, and there is no bargaining. The mother is asked to pay the fee and leave a picture and her daughter’s details. The agent will get back to her. The mother complies and adds a poem to the package: the bride-to-be is a poet.

Fig. 1.1. A Romanian mother hopes to find a West European husband for her daughter. Frame from Cristian Mungiu’s Occident (2002).

A series of amusing encounters follow, through which Mihaela (played by Tania Popa, a Romanian actress originally from Moldova) meets caricatured older, working-class, uneducated European men. “I write poems,” she says in French to a man who smiles encouragingly but to whom Baudelaire’s name sounds only vaguely familiar. “Money is not important to me,” she says in English to a man who gesticulates back that he does not have it anyway. “I like to travel . . . not to cook, wash,” she adds for another one. Mihaela is clearly not interested in her European suitors, not only because they are utterly uninteresting, but also because she is in love with a young Romanian man, Lucian, who has just been left by his Romanian fiancée, Sorina, for an overweight, middle-aged Belgian businessman.

Mihaela’s mother is persistent and soon finds her a good match, a well-situated Italian. He runs a publishing house and has read and liked Mihaela’s poems. This last detail catches Mihaela’s attention. There is no photograph, but on the phone he passes all the tests; he apparently is young and tall and even has hair. “If he publishes my poems, I’m going with him,” Mihaela declares. The Italian is invited to visit. The house is cleaned, local wall art is replaced by sketches of classical Roman gods, furniture is moved around, pasta is cooked. Finally, the big moment comes. The father opens the door and freezes. “Ciao, sono Luigi,” says a young black man. The Romanian family is in disarray. “Nu corespunde” (lit., “He does not correspond”), the father declares. Yet all the prerequisites are there, and the daughter wants to marry. The black Italian is a European impossibility the family did not anticipate. The film’s three alternative endings (in the tradition of Run Lola Run) play with variations on whether the two Romanian women, Mihaela and Sorina, take the European road to marriage, emigrate without marrying, or settle for the local husband.

What these scenes in Occident offer us are snapshots of a new Europe.¹ Since 1989, East European women have become hot objects of European exchange, packaged in a variety of wrappings, whether as domestic servants, nurses, nannies, prostitutes, or wives. Mungiu’s film challenges the perception that the European Union facilitates East European mobility, including the mobility of East European women. Reversing the terms, it prompts reflection on the ways in which the formation and sedimentation of “Europe” across its East/West post–Cold War divide is made possible by the circulation of East European women. In order to begin to understand this Europe, this chapter revisits the second-wave feminist argument about the traffic in women and draws out its implications for the European Union.

The Marriage Market

More than thirty five years have passed since Gayle Rubin published “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.”² Reprinted in various anthologies, the essay has become a feminist classic, having maintained its urgency, and having been repeatedly used as a springboard for the reconsideration of its arguments in light of new configurations of traffic, economy, the political, or sex. I propose that, alongside Luce Irigaray’s articulation of the argument for the French side of second-wave feminism,³ Rubin’s essay can offer an entry point into the transnational traffic in women in the current European moment. I retrace the archaeology of the debate here before I return to Occident. This will be a somewhat convoluted journey, one, however, that will offer a framework within which to understand the Europe that Occident dramatizes.

The precedent for Rubin’s essay, and an enduring reference point in the conceptual combination known as traffic in women, is a short article carrying the same title by Emma Goldman from 1910. Goldman writes: “It is merely a question of degree whether she [woman] sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men. Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution.”⁴ Traffic in women is the phrase Goldman uses to describe the circulation of women between men, in general. Rather than referring to exceptional cases of human trafficking, it describes an economic continuum on which both prostitution and marriage are situated. For Goldman, the difference between prostitution and marriage is one of degree, a question of how many men participate in the transaction. The scandal here is to propose that marriage, the respectable form of women’s circulation, is a variation on the economic theme of prostitution. In the modern world, this is a scandal for men, who would prefer to have this truth veiled, and it is also a scandal for women, who would prefer to think that they enter (and stay in) marriages by virtue of a love choice. Goldman, however, insists that love and marriage belong to two separate registers. In another essay, she declares: “Marriage is often an economic arrangement purely, furnishing the woman with a life-long insurance policy.”⁵ In 1910, as today, it was radical to hold that love is largely irrelevant to an analysis of marriage, serving only to obscure the fact that the system of circulation both in prostitution and in marriage is an economy and that it should be scrutinized as such. While Goldman’s statements need to be historicized to allow for the changes brought about by a century of feminism, her arguments about the broad economic continuum between marriage and sex work remain in force. Laura Kipnis’s recent Against Love, a book that calls for an understanding of contemporary marital relationships as sexual and affective work, can be read as an attempt to update these arguments for the turn into the twenty-first century, with similar polemical energy.⁶

In 1975, Rubin acknowledged her debt to Goldman as she developed her own notion of traffic in women understood on the continuum between prostitution and so-called normal forms of exchange, marriage in particular. Her essay describes “a set of arrangements,” which she calls “the sex/gender system,” through which sex is translated into gender, the performance of a set of social relations. Her project is to come to a better understanding of the conditions that produce women’s position in society. In the course of her analysis, she shows not only that marriage is always arranged but also that marital arrangements serve as a foundation for other forms of societal exchange. Where does one begin such a project? Rubin proposes that we read closely the overlap between Claude Lévi-Strauss’s and Freud’s descriptions of the social apparatus and women’s place in it. This, however, only after she puts aside her hope in Marx.

Capitalism, the Marxist argument goes, is in the business of extracting unpaid labor from the laborer, which it transforms into surplus value. Rather than being directly correlated to value, wages are set in light of what is needed to reproduce the conditions of production: commodities such as food, clothing, housing, etc. Wages are meant to cover these costs and help reproduce the conditions under which the laborer does more work—from day to day and from one generation of workers to the next. Rubin and other materialist feminists of her generation interrupt Marx at this point to emphasize that such commodities come in an unprocessed form, that they require labor in order to reproduce the laborer. In an argument we will revisit in chapter 2, they point out that the food is cooked, the clothes washed, the house cleaned, budding future laborers looked after, family life managed administratively and emotionally, etc. This is housework, more recently rethought under the names family work and care work. Traditionally, this has been the labor of women: women’s work. Women are indispensable to the reproduction of labor, hence to the production of surplus value, hence to capitalist economy. In fact, it can be argued that women’s unpaid labor within the household is the first (indirect) source of the surplus value on which capitalism thrives.⁷

How, then, Rubin continues, does one explain the fact that in many non-capitalist economic regimens women have occupied similar roles within the familial household? Her argument is that the economy under scrutiny is a function of a wider cultural heritage, a deeper history.⁸ In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Friedrich Engels went a step further than Marx in his analysis of a second type of production, that of human beings themselves. Engels dissociated the reproduction of the conditions of production from the reproduction of human beings and located the latter firmly within the institution of the family. His insight is to have proposed that it is only through a focus on the family that we can hope to make visible the network of relations within which women live, including economic relations. The first “class” to be economically oppressed are women within kinship structures; their oppression remains at the basis of other forms of economic exploitation. Rubin finds Engels invaluable for having produced a major methodological shift toward an analysis of kinship, but she proposes that he has not pursued the implications of his insight, or not sufficiently. This is where she turns to Lévi-Strauss and his magisterial Elementary Structures of Kinship.

The fabric of a society, Lévi-Strauss has famously argued, is formed by a series of cyclic, obligatory, and reciprocal exchanges among kinship groups. Society is in fact nothing other than this network of exchanges. Lévi-Strauss draws on Marcel Mauss, who claimed, against political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, that there has never been a state of nature because any society we know of has had a market form, with its networks of exchange functioning as a rudimentary social contract. The various exchanges that these markets facilitate are, in Mauss’s own words from his 1924 Essay on the Gift, “banquets, rituals, military services, women, children, dances, festivals, and fairs.”⁹ This network of exchange is a social contract avant la lettre and is something like an anthropological first principle.

In an attempt to move from the disjunctive logic of Mauss’s list to a more systematic description of societal exchange, Lévi-Strauss sifts through the “inessentials” on this list to argue that there are three levels of communication in any given society, corresponding to the circulation of three sets of interrelated objects: “The rules of kinship and marriage serve to insure the circulation of women between groups, just as economic rules serve to insure the circulation of goods and services, and linguistic rules the circulation of messages.”¹⁰ The three categories of societal exchange are goods and services, signs, and women. The relation among the three goes beyond analogy as Lévi-Strauss makes it clear that women in fact are goods, that they are signs. He concludes that the circulation of women in marriage is the arch form of exchange. In the beginning there is the exchange of women. The incest taboo is posited as the structure’s limit because, according to Lévi-Strauss, by its means a whole clear-cut network of relations is formed; a woman a man cannot marry is necessarily a woman he must offer to another man.¹¹

The question that interests Rubin is how to read this system of exchange. Most importantly, how immutable is it? If one agrees that the exchange and circulation of women constitute the very fabric of culture, is it possible and desirable to fight culture? At stake, Lévi-Strauss charges, is the very security of the collective, its principle of organization: “It is not an exaggeration, then, to say that exogamy is the archetype of all other manifestations based upon reciprocity, and that it provides the fundamental and immutable rule measuring the existence of the group as a group.” Moreover, the exchange of women yields a network of reciprocal relations among brothers-in-law: “The brother-in-law is ally, collaborator and friend.”¹² The brother-in-law is at the basis of what Mauss celebrates under the rubric of solidarity—a solidarity of brothers, collaborators, and friends. The exchange in women is what founds not only community but also solidarity, the very foundation of politics. In a long tradition from Aristotle to Carl Schmitt, politics is a game played among brothers and friends and brothers qua friends.¹³ If this is the case, the feminist predicament is profoundly paradoxical since it implies a project of articulating a politics against politics.

For her part, Rubin concludes that, while the traffic in women has a lot of explicative power (“our sex/gender system is still organized by the principles outlined by Lévi-Strauss”), structuralist kinship is itself a myth, a fiction of origins, and a very powerful one at that, as it has added an apparently incontestable scientific wrapping to its many, already seductive folds.¹⁴ Rubin reminds us that the language of “mere” observation abounds. Mauss wrote about The Gift: “We have no wish to put forward this study as a model to be followed. It only sets out bare indications.”¹⁵ Lévi-Strauss spoke of the goal of his project in terms of it aspiring to be “real, simplifying and explanatory.”¹⁶ How, then, does one interrupt a myth that presents itself as “bare indications” and “real, simplifying and explanatory”? Rubin insists that we need to read symptomatically; she describes her own reading practice as “freely interpretative, moving from the explicit content of a text to its presuppositions and implications.”¹⁷ We also need to read exegetically, at the same time acknowledging the undeniable force of Lévi-Strauss’s work (it is scripture-like) and calling for interpretation. After all, exegesis often unnoticeably slides into blasphemy.

This reading practice produces ...