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Kinship and Crisis: Embedded Economic Pressures and Gender Ideals in Postsocialist International Matchmaking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Jennifer Patico
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Abstract

The rise of the international matchmaking industry has been particularly rapid and noticeable in the former Soviet Union, where the end of the Cold War has intersected with daily socioeconomic pressures to make cross-cultural romance and marriage newly possible and newly desirable for some women of Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet states. Less acknowledged than the role of economics in women's decision making, however, is the fact that postsocialist financial strains are not experienced in social vacuums but are mediated by ideals of gender and marriage, such that the search for a foreign spouse is unlikely to be experienced as a simple desire for increased material comfort. Instead, discourses of gender “crisis” in the home country inform the desires for transnational kinship for both women from the former Soviet Union and men from the United States. When both women's and men's narratives of “crisis” (and how transnational marriage might alleviate it) are taken into account, they significantly complicate our understandings of east-west relations of “commodification” and power.

Type
Postsocialisms Unbound: Douglas Rogers, Special Section Guest Editor
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , Spring 2010 , pp. 16 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2010

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References

The field research on which this article is based was made possible through funds from the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), Haverford College, and Georgia State University. I am also grateful to the colleagues who have heard or read various versions of this article and provided invaluable feedback, particularly Douglas Rogers, Leyla Keough, and the anonymous reviewers for Slavic Revieiu. Very special thanks are due to the women and men in Russia, the United States, and online who shared their experiences with me.

1. See, for example, Orloff, Leslye E. and Sarangapani, Hema, “Governmental and Industry Roles and Responsibilities with Regard to International Marriage Brokers: Equalizing the Balance of Power between Foreign Fiances and Spouses,” Violence against Women 13, no. 5 (May 2007): 469-85CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

2. Country-specific statistics are provided at everybodyiloveyou.blogspot.com/2005/ 08/kl-fiancee-visas-statistical-breakdown.html (last accessed 1 December 2009). For a more general overview of K-l admissions in 2007, see Barr, Maccreadie, Jefferys, Kelly, and Monger, Randall, “Nonimmigrant Admissions to the United States: 2007,” AnnualFlow Report (U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics, August 2008)Google ScholarPubMed.

In 2003, the director of the Moscow Center for Social Aid to Migrants estimated that 75,000 Russian women had immigrated to the United States in order to marry in the preceding decade. See Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 7(16), pt. 1, January 2003. This figure appears high when compared to the per-year figures cited above. The same report suggested that about 75,000 additional women had migrated to the United States during the same period with documents other than fiancée visas, though the purpose of their trip was in fact to marry Americans. See also Robert J. Scholes (with the assistance of Anchalee Phataraloaha), “The ‘Mail-Order Bride’ Industry and Its Impact on U.S. Immigration“ (INS Reports and Studies, 2002). According to Orloff and Sarangapani, “The popularity of [the K-l or “fiancée“] visa provision is evident as the total number of foreign fiancées entering the United States each year more than tripled between 1996 and 2004 (Office of Immigration Statistics, 2004).” Orloff and Sarangapani, “Governmental and Industry Roles,” 472. In a 2008 report, the Office of Immigration Statistics notes that in 2007, a total of 38,507 visas were granted to “alien fiancé (e)s of U.S. citizens and children“ from around the world. Barr, Jefferys, and Monger, “Nonimmigrant Admissions,” 3. This number includes 32,991 K-l visas and 5,516 K-2 visas (for the children of K-ls); the respective figures in 1998 were 12,306 and 1,442. See www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/ yearbook/2007/table25d.xls (last accessed 1 December 2009).

3. Chittenden, Valerie, TED case study #487 (American University, 2001), at www.american.edu/projects/mandala/TED/bride.htm (last accessed 1 December 2009)Google Scholar. Agencies based outside the former USSR often work in cooperation with local affiliates.

4. Visson, Lynn, Wedded Strangers: The Challenges of Russian-American Marriages, 2d ed. (New York, 2001)Google Scholar.

5. For example, Hemment, Julie, Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid, and NCOs (Bloomington, 2007), 6 Google Scholar.

6. For example, comparing the former Soviet Union with other countries in which such industry is prevalent, Orloff and Sarangapani argue that, “Nations from which IMBs are best able to recruit women tend to be those most disenfranchised by globalization and global economic disparities.” Orloff and Sarangapani, “Governmental and Industry Roles,” 473. Yet Lisa Simons points out that it is rarely the most destitute in the world who pursue marriage migration; rather, it is the experience of relative poverty within their home countries that more typically drives people, as illusuated by the fact that the popular bride-sending countries are not those with the least developed economies, but rather those in which women's life goals come into conflict with contextually specific limits to their realization. Simons, Lisa Anne, “Marriage, Migration, and Markets: International Matchmaking and International Feminism” (PhD diss., University of Denver, 2001)Google Scholar.

“International marriage broker” is a misleading term insofar as it suggests that the firms being regulated are actually “arranging” marriages. In most cases, what the companies are actually doing is facilitating contact between interested parties through the provision of contact information, translation services, and so on, as well as arranging in-person encounters (either private dates or large “socials” or mixers held in the brides’ countries of residence). Companies may also offer consultations in which advice is given to clients about their potential matches, and they may offer legal advice for the benefit of clients who wish to initiate the fiancée visa process. They do not “make matches” or “broker“ marriages, however.

7. Padilla, Mark, Hirsch, Jennifer, Munoz-Laboy, Miguel, Sember, Robert, and Parker, Richard, “Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reflections on an Intimate Intersection,” in Padilla, Mark B., Hirsch, Jennifer, Munoz-Laboy, Miguel, Sember, Robert, and Parker, Richard, eds., Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World (Nashville, 2007), xii Google Scholar.

8. Rubin, Gayle, “The Traffic of Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” in Reiter, Rayna R., ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975).Google Scholar

9. Shevchenko, Olga, Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (Bloomington, 2009), 12 Google Scholar.

10. For example, Hughes, Donna, “The ‘Natasha’ Trade: Transnational Sex Trafficking,“ National Institute of Justice Journal, no. 246 (January 2001): 9–14 Google Scholar; Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Hearings on Human Trafficking: Mail Order Bride Abuses, Statement of Michele A. Clark, 108 Cong., 2d sess., 13 July 2004; Lindee, Kirsten, “Love, Honor, or Control: Domestic Violence, Trafficking, and the Question of How to Regulate the Mail-Order Bride Industry,” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 16, no. 2 (22 June 2007): 471–550 Google Scholar. Cf. Simons, “Marriage, Migration, and Markets“; Constable, Nicole, Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail-Order“Marriages (Berkeley, 2003)Google Scholar.

11. E.g., Hughes, , “The ‘Natasha’ Trade“; Scholes, “The ‘Mail-Order Bride’ Industry“; Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Hearings on Human Trafficking: Mail Order Bride Abuses, Statement of Clark, Michele A., 108 Cong., 2d sess., 13 July 2004 Google Scholar; cf. Nobue Suzuki, “Cross-Border Marriages and National Governance” (paper presented at the Third Conference on Transborder and Diaspora: Governance, Survival and Movement, Graduate Institute for Social Transformation Studies, Shih-Hsin University, Taipei, Taiwan, 2006) at cc.shu.edu.tw/∼e62/NewSiteData/ 20061007Conference/uploadpapers/Nobue-Suzuki-paper.pdf (last accessed 1 December 2009). With a K-l visa, individuals can enter the United States for an initial 90-day period, by which time they must marry their sponsors or return to their home countries. During the next two years, an immigrant spouse's permanent resident status is “conditional“; after two years of marriage, the couple can apply to have the “conditional” status lifted and request that the spouse be granted permanent residency status and a 10-year, renewable green card. While couples are expected to file jointly for the removal of conditional status, waivers of this requirement are possible in cases of the citizen-spouse's death and of spousal abuse and maybe possible in situations of divorce if the marriage can be demonstrated to have been “in good faith,” according to the advice to filers provided at www.visajourney.com/faq/ klk2visa-removeconditions.html (last accessed 1 December 2009).

12. IMBRA has placed limits on the activity of such agencies, including the new requirement that men provide substantial personal background information (including any criminal arrests or convictions) to agencies when they begin as clients, so that this information may be distributed to their potential love interests before they correspond or meet. Radically opposed accounts of the law, its rationales, and its achievements can be found at www.tahirih.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/frequentlyaskedquestions aboutimbra.pdf (last accessed 1 December 2009) and at www.imbra.org/ (last accessed 1 December 2009). The Tahirih site also provides a summary of existing data and arguments concerning the high prevalence and likelihood of spousal abuse in this population; see Simons, “Marriage, Migration, and Markets” for counterarguments. See also, for example, Scholes, “The ‘Mail-Order Bride’ Industry“; Orloff and Sarangapani, “Governmental and Industry Roles“; Hughes, “The ‘Natasha’ Trade“; Hass, Giselle Aguilar, Ammar, Nawal, and Orloff, Leslye, “Battered Immigrants and U.S. Citizen Spouses,” Legal Momentum (24 April 2006)Google Scholar; Center for Women Policy Studies, US PACT (Policy Advocacy to Combat Trafficking) Program, Report Card on State Action to Combat International Trafficking (May 2007). As a few scholars have observed (including Suzuki, “Cross-Border Marriages and National Governance“), matchmaking commerce and the migrations that result from it have been the subject of special debate, particularly in the post-9/11 context of elevated concern about the monitoring of international borders and human trafficking. For news coverage of the abuse and murder of marriage migrants from the former Soviet Union, see, for example, Kamb, Lewis and Robert, L. Jamieson Jr., “Mail-Order Bride's Dream of a Better Life Ends in Death,” Seattle Post-Intelligence, 2 February 2001, at seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/brid02.shtml (last accessed 1 December 2009)Google Scholar; Hansen, Jane O., “From Russia, for Love,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 5 December 2005, at www.ajc.com/news/content/news/breaking/1204/06bride.html (last accessed 1 December 2009)Google Scholar.

13. Anti-IMBRA activists assert that a few highly publicized cases of violence do not suggest that the problem is widespread among couples who met through international agencies—that is, any more so than among U.S. couples in general. One of the pro- IMBRA advocates I interviewed contested this perception, while acknowledging that firm numbers and solid longitudinal studies do not exist: “with respect to the perception that's out there that oh, there's some sort of… oh, there's only two or three cases or something. And that's often on the blogs that, you know, everybody is up in arms about this and it's a very rare problem. I have boxloads of newspaper accounts. I've stopped trying to pursue leads at some point because there were too many to follow … So the sense that it's many more cases than people I think are truly aware that they really do have some very disturbing patterns including men who are pedophiles, yes … I think that there were many data points whether or not they were anecdotal or not.“

14. Patico, Jennifer, “For Love, Money, or Normalcy: Meanings of Strategy and Sentiment in the Russian-American Matchmaking Industry,” Ethnos 74, no. 3 (2009): 307-30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zelizer, Viviana A., The Purchase of Intimacy(Princeton, 2005)Google Scholar. As Dale Pesmen argues in her critical reading of Marcel Mauss's theory of the gift, it is all too common that an observer “chooses an ‘underlying,’ often ‘hard’ truth—self-interest, for example—and assumes that if that is present, other kinds of things—less calculated gestures, for example—must be either absent, ideology, or masks… . This fails to take into account the roles time (successive moments), sentiment, and the failure to logically analyze all their actions play in allowing people to be and do more than one thing.” Pesmen, Dale, Russia and Soul: An Exploration (Ithaca, 2000), 134-35Google Scholar.

15. Padilla, , Hirsch, , Munoz-Laboy, , Sember, , and Parker, , eds., Love and Globalization; Hirsch, Jennifer S. and Wardlow, Holly, eds., Modern Loves: The Anthropology of Romantic Courtship and Companionate Marriage (Ann Arbor, 2006)Google Scholar; Hirsch, Jennifer S., A Courtship after Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families (Berkeley, 2003)Google Scholar; Rebhun, Linda- Anne, The Heart Is Unknown Country: Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil (Stanford, 1999)Google Scholar; Collier, Jane, From Duty to Desire: Remaking Families in a Spanish Village (Princeton, 1997)Google Scholar.

16. Cf. Schaeffer-Gabriel, Felicity, “Planet-Love.com: Cyberbrides in the Americas and the Transnational Routes of U.S. Masculinity,” Signs 31, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 331-56Google Scholar; Hochschild, Arlie R., “Love and Gold,” in Ehrenreich, Barbara and Hochschild, Arlie R., eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the Neiv Economy (New York, 2003)Google Scholar. For an extended discussion of how St. Petersburg teachers in the late 1990s viewed ideal femininity as impossible to achieve in contemporary Russia, see Patico, Jennifer, Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class (Washington, D.C., 2008), chap. 5 Google Scholar.

17. Web sites quoted online by the advocacy organization Tahirihjustice Center (www. tahirih.org) demonstrate some of the stereotypes presented on the Internet, such as: “In Russia, she doesn't have a choice to stay home to take care of her husband, house, and children—for her, it is a dream. The Russian woman's attitude about herself is feminine. She expects to be treated as a lady, she is the weaker gender and knows it. The Russian woman has not been exposed to the world of rampant feminism that asserts its rights in America.” See reference provided atwww.tahirih.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/ websitequotes.pdf (last accessed 1 December 2009).

18. The names of all interviewees have been changed.

19. In a separate conversation during which her husband was not present, Larisa reiterated similar themes as well as elaborating on particular stories concerning the couple's experiences and the reactions of their family members and friends.

20. Regarding the near “impossibility” of finding a suitable husband in Russia, Shevchenko's point regarding the discourse of “crisis” in postsocialist Moscow may be relevant: that even when cases in contradiction with such woeful accounts could be identified, speakers “continued to maintain that the tendency was universal, preferring to frame the unconfirming cases as exceptions rather than to part widi the imagery of a society-wide moral crisis altogether. It was almost as if the reality … was so undeniable … that it did not require evidential support.” Shevchenko, , Crisis and the Everyday, 41 Google Scholar.

21. I use the rather loaded term western to describe the men in question for lack of a better term. Although most of the men active on the Web site to which I refer are Americans, others are Canadian, British, Australian, western European.

22. The online discussion board in which I participated was conducted almost entirely in English, as most members were native English-speaking men. Interviews and informal conversations with Russian clients and employees of international dating agencies were conducted in Russian; in the United States, I spoke with native Russian speakers both in Russian and, often, in English, depending upon context (for example, whether Englishonly speakers were present) and interviewees’ English ability (generally quite fluent).

23. On consumption as a “rite of initiation,” see Berdahl, Daphne, Wliere the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley, 1999)Google Scholar. On the importance of individual consumption, see Patico, Consumption and Social Change; Fehérváry, Krisztina, “American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normal’ Life in Postsocialist Hungary,” Ethnos 67, no. 3 (2002): 369–400 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. It is worth noting that such disparaging comments were not limited to women seeking foreign spouses. While working on a different research project in the same city in 1998-99, I had quite similar conversations with an entirely different set of women— two cohorts of public schoolteachers, of which only one member (to my knowledge) was corresponding with western men through an agency. See Patico, , Consumption and Social Change. Google Scholar

25. For gender roles in crisis, see Patico, “For Love, Money, or Normalcy.” On alcoholism, male mortality, and attitudes toward spousal abuse in Russia, see Rivkin-Fish, Michele, Women's Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention (Bloomington, 2005), 78 Google Scholar; Hemment, Empowering Women; Feshbach, Murray, “Russia's Health and Demographic Crises: Policy Implications and Consequences,” Health and National Security Series (Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, April 2003) at www.dartmouth.edu/∼dcare/pdfs/feshbach_russia_health.pdf (last accessed 1 December 2009)Google Scholar. The rate of spousal abuse and murder in Russia is reportedly high: the Russian government has estimated that as many as 14,000 women are killed by family members each year. See, for example, “Violence against Women in Russia: A Report to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights” at www.omct.org/pdf/VAW/Publicauons/2003/Eng_2003_08_Russia. pdf (last accessed 1 December 2009).

26. The Russian press has discussed the problem of some men's unwillingness to marry due to the financial burdens marriage places on men in an era when value is placed on males as breadwinners yet maintaining lucrative employment is problematic; see Jzvestiia, 29 June 2007, 20. See also the 20 November 2006 issue of Ogonek for a discussion of the increasing popularity of civil marriage (cohabitation) in Russia. Jeffrey Alyn Smith suggests that across eastern Europe, government statistics reflect a drop in marriage and a common pattern of getting married in one's twenties and divorcing within five years. See Smith, Jeffrey Alyn, “The Five-Year Plan to Trap Your Man: Discourses on Marriage, Family, and Divorce in Hungary,” Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe!, no. 2 (September 2007): 3–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more scholarly treatment of the drop in marriage rates in postsocialist Russia, refer to Pushkareva, N. L. and and Kaz'mina, O. E., “Etnos, obshchestvo, gosudarstvo: Rossiiskaia sistema zakonov o brake v XX v. i traditsionnye ustanovki,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2003, no. 4: 67–89 Google Scholar. For a discussion of the ways in which such unattainable ideals for marriage and masculinity trap, not only women, but also men, in psychologically difficult and conflictual situations, see Smith, “Five-Year Plan.“

27. Kupchinsky, Roman, “Russia: Tackling the Demographic Crisis,” Radio Free Europe/ Radio Libert)', 19 May 2006, at www.rferl.org/content/article/1068526.html (last accessed 1 December 2009)Google Scholar.

28. Zdravomyslova, Elena and Temkina, Anna, “Krizis maskulinnosti v pozdnesovetskom diskurse,” in Oushakine, Sergei, ed., 0 Muzhe(n)stvennosti: Sbornik statei (Moscow, 2002)Google Scholar, as well as other articles in this collection.

29. Verdery, Katherine, “From Parent-State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe,” East European Politics and Societies 8, no. 2 (March 1994): 225-55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Funk, Nanette, “Introduction: Women and Post-Communism,” in Funk, Nanette and Mueller, Magda, eds., Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

30. Azhgikhina, Nadezhda and Goscilo, Helena, “Getting under Their Skin: The Beauty Salon in Russian Women's Lives,” in Goscilo, Helena and Holmgren, Beth, eds., Russia-Women-Culture (Bloomington, 1996)Google Scholar.

31. On the postsocialist politics of gender more broadly, see, for example: Gal, Susan and Kligman, Gail, The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay (Princeton, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Temkina, Anna and Rotkirch, Anna, “Soviet Gender Contracts and Their Shifts in Contemporary Russia,” in Temkina, Anna, ed., Russia in Transition: The Case of New Collective Actors and New Collective Actions (Helsinki, 1997)Google Scholar; Tania Rands Lyon, “Housewife Fantasies, Family Realities in the New Russia,” and Johnson, Janet Elise and Robinson, Jean C., “Living Gender,” both in Johnson, Janet Elise and Robinson, Jean C., eds., Living Gender after Communism (Bloomington, 2007)Google Scholar; Hemment, , Empowering Women. Google Scholar

32. Hemment, Julie, “Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belonging: Defining Violence against Women in Russia,” Signs 29, no. 3 (2004): 823 Google Scholar.

33. Borenstein, Eliot, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca, 2008), 46 Google Scholar. See also Attwood, Lynne, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex Role Socialization in the USSR (Bloomington, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. Borenstein, , Overkill, 49 Google Scholar.

35. On the fate of Russian culture, see Clark, Katerina, “Not for Sale: The Russian/ Soviet Intelligentsia, Prostitution and the Paradox of Internal Colonization,” in Freidin, Gregory, ed., Russian Culture in Transition (Stanford, 1993)Google Scholar. On the idea that everyone is forced into prostitution, see Borenstein, , Overkill, 46 Google Scholar.

36. Borenstein, , Overkill, 88 Google Scholar.

37. According to an Eastview database search of relevant materials in the Russian press, the issue of human trafficking began to be discussed as a general European problem as early as 1996. Coverage was low until about 2002, however, when I found several articles referring to the problem as it affected the former USSR; twice as many (13) ran in major Russian and former Soviet media sources in 2003. In some cases, international marriage agencies (brachnye agenstvd) were mentioned as sources of risk, and international organizations such as the Global Survival Network or IREX were named as authorities on the issue.

38. Fehervary, , “American Kitchens.”Google Scholar

39. See also Patico, , Consumption and Social Change, chap. 5 Google Scholar.

40. Ibid., 9.

41. Larisa used the term Russian to denote a loose ethnic and regional identity; although she herself was from Belarus, she spoke of “Russian” women, men, lifestyles, and gender norms.

42. Lyon, “Housewife Fantasies“; Smith, “Five-Year Plan.“

43. Lyon, “Housewife Fantasies.” Two women with whom I spoke in St. Petersburg, both of them waiting for their K-l visas to come through so that they could join their husbands-to-be in the United States, reflected such ambiguity as they narrated their own international relationships. One was in her late forties, a widow and mother of teenage children; the other was in her twenties and had never been married before. Both spoke, in their own ways, of how they saw themselves as extremely independent and active individuals, whose visions for their own futures might not yet be fully understood by their fiancés, who (the women knew) preferred that their wives not work outside the home. Neither woman seemed to feel that she had misrepresented herself unduly, nor did either seem worried about what these differences in expectations might mean for their future marriages. It seemed to me that they were presenting the seeming contradictions as part of the expected process of courtship and of getting to know one's loved one, and that they assumed they would be able to manage these dynamics once they entered into married life. They spoke excitedly about having fallen in love quickly with their intended spouses and about the maddening frustration of waiting for months and months for their visa approvals to come through so they could join their fiancés.

44. Leyla Keough, “The Gendering of Migration Management in Moldova” (paper presented at the annual conference of Soyuz, the Post-Communist Cultural Studies Network, Princeton University, April 2007), 1; see also Hemment, , “Global Civil Society,“ 835-36Google Scholar.

45. Shevchenko, , Crisis and the Everyday, 12 Google Scholar.

46. Though see Constable, Romance on a Global Stage; Schaeffer-Gabriel, “Planet-Love, com“; Banu, Nilgun Uygun, “Post-Socialist Scapes of Economy and Desire: The Case of Turkey,” Focaal — European Journal ofAnthropology 43 (2004): 27–45 Google Scholar; Suzuki, “Cross-Border Marriages.” For the much larger body of work on women's viewpoints, see, for example, Ehrenreich, and Hochschild, , eds., Global Woman; Bloch, Alexia, “Victims of Trafficking or Entrepreneurial Women? Narratives of Post-Soviet Entertainers in Turkey,” Canadian Woman Studies 22, nos. 3 - 4 (Spring-Summer 2003): 152-58Google Scholar; Kelsky, Karen, Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams (Durham, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keough, Leyla, “Globalizing ‘Postsocialism': Mobile Mothers and Neoliberalism on the Margins of Europe,” Anthropological Quarterly 79, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 431-61Google Scholar; Faier, Lieba, “Filipina Migrants in Rural Japan and Their Professions of Love,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 1 (February 2007): 148-62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47. Johnson, Ericka, Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband: Russian-American Internet Romance (Durham, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Luehrmann, Sonja, “Mediated Marriage: Internet Matchmaking in Provincial Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 56, no. 6 (September 2004): 857-75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48. Miller-Muro, Layli, Transcript of interview at the Mount Madonna School, Watsonville, California (2006) at www.mountmadonnaschool.org/gov06/interviews/miller (last accessed 1 December 2009)Google Scholar.

49. Zelizer, , Purchase of Intimacy. Google Scholar

50. All statements from the online discussion board in which I participated have been paraphrased rather than directly quoted here (or are quoted only in brief phrases) to protect the confidentiality of the sources.

51. Azhgikhina and Goscilo, “Getting under Their Skin.” Two women already married and living in the United States, as well as interlocutors on the discussion board, commented on how Russian women often experience culture shock in the form of a growing self-consciousness about their styles of dress: what appears as too overtly “sexy” in many U.S. contexts may have been common, everyday clothing before. Certainly there is a great deal of attention to women's appearance on the discussion board: members share pictures of women they have dated and of wives (invariably praised for their beauty, while husbands are complimented on their good fortune). But there is also a good deal of sharing of children's pictures, stories of family successes as well as illnesses and other hardships. And when a new version of the discussion board's home page featured a bevy of apparently quite young, extremely leggy women in short skirts, some members asked whether the page was presenting the “right” image of their group, eager to differentiate their endeavor (sharing information and experiences among people serious about being married to a Russian woman) from that of the more salacious agency sites.

52. Some male critics of IMBRA espouse the rhetoric of the Men's Rights Movement. Writing of the emergence of this social movement in the 1980s and 1990s, Michael S. Kimmel argues that: “These traditionalists … felt besieged by frenzied ‘feminazis’ and a culture of entitlements, affirmative action, and special interests. They said they were sick and tired of being oppressed by women and dominated by impersonal bureaucracies—and they were not going to take it anymore! They experienced feminism as an ‘emasculating force …’ and were fed up with efforts to make them feel guilty.” Kimmel, , Manhood in America, 197–98Google Scholar. Stephen Whitehead depicts men's rights proponents as those who “argue that while women have benefited from feminism, this has only served to create new injustices and a new sexism against men. Men's rights advocates seek to bring about legislative changes of benefit to men, particularly in the areas of divorce, child custody, sexual harassment and domestic violence persecution.” Whitehead, Stephen, Men and Maculinilies: Key Themes and New Directions (Maiden, Mass., 2002), 65 Google Scholar. These descriptions echo some of the sentiments 1 have encountered in online discussions—particularly those devoted to anti-IMBRA argumentation—in which participants rail against a feminism that began with calls for women's equality and (putatively) ended up creating a nation of self-satisfied, cold, career-oriented women who think they are more entitled to special treatment than men. And yet, somewhat to the side of these discussions, the more common thread on the more general-interest discussion board in which I have participated is a loosely shared vision of an ideal family life—in some cases defined as “traditional” in its division of labor, in others defined more broadly as fighting the materialism and self-centeredness of contemporary American culture.

53. Whitehead, , Men and Masculinities, 51 Google Scholar. Among the broad “social and economic transformations” relevant to this discussion are related shifts in the labor force and kinship in the neoliberal United States, including increased work insecurity and performance pressures for both men and women (125-26); the rise and heightened necessity of twoincome, two-career households; and high rates of (highly litigious) divorce.

54. Some men on the online discussion board explained that, initially, they were not seeking out a woman from the former Soviet Union; they had simply been navigating domestic dating sites and happened to follow a link that introduced them to this world, or they used a broad-based dating/acquaintance site frequented by both American and foreign users and the women with whom they hit it off turned out to be Russian or Ukrainian.

55. Borenstein, , Overkill, 88 Google Scholar.

56. In her now-classic account of Russian-American marriages in general, Visson reports that many American husbands discover Russian wives to be like a “feminine steel hand” in a “velvet glove.” Visson, Wedded Strangers, 50.

57. There is a good deal of online discussion about the wrong kind of seekers: those who could be classified as sex tourists (who travel to the former Soviet Union only to bed women and may do so under false pretenses) or who simply lack the moral integrity or class to conduct themselves respectably in another country. Former tour participants and at least one American informant who had worked with the agencies in a professional capacity for several years asserted that sex tourists definitely do exist—and, in some cases, are knowingly or even purposefully drawn into the tours by agency executives in an effort to boost clientele—yet many men are at pains to clarify that their intentions are not of that sort. More generally, gendemanliness (which can include honesty in one's discussions with a woman but also dressing well, paying for dates, and general politeness) is framed as the antithesis of “ugly American” behavior in their online discussions.

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