Gendered work and socialist pasts: memories and experiences of women repatriates in Germany

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine how migrant women make sense of their new positions in the labour market while drawing on and negotiating past meanings and experiences. I explore the individual biographies of legally privileged co-ethnic women repatriates from the former Soviet Union to Germany through a gendered perspective of work. These women found that the ethnic promise of being ‘real’ Germans given to them proved insufficient to access the labour market on equal terms, while their past Soviet socialisation led to struggles for recognition and marginalisation into low-status jobs. Although their labour-power is oftentimes devalorised, these women actively operationalise different memories of socialist work to reinvent themselves in a new context as worthy, resilient, and adaptable members of a capitalist society. Their stories of work reflect their present- and future-oriented life strategies and demonstrate how they relate different ideologies and systems of value, distant spaces and times in an attempt to challenge dominant discourses on human worth. By exploring individualised life strategies and gendered invocations of the past, this paper contributes to the discussion on post-socialist subjectivities, how they intersect with ambiguous socialist experiences and dilute the neoliberal project.