Lately, the image of a woman-wage earner, a migrant from another country, has become a particular symbol of the economic disadvantage of some countries and a symbol of the search for a better life in a foreign land. In the Ukrainian cultural context, the image of a wage earner in literature is classic: starting with oral folk art and fiction and ending with film images of the modern period. Instead, our study proposes to change slightly the aspect of view to the problem and to analyse it through the prism of gender and national stereotypes, highlighting the critical narratives of the history of migration and employment of women, not only Ukrainian but also Polish. This will remove some of the connotations of cross-national insults or under-appreciation and open up areas for further exploration of such narratives in film content. Stereotyped images broadcast in film material through rigid narratives are even more important for research because, on the one hand, they reflect specific structures of collective ordinary consciousness. On the other hand, they form them. It is, in particular, about the processes of the transgression of stable consciousness concepts through mass media. While analysing film images, we can trace certain constructs of narratives related to a migrant woman trying to earn money in another country. First of all, she appears as rightless, unadapted to another culture, the one who can apply for unskilled work (usually due to the language barrier and other factors), and under challenging conditions, her country is poor and does not give her opportunities; also women earn for family, that suits men completely, so there is an emphasis on the inability of some people at the expense of others, on gender stigmatisation.
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