Sex, Love, and Migration

Part 1. MOBILITIES AND INTIMACIESWriting a book is a unique labor of love.The labor for this book project has extended well over a decade, so the list of those to whom I am indebted is quite long and diverse.The project would never have come into being without the inspiring entrepreneurial spirit of central Siberian women I met in the early 1990s, who were traveling across borders to supply their communities with clothing.Likewise, my research benefited immensely from the generosity of numerous women involved in the shuttle trade or working as labor migrants from Russia, southern Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus.I owe a special thanks to those identified here as Kara, Bella, Zina, Maria, Eva, and Nelli for introducing me to their circles, as well as for providing me with something equally precious, their friendship.Maria's, Zina's, and Nelli's families warmly welcomed me and my family in Istanbul, Moscow, and Moldova as this project extended through the years.A number of sources of funding supported research and writing.The Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) fund at the University of British Columbia (UBC), the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC, and the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) provided support early on (2001)(2002)(2003).The Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada provided generous funding between 2002 and 2006, making it possible to conduct research spanning three countries, including by covering expenses to have my infant daughter accompany me.The UBC Killam Faculty Research Fellowship supported my sabbatical leave in Turkey (2007), and the UBC Arts Undergraduate Research Award (AURA) supported several undergraduate students to do library research.Finally, in 2016 I was fortunate to receive the UBC Dean of Arts Faculty Research Award, a form of support that could not have come at a better time; the award enabled me to set aside teaching and administrative duties for one term and focus on completing the manuscript.$1,000 to purchase merchandise on each trip.In this way, the "shuttle traders" ( chelnoki ), or "suitcase" traders, most often women, literally transported goods back to community street markets in suitcases.14 By 1996, however, government restrictions on imports into post-Soviet countries made the shuttle trade unprofitable for all but those with sufficient capital to pay for the services of shipping companies able to evade the high government import duties.15 The more successful traders continued to move apparel from China, the United Arab Emirates, and especially Turkey, with the assistance of freight companies specializing in cargo delivery to their specific cities, including Moscow, Khabarovsk, Kishinev, or Almaty (Aktar and Ögelman 1994;Zhurzhenko 1999).This history of post-Soviet mobility forms a critical part of the backdrop to the experience of many post-Soviet border crossers, including shuttle traders like Zhenia, whose mobility inserted them into a global economy and required them to engage with new intimate economies but also with rapidly shifting border regimes.Although this situation is not unlike those described by scholars writing about migrant women in Japan (Faier 2009) or South Korea (Cheng 2010), in the case of migrant women from the former Soviet Union, gender ideals, mobility, and intimate practices come together in distinctive ways.

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