Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic. By Alexia Bloch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017. 272 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $28.95, paper.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alexia Bloch's Sex, Love, and Migration, an outcome of more than a decade of intense work, is an essential and extensive study of postsocialist women's labor migration to Istanbul.Bloch sets out to disengage transnational migration from the narratives of trafficking and victimization.Instead, she calls for understanding the phenomenon of transnational mobility in the context of economies of desire, growing precarity, shrinking social security, and various, sometimes contradicting, visions of modernity.Building on these gendered stories of mobility in the region, the book complicates liberal narratives of a unidirectional way from "an 'oppressive' state socialism to the 'opportunities' offered by global capitalism" (5).The book is divided into three parts.Part one, Mobilities and Intimacies, starts with a detailed introduction, where Bloch reflects on the origin of the project, her positionality in the primary fieldwork sites (Istanbul, Vulcăneşti (Moldova), and Moscow), and defines the main analytical concepts.The first chapter lays out a history of shifting ideas about masculinity and femininity in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, as well as in 20 th -century Turkey.Then, going as far back as the 10 th century, Bloch shows a rich history of transnational migration and intimate encounters between the areas of present-day Turkey and the former Soviet Union.Part two, Intimate Practices and Global Circuits, opens with a chapter that reflects on changing gender sensibilities around entrepreneurship and socialist ideals of un/productive labour.Bloch insightfully narrates how women migrants negotiate emotional work and struggle to come to terms with their statuses as entrepreneurs and as primary breadwinners.She shows how her participants' ideas on what it means to be an entrepreneur were heavily inspired by the Soviet concept of "social parasite", because in the Soviet Union entrepreneurship was officially condemned as socially
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".