*New book* Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic

Alexia Bloch Discussion
Dear Colleagues,
 
I am pleased to announce the publication of my book, Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic with Cornell University Press.
 
Sex, Love, and Migration goes beyond a common narrative of women’s exploitation as a feature of migration in the early twenty-first century, a story that features young women from poor countries who cross borders to work in low paid and often intimate labor, to argue that the mobility of women is marked not only by risks but also by personal and social transformation as migration fundamentally reshapes women’s emotional worlds and aspirations.  Drawing on non-consecutive fieldwork conducted 2001-2011, I document how, as women have crossed borders between the former Soviet Union and Turkey, they have forged new forms of intimacy in their households in Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, but also in Istanbul, where they often work for years on end. Sex, Love, and Migration takes as its subject the lives of post-Soviet migrant women employed in three distinct spheres in Istanbul—sex work, the garment trade, and domestic work—and challenges us to decouple images of women on the move from simple assumptions about danger, victimization, and trafficking. I redirect our attention to the aspirations and lives of women who, despite myriad impediments, move between global capitalist centers and their home communities.
 
For a limited time a 30% discount is available with the code: 09FLYER  
 
Warm regards,
Alexia Bloch