Abstract
This study examines the inextricable (and understudied) link between ethnicity, gender, power, and space, to assess how gender and power relations operate in, and mark, the ethnic spaces of one community of Roma in Romania. Drawing from ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with Romani women who work as health mediators, this article identifies and theorizes the negotiated meanings that arise among the mediators’ roles and spaces. I argue that perceptions of the mediators’ power roles change between institutional landscapes (spaces of hegemonic directives), Romani communities (conceived space where the women have symbolic control), and the lived space of resistance and internalized discrimination; the latter is both an active constituent of, and a challenge to, racism against the Roma.
Roma 1 communities—commonly known as Gypsies—continue to be one of the poorest and most criticized, scrutinized, and marginalized ethnic minorities (Erjavec, 2001; Hancock, 1985, 1987, 2008; Kenrick & Puxon, 1972; Lemon, 2000; Richardson, 2006; United Nations, 2001). While ethnic spaces inhabited by the Roma other have been a focus for state control, the Romani culture (music, art, food, and crafts) has been appropriated and rendered appealing as an ethnic curiosity, while the brown body of the Romani woman—or Romni 2 —has been exoticized, sexualized, and fantasized over. Such constructions have contributed to further discrimination and, not coincidentally, to Romani feminism. At the intersection of the realms of ethnicity, gender, and space is the noteworthy case of Romanian Romani women who work as health mediators, who are intermediate between minority communities and the public health system. I set out to Romania to examine the Romni’s groundwork as they navigate different spaces and assumptions about their roles. I began from the concern that scholarship has typically treated marginalized groups “in ways that do not do justice to their sense of reality” (Saukko, 2003, p. 55) and examined, in this spirit, the Romni’s stories as instances of communication that manage various cultural positions, each with its own power dynamics. The case of the Romanian Romni mediators is theoretically noteworthy because they offer much needed complexity to the popular understanding of race and gender: The study of these women’s social practice as mediators highlights how they develop, enact, and inhabit several identities in the different realms they navigate, and therefore are seen by their publics as more than one thing, more than having just one role (i.e., the empowered mediator, the at-risk Romni, or the subjugated Romani woman), a contribution and an awareness that critics have long called for.
Beginning with Foucault’s (1972) take on power as a productive relation that contributes to the construction of knowledge, I observed the shifts and challenges in power dynamics intricately tied to space. As women crossed work and home spaces, they changed roles, and shifts in power dynamics became apparent. Each landscape seemed to be accompanied by different perceptions of power. My focus in this project became about the way in which power relations are negotiated in different spaces, the mobility of the mediators’ roles and perceived power, and their agency 3 in the spaces they navigate. This article, therefore, has two main objectives: To describe how gender operates in specific spatial contexts, and to attempt to evaluate the effects of such mobility. In what follows, I begin by providing context about Romani women in Romania, followed by a theoretical grounding of the project in feminist critical scholarship and spatial theory. After methodological remarks, I present my observations on changing power dynamics and the ethnic or gendered spaces in Romania, as I suggest ruptures in traditional understandings of space. I argue that perceptions of the mediators’ power roles change between institutional landscapes and Romani communities, while others serve as both resistance and enacted internalized discrimination.
It is not my intention to glorify the experience of an integrated Romni, or of a struggling Romni either; nor is it to generalize or essentialize as “true” for all Romni the stories shared here, nor as forever “true” for the women in this study (also see Litwin & O’Brien Hallstein, 2007; Stephenson-Abetz, 2012; Thiel-Stern, Hains, & Mazzarella, 2011). Rather, I sought to find what one might learn from women who have been virtually absent from public discourses.
Romni Health Mediators in Romania
Images of Romni continue to be primarily stereotypical in dominant discourses (Hancock, 2008). The feminist positioning—that ethnicity, race, class, and gender are inextricably linked and cannot be analyzed apart from one another (Stephenson-Abetz, 2012)—is useful in understanding the case of Romani women in a contemporary Eastern European society affected by international challenges and interethnic conflict and marked by patriarchy and severe discrimination (as is the case of Romania). This framework suggests that women occupy distinct positions in culture and share collective experiences of oppression, exclusion, devaluation, exploitation, and domination (Litwin & O’Brien Hallstein, 2007). Investigating commonalities as well as differences in women’s experiences entails also recognizing the hierarchies and priorities embedded in the group relationships and identities surrounding the Roma women (also see Schneeweis, 2015). At the same time, one must draw from ethnographic research to problematize the portrayal of the Roma woman as metonymy for all Romani experiences (Blasco, 2011).
To begin, various meanings are associated with womanhood and motherhood in Romania, a patriarchal culture with specific gender roles and hierarchies, where heavy responsibilities are attributed to mothers, wives, and women workers. The society generally rewards men with better-paid jobs and the status of the “head of the family” (Kligman, 1998; Palmer-Mehta & Haliliuc, 2011; Verdery, 1994). Second, Romani customs directly apply to gender roles and relations (Askola, 2011). The Romni interviewed in this study 4 explained that in more traditional families women must walk behind their husbands, but not in their shadow; they cannot eat with their husbands; and they must give respect to women elders in the family, including decision-making power about finances and children. Third, the Movement for Roma Rights has advocated for Romni rights but not without complications. Some advocates and Roma intellectuals and leaders have sought to separate themselves from the connection to women’s rights—depicted frequently in advocacy documents as a distraction from work for all Roma. For the more traditional advocate, emancipation of women stands in direct contrast to the structure of the Roma family and community (European Roma Rights Centre, 2000). Gender and Romani feminism have thus been minimized and deemed irrelevant, even “dirty” in some recent contexts (Askola, 2011; Brooks, 2012), in favor of emphasizing culture, ethnicity, and race. Finally, throughout modern Romanian history, Romni have been the direct target of sterilization and eugenics policies under Communism but also after Communism (Project on Ethnic Relations, 1997). It is at the intersection of these forces of culture, gender, ethnicity, race, the institution of the public health system, and the various ethnic spaces in Romania that the stories of the Romani women must be examined and understood.
As Romania has struggled to democratize since the fall of Communism in 1989, social ills such as crime, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and poor health have increased in Roma communities, contributing to the solidification of the (perception of the) ethnic group as an at-risk minority. Of the various intervention projects and campaigns conducted as a result, the program of health mediation has been among the most successful. Started in 1996 by the Romanian nongovernmental organization Romani CRISS, 5 the program has trained over 500 Romani women across Romania 6 to maintain a permanent connection between the Roma and public health services. Despite organizational, political, economic, social, and cultural challenges, the program has been deemed by officials, practitioners, and Roma alike to be a success and escalated into public policy by the early 2000s (Centrul Pentru Politici şi Servicii de Sănătate, 2006; Romani CRISS, 2007, 2010; Romaworld, 2011). With the decentralizing of the public health system in the mid-to-late 2000s, mediators were relocated from the jurisdiction of departments of public health to local governments. The decentralization and the economic crisis have both contributed to fewer working mediators, increased bureaucracy, and lower, and sometimes sporadic, pay (Local Director of the Department of Public Health, personal communication, January 2009, May 2011, June 2013; Romaworld, 2011).
Geographies of Power
This research is theoretically grounded in three interrelated frameworks: Foucault’s conception of power, spatial theory, and feminist critical scholarship. I use gender and ethnicity as fluid, constructed concepts meant to be suggestive of roles and expectations in permanent, ongoing motion and transformation, and never as static structures (Mahler & Pessar, 2001). As social constructions, they become implicated in institutions and policies and are rendered meaningful as people are socialized to view gendered and ethnic distinctions. Space has also been understood as socially constructed, contextual and historical, not just “there” (Cornwall, 2007), and ascribed cultural significance as urban or rural landscapes (Kitchin, 1998). Foucault argued that space is central in the exercise of power (1972), a starting point in understanding Mahler and Pessar’s framework of gendered geographies of power (2001)—which I expand here to mean gendered and ethnic geographies of power. I use this conceptualization to analyze agency and power in the spaces that Romani women navigate. Mahler and Pessar (2001) use the construct to suggest that gender—and I argue ethnicity, too—“operates simultaneously on multiple spatial and social scales” (p. 445). Such scales, or locations, these authors write, refer to persons’ positions within power hierarchies created through historical, political, economic, geographic, kinship-based, and other socially stratifying factors … For the most part, people are born into a social location that confers on them certain advantages and disadvantages. (pp. 445–446)The processes of constructing meaning and knowledge within and about ethnic spaces rely on the specific definitions given liberally, popularly, or strategically to gender and gender roles, to ethnicities as groups, and to ethnic practices. As certain definitions become reified over others as natural, immutable, unchangeable, and unavoidable, so do social practices enact and mimic a restricted repertoire of attitudes and actions (Foucault, 1972).
Social theorist Henri Lefebvre’s three-part conceptualization of space (1991) first describes (a) the spatial practice to mean the physical, perceived space, which is bounded and limited, and in which bodies operate and interact with one another in everyday routines; for the purpose of this study, the perceived space is that of the doctors’ offices, the city halls, the meeting rooms at the Direction of Public Health, or the homes of the Roma. Second, Lefebvre describes (b) the conceived space that is imagined, communicable, and symbolic; for the mediators, this is their work, the practice of being a “Roma health mediator,” complete with codes, rules, expectations, and routines. Third, (c) the lived space or the spaces of representation combines the first two, for Lefebvre, and constitutes the realm of “social struggle, counter-discourses and resistance … of discriminatory practices such as racism, sexism and homophobia and is where marginalization is produced and enforced” (van Ingen, 2003, p. 204). Since space is also experienced bodily, feminist geographers have noted that spatial arrangements are reflective of, and reinforcing, gendered power relations (Mahler & Pessar, 2001).
It follows that gendered and ethnic subjects are born and continue to be tied throughout their life to distinct social and spatial locations, which in turn hold social meanings and power. Each space is associated with particular roles, each signifying varying degrees of power, initiative, or control. Space has been defined and appropriated politically—and simplified, I suggest—to mean the dyads of private or public, city or country, urban or rural, with distinct meanings and roles—public or domestic, home or work (Tuhiwai Smith, 2007). In thinking about the space inhabited by the Roma, concepts such as inside or outside, boundaries, borders, in town or out of town, “out there,” center or outskirts, and so forth, become relevant. The choice of location for Roma communities—whether chosen, accidental, consequential, or assigned—denotes relationships of power, where the “center” and “in town” are hierarchically higher, more respected, safer, cleaner, easy to access, and so forth, in sharp contrast to the Romani-inhabited spaces, which are “out there,” apart, typically avoided, unkempt, hard to access, ignored, or invisible altogether (also see Mignolo, 2003; Tuhiwai Smith, 2007).
Examining questions of agency and power inevitably invokes the contested concept of empowerment, which others have problematized as one intimately tied to space (Cornwall, 2007). Empowerment has meant helping marginalized groups toward having agency, which in turn evokes expansion (of reach, of access, of spaces to occupy in the “new,” empowered roles). Others have argued empowerment resides internally and intervention must nurture subjective agency and cultural sensitivity (Dutta, 2007). Conditions of modernity have contributed to solidifying distinct meanings and roles of spatial locations (Massey, 1994) via modernization projects of development that have attempted the physical relocation of the poor and downtrodden, of “those with less power in society … to less desirable environments” (van Ingen, 2003, p. 207). Feminist accounts of empowerment have explained the reclaiming of spaces, as creation of new ones, occupation of existing spaces, or “revalorizing negatively-labeled spaces” (Price-Chalita, 1994, p. 239). Bell Hooks (1990) assesses that marginal spaces, more than sites of depravation, are spaces of possibilities and resistance. Distinctions and boundaries between spaces are unstable, however, perpetually negotiated, always sights of ruptures, affected by a confluence of factors, political, contextual, and changing (Blasco, 2011; Cornwall, 2007).
Methodology and Procedures
This ethnographic project began inductively, formulating research questions from the field (Mayer, 2003), and draws upon a long-term study of ethnicity in Romania that began in 2008. I observed and accompanied eight Romani women in their work in small towns and villages and interviewed them in both formal and informal settings. I sought to understand the women’s experiences as they are grounded in their own environments. Critical ethnography and life story scholarship call for more attention to communication of one’s own journey, especially significant in contexts where the subjects have been mis- and underrepresented (Linde, 1993; Saukko, 2003).
As I attempt to understand the power dynamics characterizing Romni’s roles and interactions, it is imperative to reflect on my positioning as insider (wife, mother, daughter, upwardly mobile Romanian woman) and outsider (non-Roma, educated, middle-class communication scholar from the United States) among the health mediators in urban and rural Romania. This article is based on my earlier introduction to the group of Romni mediators, so I was not a stranger to the women. My role as outsider was more pronounced in Romani communities, where I was a newcomer, an “American,” and sometimes even a “lady doctor.” 7 I was also aware of my formation as a scholar shaped by Western knowledge and of criticism to “the return of ‘natives’” to study homeland societies, to “authentic” accounts, and to “the hybrid identities of ‘native’ scholars” (Parmeswaran, 2001, p. 72). Such awareness is more familiar to postcolonial scholarship, which describes a wave of intellectuals “by liberation” (Tuhiwai Smith, 2007, p. 69). Although Roma-non-Roma relations do not have a root in imperial history per se, the resemblance to colonial and postcolonial legacies (such as internalized racism) is striking and has been argued before (e.g., [Author]; Brooks, 2012). I argue that the same must be recognized in research focused on postcommunist European spaces (as Romania is), which have seen heavy emigration. In this context, I am conscious of the practice of articulating “original,” repressed voices, of speaking for the other, of articulating Romani practices and cultures for a non-Romani audience.
Participants
Nine Romni health mediators from one Romanian county consented to participate in the study and be interviewed, of which eight were available to share their time in the field with me. 8 Their age ranged between 29 and 57, with a mean age of 44.3 and a median age of 42. All women held a high school degree and lived in either the localities where they served as mediators or in neighboring villages. Three of the women have worked as mediators since the early years of the program in 2002, while the others started in 2006. Seven were Romni and two were married into Romani families. The latter were included in the study because of their status (and employment) as “Roma health mediator” because of their self-positioning as part of the community, and because of the Romani families’ treatment of the mediators as one of their own. As the only mediators working in their county, these nine women together represent a microuniverse during this time of political attention to the Roma problem.
The mediators walk the miles from their homes to city halls, to doctors’ offices, to the community, and back-and-forth; only one drives her own car, though she pays the diesel fuel herself. The Roma are integrated to varying degrees in non-Roma Romanian localities; some live in interethnic, comfortable neighborhoods, equipped with the perks of “good living” by contemporary Romanian standards (cable TV, leather couches, granite tile, with refreshments ready for guests); other communities match the horror stories of humanitarian nongovernmental organizations, the forgotten dwellings at the margins of society. Although none of the mediators live in the slums, six of the women took me to these secluded, hard to reach areas, with unpaved and broken roads, in homes with no electricity, gas, or running water, with leaking roofs, dirt floors, little to no food to spare, and too many children sharing one bed. The other two health mediators explained that they wanted to show me the better-off families and not the poorest.
Tacit Practices
I met the Romni at the county’s Department of Public Health, where I unobtrusively observed a routine meeting with the staff, and then interviewed them in two groups, of four and five members, respectively, and without officials present. 9 I came with some prepared questions, but let the conversations move to topics that the participants wanted to discuss, often with little of my prompting. A few days later, I met each of the eight women who consented to my accompaniment in their communities and always drove or walked to Romani homes. I shared meals with some of the Romni and joined others on short stops at their homes or their parents’ home and business. Throughout the workdays (usually 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.), we spent quite a bit of time talking, while walking, driving, or sometimes sitting in the car, or in their office at the city halls. I only recorded the women if we intentionally set time to talk, during pauses from fieldwork. Before parting with each mediator, I often asked clarification or follow-up questions, to check my impressions. In what follows, I offer quotations 10 to ensure accurate representation of the women’s words. My goal in the interactions was to earn the Romni’s trust, enough for their stories to be sincere and true to their own lives, and not to the expectations of a researcher, as much as I realize that any exchange is complicated and mediated by the ethnographer-participant dynamic.
Power Shifts, Romani Spaces, and Lived Spaces
I forward two arguments: First, that power relations are space-dependent—and elusive across space; and second, that space has an active role in maintaining processes of exclusion and also offers opportunities for resistance and subversion of discrimination. To construct these arguments, I lay out three moments in the production of ethnic and gendered space, each associated with different power roles: (a) Institutional power in the perceived space, which is perhaps the most expected; (b) mediator power in the conceived space, which is perhaps a mark of successful intervention toward ethnic empowerment; and (c) resistance and internalized discrimination in the lived space. While I provide my interpretation of each, the three spaces do not have clear boundaries and are constitutive of one another.
Institutional Power in the Perceived Space
In the most literal and perhaps expected sense, authorities hold the most power in and over Romani spaces—doctors, mayors, social workers, and nurses exert influence across physical boundaries and over Romani homes. Sometimes, such figures assert their direction and control overtly and discriminatorily, through what they say or do. In earlier research, I offered extensive stories that authorities have demanded work of the Romni that was beyond the job description or below their training. Mioara, 11 one of the first mediators in the county, spoke of being asked to provide day care; Liana and Claudia were asked to do secretarial work in the past; and two others shared their struggles to refuse custodian work. The women said it has been most common since decentralization to have to justify and explain their time spent in the community—and their absence from the offices of city halls.
Other times, the influence of institutional forces is not present, but instead projected, from the office, from the shadows, a threat felt and not seen. Valeria’s relationship with the family practitioner in her community speaks to both dynamics—covert and overt discrimination and control: Valeria: [During the changes around the decentralization of the public helth system,] the doctor told me to my face, “You’re the first to go.” … She also asked for my salary reduction, but it wasn’t her decision. She tried to harm me in any way she could … She insulted me over and over, she told me my clothes smell of Gypsy. I didn’t want to go to work; I felt I was going to my death. She told me, “We don’t have to put up with you.” … Now, she’s happy I do the fieldwork. She doesn’t go see the kids in their homes; I go alone.
Researcher: Should she go instead?
Valeria: Yes, she gets paid for it. She writes down that she does the home visits, but she only goes to those that can pay her.
Researcher: Have you thought to tell anyone?
Valeria: No, no; it would only harm me. I can lose my job, and then what do I do? I just do my job … They ask us at the Department of Public Health, but I don’t say anything, I don’t want to lose my job … But the people that can afford it in the community aren’t really bothered by it. Those who can’t afford it go in to the clinic [to see the doctor].
Researcher: Does she share the money with the nurses?
Valeria: No, no, it’s all for her. [The nurses] are afraid they’ll be sacked [if they say anything]. She can [fire the nurses]. She did it before [when she heard about a former nurse voting for a certain local political candidate] … There is much injustice and there will always be injustice. And this injustice is accepted by the community. They don’t revolt. So why should I? … I try to open their eyes a bit, but if this is what [the community wants] … They want to be seen [by the doctor], they want to be treated properly … People are used to it.
In Romani communities, the role of the mediator is affected by a shifting perception from insider to outsider in some of the locals’ eyes, as the mediators become identified with interference from the non-Romani world. The shift was most evident one morning, when I arrived with Dorina in a secluded neighborhood of her village. While a pregnant woman was hanging clothes to dry, Dorina approached her about her health and her children’s vaccination schedule. Although at the time, the woman assented to all of Dorina’s advice, the mediator later told me about her struggles with this woman, how little she listens, and how her husband controls the household, sending his wife to do hard, physical labor. That afternoon, Dorina pondered on the uselessness of her attempts, wondering why the health advice she brings seems collapsed with authority intervention—and as such rejected by this particular Romani family. She did not question that the medical information is needed and should be welcome; she did not wonder whether the family has a “right” to reject it, or whether she herself was “right” to judge the family’s decisions, to admonish them, and to continue to try to intervene. The situation reminded me of the difficulty of deciding “which voices to listen to, and how to adjudicate between different voices” in the act of doing fieldwork (Saukko, 2003, p. 67); it is also reminiscent of the complications of attention to cultural sensitivity in health intervention (Dutta, 2007). At the same time as Dorina’s insider position aids her in relating with families, her presence seems to be deemed as an outsider body, sent into the community from the outside; in this family’s space, the authority intervention was rejected.
Mediator Power in the Conceived Space
Although at face value power comes top-down from official institutions, perceptions shift as mediators reach communities. In these conceived areas (Lefebvre, 1991), the Romni are the “powerful” ones. While to me “community” is an “out there” space of fieldwork (Tuhiwai Smith, 2007), the Romani women invoked “community” repeatedly as an intimate site where they return to for respect, recognition, and validation—and where they exert power and feel empowered. Although there are corresponding physical spaces, areas, and neighborhoods where the Roma live, the “community” to the Romni is self-defined as “my community,” “the community that’s mine,” “my people,” “my co-villagers,” and “my Gypsies.” They describe their relationship to this community in warm terms: “I don’t know what to call them, they are so familiar to us” (Mioara); “They call me ‘Aunt’ and other endearing words” (Dorina); “I’m Mrs. Nurse, Mrs. Doctor, Our Mrs., the Mrs. of the Gypsies … ” (Liana). It is at this conceived spatial level that the mediators imagine their work and their belonging.
The conceived space of the work of the mediator includes trust, respect, repetition, the women’s physical presence, and routine visits. The women’s “community” as defined by them is one that is “imagined … constructed through discourse” (van Ingen, 2003, p. 203). If we take Lefebvre’s (1991) view that this is the most dominant form of spaces, then the women mediators hold a great deal of power—and exert a great deal of agency in Romani communities in Romania. When I first met the mediators, they spoke at length—and almost in an attempt to convince (me, as listener and outsider) of the accomplishments achieved on the ground, and of their skill in earning the community’s complete trust. Now, they spoke again about the difficulties they first encountered on the job and the differences in their relations to the communities today. Claudia, for instance, described how skilled she is today at approaching families and at reading the truth: “I first go in the house, I ask how they are, what they’re cooking. I sit, I watch, we talk. Then they start complaining. And then I see the real deal. Very few have lied to me.”
Their skills include diplomacy—what van Ingen (2003) referred to as “codes.” Sorina spoke of how she must speak indirectly to some Romani families: I can’t tell them to clean up [because] they get upset. I tell them instead how others handled say, a social worker’s visit well, to give an example. “Don’t clean for me,” I tell them, but when others stop by, do it.
Understanding the Struggle Within the Lived Space
In the communities where I spent time, resistance took various forms, some more direct than others. This third space of power relations was the more difficult to conceptualize without interpretation and assumption on my part. I witnessed expressions of resistance as defiance of the system, as outcry against anti-Roma discrimination, but also internalized discrimination, and efforts to withhold reactions and information from me. The first two of these manifestations were the most clearly expressed. Before decentralization, several women said they trusted the public health officials to share their concerns when they arose. Mioara, as a more outspoken personality, spoke also to doctors in her town, revolted by comments made about Romani patients being dirty or smelly. Most of the mediators, however, shared a variety of veiled ways in which they show their intervention. Nicoleta and Liana both talked about having to intervene in schools (where they were conducting hygiene workshops) against the discrimination against Romani children. A common discriminatory practice in ethnically mixed classrooms has been to have Romani children sit in the last row, at the back of the classroom. However, the discussion may not be direct: “I don’t make it be about discrimination,” Liana said. “I say, instead, that a child can’t see very well, could they move him from the last row closer in the front?” Another mediator said she silences herself out of fear of authority, as is Claudia’s experience: “The social worker is racist … I’m afraid to bring it up, to insist with authorities to help some families, because [the social worker] will find out.” In Claudia’s case, her fear translated into silencing and trying to work around the system, as the only way to subvert the discrimination.
A focus on explaining anti-Roma discrimination led to me to wonder about the mediators’ internalized discrimination, and about resistance through adaptation at the same time. The eldest mediator, Dorina, was one to repeatedly appease. To a doctor’s comment about the Roma as illiterate, Dorina explained, “It’s because they can’t send their children to school.” When the doctor scoffed that, “[The Roma] want rights, but they don’t … wake up to feed their children before sending them to school,” Dorina apologetically explained, “We have big issues in our community, with many problems, and much poverty.” In an earlier conversation, Dorina denied having issues in her community, by comparison to another woman’s experience with racism: “I think I am a happy one … ” In my observation, I could deem Dorina’s contentment to be naïve, blissful denial, or intricate adaptation to a denigrating environment. The same could be true for Stela’s relationship with the medical staff in her community. During her routine stop at the village clinic, the practitioner exclaimed, “I’m sick of them all, poor and stinky.” Stela smiled awkwardly, but said nothing. I later spoke with Stela about the comments in the office: [The doctor and staff] are intolerant. They are bothered when people move a lot, between [the county capital] and back here [in the village], with no stable address. It’s hard to keep track of the vaccination schedule that way. [The doctor and staff] have their bad parts, but they’re also right … I can’t side with one or another. I just can’t.
A subtler form of power is one that several of the mediators tried to keep hidden from me. On occasion, I suspected that the Romni normally answer more questions about health, more medical questions perhaps, and that they give more advice in the community than they did in my presence. At times, Mioara and Claudia for instance waved away a question, interrupted a community member in louder voice, or laughing, to ask the doctor—and not to expect an answer from her, the mediator. The exchanges always drew my attention as forced, perhaps acted out. In these moments, my outside status felt reinforced. An alternative space of resistance opened in the women’s attempts to impress me (i.e., to perform well in my eyes as outsider) and in their seeming effort to conceal certain social and power dynamics from me. In several spaces visited, I noted stolen eye contact, side body language, and a change from Romanian to Romany for brief exchanges. On some occasions, in response to my probing, some of the women said they are indeed more direct or more critical when they work alone, but not when I was with them (Sorina, Mioara, and Claudia). This alternative geography, this counter-space became shut off, closed off, forbidden for me. Drawing from Foucault (1990), however, “There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say … There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourse” (p. 27). As such, the boundary set up by the women is intrinsic to lived space, which can never be completely known or understood (van Ingen, 2003), and especially not by an outsider.
The mediators’ approaches include both conveying knowledge and concealing their own power. Such is their intervention: Direct and veiled, and everything in between. Seen together—denials and justifications, stories of racism and discrimination, the imparting of health knowledge (e.g., teas to drink for upset stomach, how often to change a diaper, or what to feed a toddler) and healthy living tips (e.g., to air out the room, to clean out the apartment before the social worker arrives, or to wash the children)—these practices render evident that “lived space is both oppressive and enabling” (van Ingen, 2003, p. 204). Discrimination comes from outside officials, it is tolerated (“[the community is] used to it,” in Valeria’s words), and self-enforced, all at the same time.
Conclusion
I argued in this research that perceptions of power relations and roles, dependent on space and mobile across ethnic spaces, change between institutional landscapes (perceived spaces of hegemonic, dominant directives), Romani communities (conceived space where the Romni communicate their knowledge and have symbolic control), and the lived space of resistance and internalized discrimination. The ethnic space emerges as an active constituent of interethnic social relations, which enforces racism in two ways: First, ethnic and gendered space is organized to keep the Roma in their place, secluded in their communities, outside of town, on the outskirts, monitored and monitorable; and second, ethnic and gendered space is a means to discursively communicate to the Roma (communities and mediators alike) that their ethnicity is out of place (also see Kitchin, 1998). At the same time, the gendered power of the mediators suggests a challenge to racism against the Roma. The Romni resist the system, the control that is felt coming from officials in both the conceived space of their work routines, and more discretely in their silence to outsiders, within the bounds of lived space.
When studying marginalized groups, scholars of resistance have approached findings such as these in three distinct ways, according to Saukko (2003). One could dismiss the women’s attempts at silencing their reaction or frustrations with a discriminatory context, including their attempt at shutting out my observation, as ultimately a powerless act over social structures, as a weak resistance that does not challenge social relations. One could, conversely, react overly positively about their agency in formulating and expressing a reaction to the system, to the forces from outside, and deem these acts as discursive transformations. A third approach to resistance—and one that is less judgmental than the first, and perhaps less naïve than the second—is one that is contingent. In this vein, instead of calling the mediators either rebellious or subjugated, I propose to contextualize their power as contingent on the spaces they occupy. I argue that this approach is innovative for the critical communication scholar, already accustomed to contextualize language and cultural practices as symbolic and ideological, in that it complicates the attention given to the dyad of dominant-subjugated (also see Dutta, 2008; Tuhiwai Smith, 2007) by adding the factor of space to the social construction of power relations and also by suggesting complications in the resistance of the ethnic woman. The Romni in this study attach themselves to diverse landscapes, with diverse agendas, and explicit attention must be paid to the ways in which “space not only represents power but materializes it” (van Ingen, 2003, p. 207).
While the Roma have continued to have their spaces and resources reorganized by state intervention, leading to further physical and symbolic marginalization (at the outskirts of localities, or in the hidden alleys of urban downtowns), and continued discrimination and racism, early academic writing focused on explaining cultural demise, on documenting poverty or other social problems. Recent scholarship has moved to contextualize poverty, or illiteracy, or truancy, and so forth, instead of merely explaining it away as a cultural trait (also see Tuhiwai Smith, 2007). What spatial theory contributes to the study of ethnicity and gender from a communication perspective is that power relations are inscribed in space (Lefebvre, 1991) and must be understood as dependent upon, and constrained by, spatial arrangements. As language and communication practices fix meanings into place, examining shifting power roles along spatial dynamics will be productive not only for the health communicator but also for any member of the structures within which Roma—and minorities in general—live.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received a Faculty Research Fellowship from Oakland University in order to conduct the research presented in this project.