Uncanny Babushka: Migration,aging and the search for a new sexual Self

The emergence of the Eastern European Migration system in Italy

Eastern European women migrants are late arrivals in the Italian migration regime. Still in the second half of the 1990s, post-soviet immigrants in Italy were a tiny number, a mere curiosity in comparison to already-established immigrant groups (Vianello, 2009). The only job open to them was in the least desirable niche of household services: live-in care work for old, only partially self-sufficient, Italians (Sciortino, 2013). A few years later, however, Ukrainian and Moldovan immigrants were already among the top foreign nationalities in the country, accompanied by smaller numbers of Belarusians, Russians and Georgians. Their number has continued to grow in subsequent years, despite the economic crisis (Istat, 2019a).

Since its inception, the migration of post-Soviet migrants to Italy has exhibited some peculiar features. First, the post-Soviet migrant pioneers were definitely older than the average foreign domestic worker in Italy. Their age at arrival ranged from the late thirties to the late fifties. Still today, two decades later – and despite the arrival of many children for family reunification – post-Soviet migrants have the highest median age of any immigrant group in Italy. Second, nearly all the pioneers, and a large proportion of subsequent arrivals, were women. Among the pioneers, men were nearly nonexistent. Still today, two decades later, more than seven out of ten Eastern European immigrants in Italy are women. Despite the arrival of a sizable number of young males for family reunifications, Eastern European new arrivals are still mostly made of women. Third, the post-soviet pioneers, particularly from Western Ukraine, were nearly exclusively solo migrants. They described themselves as mothers (or, not infrequently, grandmothers). They were the family breadwinners, entrusted with the exclusive responsibility for their children. They hardly ever described themselves as wives. In fact, they were nearly all widowed or divorced, legally or factually (Cvajner, 2019). Although the number of Eastern European couples has increased subsequently, the Eastern European resident population in Italy has still among the lowest number of couples with the same nationality (Colombo and Li Fauci, 2018).

As the women pioneers considered themselves old, babushkas, they thought of themselves as quintessential ‘temporary’ migrant. They had emigrated to work hard, save some money and return as quickly as possible to their children. Many flatly denied that they were interested even in a minimal social life in emigration. Very few of them anticipated that their migration could bring any significant experiential change.

Contrary to their original expectations, however, a sizeable portion of the early women pioneers have settled in Italy, where they are staying, or planning to stay, even after retirement (Conti, 2014). Many have decided, often thanks to the sponsorship of their Italian partners, to bring their children to Italy. In the many cases in which they had become adults, the women have opted for frequent visits rather than final return. Such aspirational change has been deeply intertwined with the development of new forms of sociability centred on a new understanding of mating and dating processes. This, in turn, has been rooted in the symbolic codification of Italy as a place where middle-aged women can and are actually expected to participate in courtship and sentimental liaisons. These experiences may even develop in long-term unions.

The discovery of this ‘right to love’ even in old age has been an important dimension of the migration experience of the women pioneers. Such ‘right to love’ has been subsequently transmitted to the new cohort of women migrants, paving the way to a distinctive pattern of sentimental sociability and the birth of new norms such as those regulating the (previously unthinkable) non-cohabitating coupledom. In fact, even the switching to long-term settlement has been rooted in the consequences of the development of a strongly exogamous mating system and the birth of a new sexual field, where age played an important double role in dictating both eligibility (to mate) and desirability (as mate). Survey data document how women from the former USSR – despite their high median age – have the highest probability, among foreign women in Italy, to have a sentimental relationship with an Italian (Cvajner, 2018). They are also strongly over-represented among the foreign women marrying Italian men: more than 70% of the marriages involving an Eastern European migrant in Italy join a foreign bride and an Italian groom (Istat, 2019b). The latter are usually markedly older and less educated (Guetto and Azzolini, 2015).

Unsurprisingly, such unions are often maligned both by conservatives and progressives. Conservatives often claim that such unions are a mere gold-digging expedition: naïve, horny old men are seduced by Eastern European women interested in their savings (and in the prospect of a survivor’s pension). Progressives perceive such unions, on the contrary, as the last ditch offensive of a dying patriarchal order. Italian men, unable to reproduce exploitative conditions now refused by Italian women, switch to needy, backward, weak Eastern women to satisfy their demands. Both these accounts are poor description of the role played by late-life exogamous mating in the Eastern European migration system.

While there are clearly cases of heavily exploitative relationships and a sizeable percentage of failed unions, the evidence available points to the existence of a number of successful long-term unions, often lasting for decades. Exogamous unions, moreover, are highly legitimized within Eastern European migrant networks, as witnessed by the role played by mixed-unions in promoting and sustaining community institutions. These relationships are considered by both partners – middle-aged women and older men – as a satisfactory long-term arrangement able to sustain them in their aging together. To understand the popularity of such arrangements, it is necessary to see them as the outcome of an authentic sexual field, based on specific, shared, notion of erotic desirability and sentimental exchange.

Sexual fields and international migration

The analyses of the role played by intimate relationships in the aging of older migrants provide a strategic research material to foster a conversation between two important streams of literature that have until now developed largely in isolation: the growing body of international migration literature on the sexual dimension of geographical mobility (Cvajner and Sciortino, 2019) and the sociological theory of sexual fields (Green, 2014).

As for the first, it is difficult to deny that there has been, in recent years, a growing interest in the interrelations between geographical mobility and sexual change. Migration is a movement through geographical space that require crossing – often grudgingly – many social boundaries. Among them, ethno-sexual boundaries are often quite important. In the last two decades, a growing body of literature has highlighted the significance of the erotic dimension at nearly any juncture of the migration career (Mai and King, 2009).

A main focus of the research has been the importance, previously largely neglected, of sexual aspirations as a driver for migration. In many migration cultures, erotic stereotypes and anticipation of more relaxed gender norms entrust migration with the hope of a transition towards an erotically desirable future. Mobility is indeed one of the ways in which many types of sexual minorities have historically escaped repression or pursued greater autonomy (Cantú et al., 2009). To make visible this type of mobility, Hector Carillo has coined the term ‘sexual migrations’, covering those international relocations subjectively motivated by the sexual orientation or projects of those who migrate (Carrillo, 2018). Although most studies of sexual migrations have been focused on the mobility of LGBT+ migrants, the same model can be applied to an ample variety of sexual categories that are denied full membership in local lovescapes. Among them, mature and old persons are frequent presences. Relationally and symbolically excluded in the place where they live, mature people may try to gain – more or less easily – access to potential partners in other places. Their migration may be an experience of re-sexualization, a form of re-inclusion in the circuit of intimate memberships (Lulle and King, 2016).

While we acknowledge the importance of this perspective, we also want to suggest the necessity to broaden the importance of sexuality in migrations studies well beyond Carrillo’s ‘motivational’ definition. In many – indeed, perhaps in most – cases, the subjective process of sexual change is triggered indirectly, and sometimes serendipitously, by the experience of geographical dislocation. Many of these changes, in fact, are independent from any pre-emigration aspiration to change one’s sexual Self (Ahmadi, 2003; Gonzales-Lopez, 2005). In the case of the post-Soviet women described here, the importance of emigration in the shaping of new sexual selves can only be appreciated retrospectively, as it was largely absent – indeed, even ostracized – from the definition of the situation adopted by the migrant around departure.

An adequate understanding of the sexual dimension of migration, moreover, requires going beyond the individualistic pursuit of subjective preferences or cultural scripts. Migration-related sexual change is not limited to changes in the opportunities, norms and sanctions that regulate individual desire. Migration is also a challenge to the functioning of established sexual fields, the collective structures fostering the development of fine-grained, shared, criteria of desirability that may be translated interactionally in tastes and judgements (Levi Martin and George, 2006). It is the patterned interaction within these fields, rather than the mere aggregation of individual intentions, that shape what makes people sexually attractive to one another (Scheim et al., 2019). Sexual fields scholars claim that modern societies are defined by a large plurality of specialized sexual fields, each defined by different degrees of institutional autonomy, legitimacy, behavioural consistency, horizontal fragmentation and vertical stratification (Green, 2014). Acceptance of such structures defines the practices even of those members that are least likely to benefit from them (Wade, 2019). Giving centrality to social practices over rule-based behaviour and preference-based choice, sexual fields theory has offered researchers an important alternative to both rational-choice account of sexual agency and to the culturally determinist versions of script theory (Green, 2014).

The potentialities of sexual fields theory, however, have been weakened by the tendency of sexual field scholars to always assume stable populations of members. Even those sexual field theorists that have worked on ethnically and racially diverse fields have done so assuming that participants were already socialized, their habitus already hardened (Farrer, 2010; Walsh, 2007). With our study, we want to highlight the importance of the dynamics shaping the boundaries of the fields themselves. Migrants, through their mobility, cross not only significant ethno-cultural barriers but also the boundaries among different sexual fields. If exposure to different sexual fields changes migrants, migration also changes the sexual fields. It generates the challenges of including – or excluding – new categories of members as well as creating the conditions, through the ethno-sexual stereotyping of the newcomers, for the birth of new sexual fields. In our case, the specific features of the initial Eastern European migration to Italy – made by educated, middle-aged women migrating after a traumatic process of downward professional mobility matched by marital dissolution and sentimental neglect – have given rise to a new sexual field based on a radically different understanding of age as a criterion both for inclusion in the field itself (in the case of the women) and of desirability (for men). This field, once born, has been able to institutionalize itself, offering subsequent waves of members a (relatively) stable expectation order.

Data and methods

Accounting for long-term social change presents many methodological and empirical challenges. Retrospective accounts, such as those provided by biographical interviews, provide a chronicle of the past as it is remembered many years later. Beside the reliability of individual memories, the problem is that the meaning of events such as the one narrated here – a set of middle-aged women suddenly discovering through migration to have ‘returned women again’ – masks themselves over time. The reactions to such discovery have produced a sharp differentiation among the migration trajectories of the women. Once such differentiation has moved beyond a certain threshold, migration selves inevitably solidify retrospectively into a repertoire of taken-for-granted differences. The new selves are projected well into the past, and differences become heavily moralized, perceived as natural attributes of specific individuals and their cliques. The outcome modifies the path that has brought them there and negates all the other possible paths the very same women could have taken. What has become is now what was bound to be. Retrospective accounts are consequently sharply different from real-time data, recorded during the process, that show which concrete interactional mechanisms have shaped a certain train of experience (Jerolmack and Khan, 2014).

To understand the long-term role played by the erotic dimension in the development of late-age women migration from Eastern Europe to Italy, we have decided to combine and triangulate real-time data and retrospective accounts, observation-based descriptions and later recollections. We consequently rely on two different, independently collected, data sources. The first is an ethnographic project, taking places in the Northern Italian city we call Alpinetown, that has recently entered its third decade (Cvajner, 2019). The second is a collection of biographical interviews with Eastern European women pioneers. The interviews are part of the LIL database, a set of biographical interviews with foreign domestic workers in Italy collected and codified using a comparable protocol. ¹ The triangulation of the two sources has made possible to sketch a more accurate description of the women’s sentimental discovery that otherwise wouldn't have been possible.

Desexualized aspirations

The first wave of post-soviet women joining the care work sector of Italian cities described their sentimental life before emigration as marked by loneliness and neglect. In their 40s or 50s, sometimes even in their 30s, they had found themselves excluded from nearly all forms of ‘honest’ intimate life. Such sexual obsolescence may appear extreme. Once read in the context of the period – defined by the structural interaction of demographic patterns of early marriage/early fertility, the economic and social trauma of the political transition, the diffusion of alcoholism and the (comparatively) low life expectancy of post-soviet males – it is possible to understand how the women were considered, and they considered themselves, desexualized ‘babushkas’. It was assumed that their emotional satisfactions had to derive only from the care of their children and grandchildren. I was definitely not choosy, Ruslana, a 46-year-old Moldovan woman explained in an interview in 2002, I was desperate for a man. Really. Very simply, there were no decent males left. Gosh, it was like shopping in the old [i.e. Soviet] times. ²

The pioneers were conscious that their emigration involved the crossing of some ethno-sexual frontier, usually embodied in the widely known symbolic opposition – drawn from the Italian melodic music popular in the last decades of the USSR – between the (Southern) Italian man (both passionate and family-oriented) and the soviet man – disparagingly nicknamed sovok – unable to engage in proper courtship and to take care of a family. Romantic considerations, however, did not play any role in their decision to emigrate. ³ If anything, the women anticipated that emigration would imply a further restriction of their already-limited sexual options. Emigration was associated with loneliness and sexual life in emigration with indecency and risk.

Emigration was lived by Eastern European women pioneer as an unjust punishment, forced by the need to provide for their children and for their parents. They spoke of their emigration as a self-inflicted trauma, forced upon them by blind circumstances. The stories they exchanged among themselves were all narratives of loss: of their jobs, of their husbands, of their savings and assets, of their status as modernized, urban, professionals. They had been educated soviet women. They had worked for large organizations in white-collar jobs. They had been sophisticated members of an important high culture, daughters of Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky. The breakdown of the USSR (and particularly the 1998-ruble crisis) had forced them to leave behind even the last vestiges of their middle-class status. They had turned themselves into rab [serf] for ungrateful Italian families. Although the women were proud of being able to provide for their children and parents, the way they provided for them was associated with an intense degradation of status. When in public spaces, they constantly feared to be identified as lavaculi. ⁴

Beyond the narrative of loss: The challenge of middle-aged womanhood

The sacrificial narrative of loss was, in the beginning, pervasive. After a while, however, migration careers started to differentiate along two different paths.

Some women remained faithful to the original narrative, living it in increasingly religious terms. When the provision of regular Orthodox and Greek-Catholic services started, a cluster of associations and social activities developed around them. For the women who choose to focalize most of their social life within these circles, the ‘loss’ acquired the meaning of a test. The women tribulations were defined and understood as noble instances of self-sacrifice, of ways of bearing the Cross. Within these circles, the women pioneers remained defined exclusively as mothers and sometimes as national patriots (Solari, 2017). They were expected to focalize their energy nearly exclusively on their homeland, their lives in Italy being a mere temporary phase. Their femininity remained latent or even openly denied.

Many other women, however, slowly adopted a different self-understanding. Without challenging the hegemonic narrative of loss, they started to frame it in terms of an alternative narrative of death and rebirth. An important trigger for the development of such alternative narrative was precisely the discovery that, in Italy, their age did not exclude them from being ‘women’, able to desire and to be desired.

Such discovery had imposed itself through a variety of direct, bodily experiential processes. The women rediscovered their sexual agency participating in many complex chains of – sensualized and localized – social interactions. ⁵ Many women discovered it through the exposure to the male gaze. While walking in the streets – the only activity they could do in their free time, as it did not cost anything – they noticed that some men were observing them as desirable sexual beings. Some women even heard – or claimed to have heard – men sitting on the benches in the park exchanging salacious jokes at their passage. Some encountered men in the streets that, in more or less subtle ways, made their attraction known to them. They now started to consider – particularly during their walks in the city – even the slightest sign of attention as an indicium of sexual attraction. Ah, they eat you with their eyes, said Irina once while walking, stressing, along with the other women, how courtship in Italy was a serious matter. He definitely wants my tits, Alina commented about the puzzled glance of an ice-cream seller.

The discovery that they were still considered women left a lasting influence on many of them. Many years later, Nastenka – a former high-school teacher who arrived in 1998 – still remembered such discovery in lyrical terms: here [in Italy] men are different! They buy flowers, they honk on the street and shout: bella, bella! And you are bella. Not bella babushka. Real bella! It is difficult to say to what extent the instances the women interpreted as forms of sexual interest were really so. In many cases, they could easily be classified as trivial signs of mere curiosity or courtesy. Still, they were all based on the presupposition that the women were ‘women’, not babushkas. And some of the instances were actually, or could reasonably believed to be, subtle indicia of actual interest. The impalpable feeling that they were observed by some men as ‘actual’ women was considered demeaning by some women. It was, however, empowering for many others. Their age did not disqualify them from intimacy and desire.

The performance of resurrected womanhood

The practice of strolling for hours had been originally motivated by the lack of money. For many middle-aged women, however, the stroll started to acquire a greater significance, defined by the sensual process of observing and being observed. While walking, many women would point out to each other some of the men they encountered, discuss how they thought they would be in bed and joke about who among them had caught their (alleged) attention. These jocular pleasures were lived as innocent entertainment, void of any consequences. The diffusion of these naughty jokes, however, signalled how the narrative of emigration as rebirth had started to provide a competing alternative to the tragic frame previously employed. Unsurprisingly, the signs of interest they received were quickly generalized to the entire male audience.

The walks made also possible to identify the existence of prospective partners: the women discovered that there were many older, working-class Italian men – widowers, divorced, never-married or unhappily married – that were openly interested in finding stable partners. After having discovered that their age was not in itself a bar to romance, the women discovered that age did not disqualify these men from participation in romantic projects.

Long before any instance of actual romance, the women started to prepare for the strolls by taking care of their appearance. What had been a cheap way to kill time in an unknown city quickly became also a conscious and well-staged form of display. It started minimally, with some lipstick and well-groomed hair. It grew in frequency and sophistication, involving a whole ritualistic apparatus – posture, clothes, makeup, hairstyle – characterized by the refusal of whatever could appear babushkish, mannish or ambiguous.

The performances, besides being fun and emotionally rewarding, provided the women with a new and unexpected arena for securing a ground for recognition in the new environment. It allowed them to draw a boundary both against the place of origin (where they were considered old ladies, important only as mothers and breadwinners) and against their status degradation as sexless lavaculi. Participating in these performances created a symbolic space for the ‘right’ to restore their status as full-fledged women, worthy of male desire as well as of broader commitment.

Sexual desirability as a boundary-making device

Why did the discovery of ‘having returned to being women again’ trigger such a highly sexualized and materialistic performance? A starting point for answering this question is to acknowledge, paraphrasing Marx, that the women crafted their own presentation of self, but under conditions not of their own choosing. They had to fashion their presentation of self within the constraints and resources available in the environment to which they were slowly adapting (Goffman, 1956). These constraints, as for any presentation of the self, consisted of three types. There were internal constraints, the banks of experience solidified in their own previous biographies, to which they could reconnect in some new way. There were the expectations of the new audiences, the anticipation of how they would be seen by others. Finally, there were the often-neglected practical requirements of visibility and performativity (Alexander, 2004). The women needed something that could actually be displayed and performed on the given stage, with the props and scripts available at the concrete sites where they were located. Among what could be displayed and felt, the most important were the props that could allow them some form of demotic pleasure, a materialized form of experience as sensually different as possible from the physical reality of decaying bodies and incipient death they were constantly in contact with during their work time. The selves the women built were historical products shaped within all three of these categories of constraints.

The elaboration of a hyper-feminine self, matched by a resurrected womanly pride, allowed them to draw two additional boundaries that were very important to them. First, rediscovering their sexual agency allowed them to detach their age from the traits – traditionalism, rurality, modesty and humility – usually attached to the image of the foreign care worker. The women had been increasingly irritated by the fact that their employers – usually the daughters or nieces of the elders they were hired to care for – expected them to dress modestly. Flashy clothes and heavy makeup, that the women cherished as signs of their resurrected femininity, were frown upon. They felt that Italian (women) employers feared their true womanhood, thus trying to force them to appear not what they authentically were – strong, independent, well-educated urban women – but rather what they despised, docile and ignorant babushkas, old peasant women. One night, Anja, a former store manager, stated her advice to a novice concisely: They want you to dress as if you were still in Soviet times! All the women laughed, and her declaration became a maxim that others repeated.

More troublesome, such performances – distinguishing them from the many domestic workers migrating from the Philippines and Sri Lanka – embedded a claim to respect on ‘racial’ grounds. They also established a difference between the sophisticated women – civilized urban dwellers – and the many domestic workers from Rumania and Albania, whom the women considered rural people, just out of the stable. For many women, the possibility of drawing a clear-cut, often openly racist, distinction between them and most other immigrant group was extremely important. It is worth noting that the immigrant groups the women despised had, in fact, a better social status in Italy than the women could aspire to at the time. The large majority had been in Italy for many years, spoke Italian fluently, had been able to adjust their legal status and had usually left live-in care work to shift to the more prestigious hourly paid work for a pool of employers. Their disparaging comments – the constant emphasis on their modest and humble presentation of themselves – possibly compensated for their comparative disadvantage (as well as advancing a claim to inclusion based on their fair-skinned ‘Caucasian’ superiority).

A second, equally important, boundary was drawn against Italian women (that were, it should not be forgotten, nearly always the members of the households in charge of giving them orders). If the main explicit focus of the walk performances was the male gaze, an equally important – if implicit – element was the activation of disparaging comparisons between their increasingly flamboyant, attire and those of the Italian half-women – as they used to call them – that crossed their path. The women treated as factually self-evident that the reason for such hyper feminine appearance was to attract Italian males that they assumed were unsatisfied by the mannish style of Italian women. Such explanation, however, was not particularly convincing. When women started to go to actual dates with Italian men, as example, they were quite careful to avoid any hyper-feminine excess, choosing as much as possible the subdued style they had so often despised as ‘Italian’. The hyper feminine performance may be consequently more easily interpreted as a way to strengthen their own feeling of resurrected womanhood. The amount of effort required to draw such boundary against Italian women was, above all, a mutual, highly moralized, re-affirmation of a commitment among the women themselves.

The highlighted difference was deeper than a matter of style or taste. It focused a contrast between real, deserving women – who, all their difficulties notwithstanding, were still women who took care of their appearance, making efforts to uphold their womanhood – and the masculine, selfish women who, albeit wealthy, failed to perform their most basic gender duties. The importance given by the women to the male gaze and the boundary drawn against the Italian women were consequently perfectly compatible; in fact, they sustained each other. The women started to claim more and more often, even if only among themselves, that Italian men were attracted to them precisely because they recognized in their superior femininity the marks of passionate love and wifely devotion Italian women sorely lacked. Their resurrected womanhood had become an oppositional stance that supported both a claim to respect and a legitimization of mating as a form of social mobility.

From resurrected womanhood to the development of a distinctive sexual field

The re-appropriation of sexual agency helped the women to foster a sense of themselves as distinguished from – and superior to – both better established immigrants and native women. It was also important, however, to define the criteria of an emergent erotic stratification the women started to create to classify prospective partners. This collectively shared ranking of desirable mates provided the basic structure of their sexual field. In fact, the women constructed, and tightly enforced, a sexual stratification system that openly employed race and wealth as selective factors for allocating prospective partners to sharply differentiated types of interaction (Cvajner, 2019). At the same time, such stratification valued age and devalued youth: the most prized partners were markedly older than the women, while relationships with younger partners were considered by definition ‘not-serious’.

This sexual stratification was highly exogenous: post-Soviet males (sovok) as well as immigrants with Asian and African backgrounds (chórnenky⁶⁶) were considered acceptable only as occasional lovers. The only kind of woman who could consider to establish a long-term relationship with one of them was a blyat, a world that is usually translated as ‘prostitute’ but it was used by the women as something closer to ‘indecent’ or ‘sex-starved’. In fact, the few women who had established stable relationships with sovok or chórnenky have always, rather quickly, been marginalized.

Immigrants from the Balkans (Makedonac) – that had settled in Italy decades before and were relatively well incorporated economically and socially – were considered good prospective mates, for their combination of Slavic and Southern European qualities.

Still, the fullest embodiment of romance, the perfect combination of passion and reason, were without doubts the Italians, even if married or significantly older. They were seen as males able to provide, in exchange for care and wifely devotion, both an authentic erotic appreciation and a degree of socio-economic security. Old Italian men were able to make a woman a signora, a respected woman, to a degree inaccessible to any migrant male. They could court a woman properly. They had the experience and the resources for being seriously committed. The women assumed that, once in a serious relationship, the older Italian would – willingly and spontaneously – help the woman in a variety of ways. For them, this was not the ‘price’ paid for their sexual or sentimental services. They talked of their relations with older males as regulated by a broad moral economy, where passion, devotion and material assistance were naturally fused in a shared, life project. Becoming a signora was a form of (relative) social mobility that acknowledged the worth of their womanhood. Even in the (relatively frequent) case in which the Italian partner was married, the women considered their relationship as an ersatz-marriage, a contract based on a holy, not a mundane, exchange of duties and rights. Even in these cases, as example, the relationship had to be built on the premise that – in some unknown future – they would have got old together. Although such description may appear farfetched, it is a fact that, nearly two decades later, nearly all the women pioneers who have been able to experience a degree of social mobility have done so thanks to the support either of a Makedonac or an Italian partner. Even among the women who act as leaders in the various ‘ethnic’ institutions, it is frequent to find women who rely on the social capital of their Italian partners to access the urban resources necessary to the task (Cvajner, 2019). The support of an Italian partner, moreover, has been often crucial to apply for the family-reunification of their children, a procedure that requires a certain income and the availability of a proper flat. While the women who have remained committed to the sacrificial narrative have maintained the practice of regular remittances, most other women have slowly opted either for family-reunification or for occasional visits.

Why would a group of mature women prefer remarkably older men, often married, while frowning upon – on racial grounds – the birth of stable relationships with younger and better integrated immigrant partners? A possible explanation is that the women advanced a claim to ‘white’ status, and consequently a right to be chosen as long-term partners by Italians, not for their being exotic – as is often recorded in many instances of female migration – but rather for their being attractive according to the standards of the men themselves. The women conferred a great importance to their ‘Caucasian’ appearance. They never passed up an occasion to stress how some of their phenotypical features were judged attractive in the traditional local gender stratification.

The norm against inter-racial dating, moreover, preserved the aspiration to become a signora in a second, more empirically evident, sense. In Alpinetown, the number of potential Italian partners they could hope to date was small and reaching them was difficult. The number of potential immigrant partners was large, and it was much easier to enter into contact with them, as they attended mostly the same urban sites. The norm worked consequently as a barrier against the easiest mating option. By sustaining the norm, women pushed each other to keep trying, against all reasonable odds, to reach the status of signora, renouncing other, potentially more accessible, alternatives.

Conclusions

The discovery that, through emigration, babushkas may ‘return women again’ has had quite an impact on the lives of the post-Soviet migrant pioneers. Middle-aged women migrants had thought of their migration as strictly temporary, finalized to provide for their relatives and recover at least some vestigial elements of their previous, shattered, middle-class life. While some have maintained such orientation as part of an encompassing religious interpretation of emigration as a spiritual trial, many other women have elaborated a narrative, centred instead on their resurrected womanhood. Without denying the loss and degradation experienced, such narrative describes their loss as a passage towards a rebirth as respected signoras both erotically recognized and economically secure.

Their returning women again, of course, does not mean returning the same women they had been. Their life as mature partners has not reproduced the sexual mores the women had experienced as young, soviet citizens. A main difference is precisely in the different erotic qualities attributed to age. Women are now taken to be sexually desirable much longer, and men are assumed to be desirable because older. Another important difference, whose consequences are easily visible in survey data, is the existence of a strong exogamous norm, (or) at least by the lack of any endogamous preference. Another difference concerns cohabitation. Many women still work in residential care work. Some of their partners have ‘complicated’ family arrangements. As a consequence, the expectation that long-term commitment implies cohabitation has considerably weakened, something most women would have considered unthinkable before emigration.

With time, the emotional power of the making of new sexual selves has weakened. Today, the hyper-feminine performances are rare and nearly always reserved for communitarian occasions, where they have a celebratory, rather than oppositional, meaning. Recently arrived women maintain a high level of exogamy, even if the choice of endogamous dating or mating is not any more heavily stigmatized. Newly arrived women and re-united daughters usually experiment with different lifestyles, without suffering an exorbitant level of peer pressure.

The most important consequence, however, is that most women pioneers have actually aged in Italy. For them, even when close to retirement, the idea of a return to the homeland has lost much of its original appeal. As Jana recently stated while chatting in the centre of Alpinetown, I’m still here. And here I will remain forever. My heart has been captured (she laughs). Such statement is important because Jana had been – before meeting Carlo, a widower in his late seventies – one of the staunchest supporters of the ‘temporary migration’ frame. Such a commitment seems to survive even the death of the partner. Ulyana – a lively grandmother in her early seventies – had been married for a number of years with Carmelo, a working-class bachelor 15 years her junior. After he died, Ulyana claimed that this would have not changed anything in her residential choices. At least here I can go and pray for my Carmelo….I can go to the tomb.