In recent years, women's transnational labor migration from Moldova has grown exponentially and their absence from families has provoked considerable anxiety over transformations in the social order. Few scholars of postsocialist states have explored transnational labor. Those who have focus on how new economic practices such as trading are anxiety-ridden because they index transformations from socialism to "postsocialism." These scholars have not detailed nor theorized the gendered nature of migrant labor, representations of it, and states responses to it. Using ethnographic research and interviews with Gagauz Moldovan migrant women who travel to work as domestics in Turkey and their village compatriots in Moldova, this paper illustrates a discourse of blame that employs the trope of "mothers as key to the social order," one complicated by notions of socialism, sexuality, ethnicity, work, wealth, and rurality. This trope plays a key role in blaming female migrant laborers for social disorder and in migrants' own justifications for going abroad. I argue that the migrants' gendered justifications constitute a new moral economy that aligns with global and Moldovan state neoliberal rationales. Drawing on a broad feminist and anthropological literature, this article problematizes claims about "postsocialist" transnational labor experiences by specifying them in terms of other overlapping subjectivities, particularly gender. In so doing, it shifts the anthropological gaze from a narrow focus on "postsocialism" in this region to identify problems and processes of globalization that hold wider significance and questions our categorizations of states into "postsocialist," "postwelfare," "third world," "global south," and/or "postcolonial."

Islamist Mobilization in Turkey:. Study of Vernacular Politics. Jenny White. Seattle: University of Washington Press 2002. ISBN 0‐295‐98291‐8 (paper), 0‐295‐98223‐3 (cloth)

This article focuses on the skill and fortitude of Gagauz Moldovans who migrate to Istanbul to work as domestic laborers. I consider how these 'driven' women negotiate their subject positions as mothers and wives, educated workers, migrants and paid domestic laborers, Turkish-speaking Christians and former Soviets. While their understandings reproduce certain power relations in Turkey and Moldova, their journeys also constitute a route for empowerment. Their situation is presented in the context of a 'discourse of sexual threat' that circulates about them in Turkey. I examine how this discourse and the women's understandings of their own subjectivities work to open or close off, contribute to or limit, the subject positions, the goals and desires, and the potential agency of Gagauz and Turkish individuals. By considering these issues in this way, I argue that this case study may challenge traditional academic conceptualizations of migration in Europe, female subjects and power relations.

for the audience to relate to the stories of the interviewees. As a non-native English speaker, I appreciate the challenges of academic writing in a foreign language, but I do believe that a better-written book would have been more compelling.Relative to existing scholarship, this book makes an important step toward evidencebased corruptology. Yet, its lack of engagement with the issue of power and a convoluted writing style take away from its potential to initiate a long-overdue critical conversation about the impact that the spread of neoliberalism and its by-product, the heightened sensitivity to corruption, have had on the lives of ordinary people worldwide.

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