‘Washing men's feet’: gender, care and migration in Albania during and after communism

Abstract

'Washing men's feet': gender, care and migration in Albania during and after communismThis article compares the interrelationships between gender, family structures and intra-family care arrangements during two markedly different periods of Albania's recent history. The first of these, the communist era, was dominated by the autocratic state-socialist regime of Enver Hoxha. In contrast, the post-communist period that followed was characterised by a kind of reactive free-for-all capitalism and high rates of both internal and international migration, the latter mostly to Greece and Italy.Families have been torn apart by this mass emigration, resulting in husbands separated from their wives and children, and older generations left behind by their migrant children. All this contrasts with family, residential and care arrangements during the communist period when not only were families generally living in close proximity, but also state welfare was available to support vulnerable and isolated individuals. Across these periods, however, the burden of care responsibilities fell almost wholly on women, despite the egalitarian ideology of the socialist era and the potentially modernising and empowering effects of post-socialist migration on the agency of women. The article provides a valuable lesson in historicising regimes of gender, family and care across dramatically contrasting social models.Keywords: Albania; socialism; post-socialist Eastern Europe; migration; gender; care Accepted Manuscript (AM) of 'Washing men's feet': Gender, care and migration in Albania during and after communism. Gender, Place and Culture 23(2): 198-215 [DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2015.1013447][accepted 06 October 2014; first published online . 2 IntroductionThis article takes a diachronic perspective on the evolution of migration, gender relations and intergenerational care within families across two highly contrasting periods of social organisation: state socialism and neoliberal capitalism. The setting for this historical comparison is Albania, which experienced the extreme of both social orders. For nearly 45 years the country was in the grip of the most severe, orthodox-Stalinist and isolationist of the East European communist regimes. During this era, emigration was banned and regarded as an act of treason. Internal mobility was tightly controlled. After the 'democratic turn' of 1990-92, a free-for-all type capitalism was unleashed with dizzying speed. The main characteristic of the 'new Albania' has been mass migration, both abroad, chiefly to Greece and Italy, and internally, focused on the capital Tirana. Across these two contrasting erasthe relatively immobile world of Albanian communism, and the hyper-mobility of the postcommunist period -we focus on three key aspects of how society was (dis)organised: family life, gender, and the administration of intergenerational care.In the next section, we briefly describe the projects from which our empirical data is drawn, as well as the field and analytical methods used. Following that, we ou...

Empowerment or a double burden? Work, family, and agency among Albanian migrant women in Greece

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Post-socialist narratives of being, belonging and becoming: Eastern European women migrants and transformative politics in an era of European crises

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“…paid care, daughters). As Vullnetari and King (2016: 210) conclude, ‘[l]arge-scale migration … necessitated a renegotiation of cultures and practices of care’. Their study draws attention to aspects of wellbeing which are not purely material or related to care drain, but tap into questions of identity and social roles which may be disrupted through mobility.…”

“…Unsurprisingly, the reality lies between these poles. How well family relationships are maintained over time and across distances, and whether these relationships are sources of support and care, depend on an interplay of negotiations on three levels: individual families (micro), culture and local opportunities (meso), and migration and welfare regimes (macro) (Vullnetari and King 2016). This complexity is captured in recent theoretical conceptualisations on the ‘circulation of care’ (Baldassar and Merla 2014 b ), and it is within this framework that we situate our present study.…”