'She has to be Prepared to Improve Herself': Shaping Femininities in Transnational Marriage Agencies in Russia

Abstract

Petra Heyse – Departement Taalkunde (IPrA Research Center), Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium. Email: petra.heyse@gmail.com

This article draws on a broader research project that scrutinizes online / offline representational practices on transnational matchmaking websites featuring so-called 'Russian brides'. The central research question is: how are recurrent online representations related to gender (in intersection with other identity categories) co-constructed in the daily interactions between matchmaking staff and female clients on the floor of a marriage agency. To these aims, the researcher conducted participant observation in a transnational marriage agency in a Russian city and used linguistic ethnographic methodologies. The analysis for this article concentrates on the routine argumentative strategies that are used by matchmaking personnel to legitimate their intermediating role to Russian-speaking female clients in the case agency on the basis of in-depth interviews with agency staff and female clients. The analysis of discursive positioning in interviews with translators and female clients sheds light on the social order that is discursively created. This order is functional in defining and reproducing the commercial dependencies between matchmaking staff and female clients in a transnational globalized industry. This study demonstrates the way in which: (a) matchmaking personnel in the case study constructs subject positions in discourse – i. e. of transnational matchmaking experts and of female clients – by drawing on commonsensical public discourses of difference that encompass gender, age and nationality, and (b) matchmaking personnel affiliates with its clients by conceiving the matchmaking approach as an increasingly popular genre of self-improvement for Russian-speaking women.