Female Russian migrants in Norway and their stories about International Women’s Day

Abstract

Although political relations between Russia and Norway have softened over the years, the symbolic boundaries persist. In this article, we illustrate how Russian female migrants in Northern Norway relate to these symbolic boundaries. Thus, perspectives from the phenomenology of the body and critical phenomenology are used to analyze qualitative data on how Russian female migrants experience the celebration of March 8, widely known as International Women’s Day, as a transnational space where they feel both belonging and non-belonging. More specifically, we explore the following research questions: How do Russian female migrants in Northern Norway use International Women’s Day as an occasion to express Russian femininity, or even Russian feminism, in their own way? And what can we, through a political-historical contextualization of these March 8 narratives, learn about the Norwegian majority and how the majority, often in subtle ways, represent women from outside the West, including Russians, as ‘the other’? It is our goal that this article will inspire readers to become more sensitive to racialization processes in our communities by becoming more aware of ‘ourselves’, and how we, through various narratives, reproduce inclusion and exclusion processes.