The emergence of the current terms and dynamics of the migration reality in Turkey date back to the early 1990s, when the country began to receive unprecedented numbers of people. These were either trying to transit to Europe (some in the capacity of asylum seekers) or were entering on tourist visas for work purposes. While there is a burgeoning literature on the various themes related to this topic, the number of full-length books published in this field remains relatively sparse. Leyla J. Keough’s 2015 book Worker-Mothers on the Margins of Europe is thus a welcome contribution to this rapidly growing area.

Keough’s book is a multi-sited ethnography concerning the migration to Turkey of Moldovan women of Gagauz descent, to work as domestic and care workers. The author takes up these women’s stories from the social relations they left behind at home and follows them to Turkey, into their employer’s homes, where they worked primarily as live-ins. The research also covers the involvement of the international institutions that oversee global human mobilities and the political economy behind the policies they formulate in regards to women’s migration. The book consists of an introduction and six chapters, in each of which Keough tackles a different set of actors and relations: in order, these are the transnational migrant workers themselves, their community at home, the households in Turkey for which they work, and the staff of the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The Moldovan emigration began in the 1990s, with its momentum increasing rapidly following the economic crisis in Russia in 1998. While ethnic Moldovans pursued their chances in Italy, the Turkish-speaking Gagauzi came to Turkey, thus accelerating the demand for migrant labor in the domestic work market. As such, the Moldovan migration is a postsocialist phenomenon. However, Keough uses “postsocialism” in its two distinct meanings: first, as a geographically specific term denoting all kinds of transformations in the formerly socialist areas, and second, as a larger concept, such as that suggested by Nancy Fraser, indicating the rapid shift toward the ultimate hegemony of neoliberalism and following the collapse of socialism as an alternative ideology.

In using postsocialism in both of these denotations, Keough treats the Moldovan migration not merely as a move from one physical location to another, or from an inside to an outside, but as a mobility occurring on a single plane. In her formulation, the Moldovan domestic workers’ transnationalism becomes a larger journey, a “gendered moral economy” (p. 4), whereby these women try to make sense of what has happened to them within the larger context of postsocialism in all its political and social ramifications. In Keough’s conceptualization, this gendered moral economy is a common endeavor, albeit with diverse individual consequences, to resist the harmful effects of neoliberalism as all its subjects turn into “worker-mothers.” The latter represents the new identity of the Moldovan domestics, which has to be built on “self-reliance” (p. 73) as opposed to a reliance on the state, as was formerly the case.

Within this framework, even though it is clear who the protagonists of these journeys are, there is in fact an excess of secondary actors who are eager to talk in the former’s names. Keough suggests that the worker-mothers become a kind of knot that simultaneously sutures together and dissects the postsocialist past and the neoliberal future. Therefore, the choices they must make have significant results in the formulation of larger dispositions in society. When the stakes are this high, morality becomes a zone of contention set up over the subjectivities of women, turning their very motherhood, labor, and bodies into subjects of debate. Their communities at home judge the Moldovan domestics for performing motherhood poorly by being away from their families. Their employers, on the other hand, treat them as educated but sexually loose. Finally, the IOM staff firmly posit that desperation is the only possible cause for these women’s mobility. While each of these actors judge the reasons behind Moldovan domestic workers’ migration differently, what they have in common is each actor’s determination to frame this mobility exclusively in their own terms, leaving out any alternative accounts. Contrary to this, Keough’s aim is to uncover her subjects’ efforts to position themselves amidst all these discursive clashes and to illustrate how, among all the reasons that have turned Moldovan domestics into “driven” subjects (p. 209), their own agency should be listed at the top.

Perhaps the book’s most enlightening chapter is the one on the IOM, partly because no other research on the topic has tackled this issue. The IOM is an intergovernmental organization that was established in 1951 and became a Related Organization of the United Nations in 2016, and that works in the area of migration management. Oftentimes, those who follow migration studies from a distance tend to buy into the claim that certain institutions have better intentions than others in terms of their approach toward the subjects on the ground. This firm faith, however, overlooks the fact that global governance always requires a variety of institutions, each of which oversees the issue through its own viewpoint. Therefore, while the IOM may appear to be more “migrant-friendly” than, for example, Frontex (the European Union’s border security agency), this is only because the former has been effectively designated to play the “good cop” role, with the latter established as its “bad cop” counterpart. Ultimately, the totality of the global migration regime is governed through the ideological coordination between these and other similar institutions. Keough’s ethnography, following feminist scholars of a similar viewpoint, exposes this fact by delving into IOM policy formulations regarding “trafficking in women,” revealing the critical role of such campaigns in the management of women’s migration at a time when the latter has acquired an autonomy of its own. Keough’s juxtaposition of the making of policies related to trafficking with the empirical data on women’s migration reveals the disconnect between the reality on the ground and how we learn and have learned to talk about it. This is no coincidence, inasmuch as the global migration regime is a constitutive element of neoliberalism, which demands restrictions on most forms of human mobility, which in turn works to decrease the net value of labor. In the specific case that Keough examines, the IOM fulfills its role along precisely these lines by presenting the Moldovan women migrants as victims of trafficking, thereby denying them agency.

The book’s strengths notwithstanding, there is one important problem: it is based on significantly outdated data. Keough’s research was done primarily between 2002 and 2005, and she also had a chance to revisit the field in 2009. Since her ultimate goal is to trace the moral economy of her subjects, this fact might perhaps be overlooked. However, the problem is not merely one of dates insofar as the status of domestic workers is a matter that closely concerns their moral endeavors. When Keough did her ethnography, migrant domestics were only able to enter Turkey on tourist visas, and were thus compelled to work as undocumented. In 2012, this paradigm changed when the Turkish state introduced a regulation making it possible for migrant domestics to file for work permits. Despite this major change, the book includes neither new data nor even an update noting the implementation of such a significant new development. Considering the vast literature on irregular migration, a change in policy regarding the status of undocumented migrants is not simply some minor point that would slightly improve the text if included. In fact, this oversight appears to be related to an even larger shortcoming of the book: despite her emphasis on a multi-sited ethnography, Keough pays only nominal attention to what I would consider the critical role of the state, which may explain the lack of updated information concerning the status of migrant domestics.

Despite these shortcomings, overall Keough’s book offers a solid ethnography on what happens to gendered subjectivities in a context where mobility emerges as the primary scheme of survival and sustenance. It lucidly illustrates that the “feminization of migration” is never merely a quantitative increase in the number of women migrants: when women, for any reason, have to shift their given positions in society, this shift in turn prompts a flux of changes, a process which Keough’s study vindicates. I would recommend the book to all readers interested in the agency of women and in the migration literature on Turkey.