Dynamics of elite migrant networks: the role of gender and sexuality


Irina Isaakyan, Toronto Metropolitan University

People migrate in networks, argues Alejandro Portes (1995) in his fundamental work. Therefore, migrants must learn to obtain membership in their networks and to deal with its requirements (ibid). In application to elite migrants such as musicians and artists, the unanswered question is how they manage to sustain challenges of their network membership on a daily basis. Seeking to answer it, this paper studies the dynamics of elite migrant-artists’ networks. Based on narrative biographic interviews with 60 opera singers from the former Soviet states who now live and work in Europe and North America, I examine the most challenging experiences that the informants had while navigating global opera networks. Those include understanding the network dynamics before or at the very beginning of migration, learning to meet the ‘right people’ in ‘right places’, building relations with them and managing to sustain those relations. Synthesizing the informants’ testimonies with the theories of ‘migrant network’ and ‘cultural production’, I explore their networking problems and associated coping strategies, particularly through the prism of gender relations. I specifically look into their network brokerage and other difficult and gender-biased relations and practices that my informants had with their networks. The analysis of the findings illuminates the work of migrant agency in relation to the most desired and undesired networking spaces they respectively sought to enter and exit. Seeking entrance to their networks, the informants use the strategies of socializing parties, personal friends’ connections and protection of a powerful network actors (network node). Very often these strategic, or agentic, activities are inter-connected, forming the ‘strategic (or agentic) staircase’: the informant may first participate in a socializing party, where s/he would meet a soon-to-be friend or mentor, who would eventually introduce him/her to an influential patron. The findings show that the most difficult problem for my informants in their elite networking was the socialization and establishment of a rapport with their low-level intermediaries rather than with more influential network actors. The informants confess having experienced many more serious and long-term hardships and vulnerabilities such as daily humiliation (both emotional and physical), over-exploitation (both as professionals and as persons, especially as young, vulnerable women) and persistent gender bias through the networking relations of this kind. Another difficult challenge of their networking was their inability to end the undesired relationship with a previously desired network patron and to terminate the undesired network membership quickly and without consequences for one’s career progression. It came to be a much more difficult challenge than the initiation of a network contact or the network entrance, especially for the women singers. Strange as it may sound, these “privileged” informants were mostly using the most traditional coping strategy of transnational marriage in the form of the marriage to a powerful network actor. They admit that it always produced the desired effect on the professional level. And this strategy was actively used by both the interviewed women and men. While spotting gender differences in my informants’ experiences of dealing with the challenging reality of their elite migrant networks, this paper also illuminates the role of sexuality as a strong factor affecting elite migrants’ decision-making and explores such a powerful mechanism of elite migrant networking as ‘sexuality navigation’.

This paper will be presented at the following session: