Resistance to Russian Gender Norms and the Fear of Taking Them Home

This chapter analyzes the role of migration experience in forming Tajik men’s gender perspectives in the transnational context, when they themselves live in Russia but have wives and families are back home in Tajikistan. Bringing with them strong beliefs of what gender and intergenerational relations should look like, in Russia Tajik migrants are confronted with a different gender order, where familial power relations, including parent–child relations and production relations, are significantly different from those of Tajikistan. The acquaintance, occurring through either personal experience of cohabitating with Russian women, or simply observing familial relations in Russia, forces migrants to reassess their manhood and Tajik conventional gender relations.