Women crossing borders in white vans: an autoethnographic account of the performance and embodiment of class in post-socialist migration

Building on an authoethnographic account of familiar migration, this chapter reflects on the relationship between class and gender and how it changed on both sides of the Bulgarian–Greek border after 1989, when unemployed post-socialist workers fled to Greece. Migration and the transition to a capitalist market economy caused an upheaval of established ideological and economic ideas and practices of gender and class for female migrant workers whose new jobs tied them much more strongly to the feminized social spaces and tasks of domestic labour. At the same time, crossing the border, especially in cases where families were separated by it, enables the performativity of classed identities and, in particular, classed gender identities, not just by the migrants but also within their families and communities. The chapter argues that class and classed gender identities should be seen as not just enacted by the individual but as inherently communal and familial categories which operate through networks of intimacy and familial affects.