Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic (SLM) examines global inequality beyond familiar discussions of exploitative relationships that divide the world between the “Third/First World” or “Global South/North”. SLM traces how women’s mobility is fundamentally reshaping their emotional worlds and social ties: with men, children, work, households of origin and destination communities. Since the early 1990s, post-Soviet women have crossed borders between the former Soviet Union and Turkey as labor migrants. Based on ethnographic fieldwork spanning over a decade primarily in Istanbul, but also in Russia and southern Moldova, SLM portrays the lives of post-Soviet migrant women often employed for years on end in three distinct spheres: sex work, the garment trade, and domestic work. It considers how they negotiate emotion, intimate relationships, and unpredictable state powers shaping their lives. SLM challenges us to reconsider assumptions about mobile women being solely defined by danger, victimization, and trafficking, and instead, turns our attention to the stories that speak to the myriad aspirations and complex lives of people engaged in transnational mobility. Above all, SLM portrays women migrants as people who foster intimate ties as they move between hubs of global capitalism and their home communities.