Body of the Nation: Mothering, Prostitution, and Women's Place in Postcommunist Latvia

Abstract

Among the guiding preoccupations of postcommunist Latvia and its east European neighbors is the desire to be “normal.” A unifying notion in the period of opposition to Soviet communism, “normality” became a site of political contestation after the restoration of independence in Latvia. The fields of political and social life have been dominated by two competing narratives of normality: temporal normality, a restorationist narrative that elevates the experiences and institutions of independent interwar Latvia as a model for postcommunist change, and spatial normality, which takes the western (European) road of capitalist modernity as a map for the future. Although frequently at odds with one another in the field of political life, the temporal and spatial narratives share a nation-centered orientation that both reinforces and, arguably, expands women's subjugated status in society and submerges the “woman question” beneath the "national question." That is to say that although women as members of the body of the citizenry share in the benefits that accrue to this group in the forms of free speech, voting rights, and the right to own property, women as women have not benefited and, in fact, have suffered the consequences of the dual trends of commodification and domestication that have accompanied, respectively, the push toward economic modernity and the elevation of tradition in social life.