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# Migrating to Dominate? The Experience of French Men in Post-Soviet Countries through the Prism of Intimacy and Gender Regimes

*Migrer pour dominer ? L'expérience des hommes français dans les pays postsoviétiques au prisme de l'intimité et des régimes de genre*

*¿Migrar para dominar? La experiencia de los hombres franceses en los países postsoviéticos a través del prisma de la intimidad y los regímenes de género*

## Laure Sizaire

Translator: Alexandra Poméon O'Neill and Katherine Booth

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URL: https://journals.openedition.org/remi/28408
DOI: 10.4000/15ard
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**This article is a translation of:**

Migrer pour dominer ? L'expérience des hommes français dans les pays postsoviétiques au prisme de l'intimité et des régimes de genre - URL : https://journals.openedition.org/remi/26553 [fr]

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Date of publication: October 1, 2024
ISBN: 978-23-81940-27-4
ISSN: 0765-0752

**Electronic reference**

Laure Sizaire, "Migrating to Dominate? The Experience of French Men in Post-Soviet Countries through the Prism of Intimacy and Gender Regimes", *Revue européenne des migrations internationales* [Online], vol. 40 - n°2 et 3 | 2024, Online since 01 November 2025, connection on 09 December 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/remi/28408; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15ard

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# Migrating to Dominate? The Experience of French Men in Post-Soviet Countries through the Prism of Intimacy and Gender Regimes

Migrer pour dominer ? L'expérience des hommes français dans les pays postsoviétiques au prisme de l'intimité et des régimes de genre

¿Migrar para dominar? La experiencia de los hombres franceses en los países postsoviéticos a través del prisma de la intimidad y los regímenes de género

Laure Sizaire

Translation : Alexandra Poméon O'Neill and Katherine Booth

<footnote n="1">1 "For French men, paradise is Ukraine and for Ukrainian women, it's France." Guy,¹ a forty-eight-year-old man, shared this conclusion with me in 2013, after several years moving back-and-forth between France and Ukraine, when he was about to marry a Ukrainian woman he had met through an international marriage agency. According to Guy, it is in the interest of French men to move to Ukraine, and Ukrainian women to France. But why? What makes these countries appear as a "paradise" to either group? How can we explain this inversion, where one nation seems more favourable than another in terms of gender? This statement reflects the idea that transnational migration is linked to a shift in gender regimes.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 This notion draws on the theory developed by Raewyn Connell (1987), though I use it in a broader sense by looking at gender regimes not just at institutional level, but also at state level. Gender regimes are mainly constructed by nations (Yuval-Davis, 1997) and define the "patterns of practice in which people (men and women) engage and in which the definition of what it means to be a man or a woman is constantly negotiated" (Lépinard and Lieber, 2020: 69). Each gender regime has norms and practical rules that vary over time and space. In this article I refer to post-Soviet gender regimes, because at the time of my research, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus still shared a Soviet past that</footnote>
defined different forms of “gendered citizenship”: from women’s emancipation (1918-1930), to a period of totalitarian androgyny (1930-1950), followed by a return to the essentialisation of gender roles (1950-1980) (Zdravomyslova and Temkina, 2005). With the collapse of the Soviet Union, these three countries experienced a severe socio-economic crisis that fostered a “patriarchal renaissance” (Mezentseva, 1995) and “aggressive re-masculinisation” (Attwood, 1996), pushing women to return to domesticity and men to resume their role as the main economic providers. Later, post-Soviet regimes, and Russia in particular, distinguished themselves with family-oriented policies and discourse promoting the traditional family, based on a coercive and repressive heteronormative gender order, as evidenced by laws on violence against women or homosexuality (Daucé and Regamey, 2012; Moss, 2020; Connell and Pearse, 2009).

3. The politicisation of issues of gender and sexuality directly affects gender relations: while the trend in European regimes has been towards sexual democratisation, meaning that gender norms are no longer imposed as natural laws (Fassin, 2006), Soviet and post-Soviet regimes have, on the contrary, promoted a renaturalisation of gender at the centre of neo-familialist ideologies (Gal and Kligman, 2000; Kuehnast and Nechemias, 2004). Thus, changing country entails changing gender regime, thereby enabling gender mobility and, in the case of French men migrating to post-Soviet countries, upward gender mobility, if Guy’s remarks are to be believed.

4. Although gender appears to be a central factor in understanding many migratory movements (Morokvasič, 2010), its role in privileged migration remains insufficiently explored (Croucher, 2013). Yet, when it comes to accessing better living conditions (Benson and O'Reilly, 2009) (already quite good in the country of origin), the search for different gender relations may be the sole and unique reason for departure. By crossing international borders, white Western migrants become part of a “gendered geography of power” (Pessar and Mahler, 2003), occupying a dominant position marked by “Western privilege” (Le Renard, 2019). In certain contexts, such as the United Arab Emirates (Le Renard, 2019; Cosquer, 2021), this privileged position is maintained, both on the labour market and in the private sphere, by keeping other nationalities at a distance. However, other studies document the experience of Western men and women who enter intimate and conjugal relationships with partners in the country of residence (Bottero, 2013; Despres, 2017a), encouraging these privileged migrants to invest more in the host country over the long term. Once they step outside their “social microcosms” (Quashie, 2016), their experiences become more complex as they engage more directly with the society in which they live. How is privilege reconfigured in the context of transnational conjugality? Research on North-South migration shows that Western women may temporarily occupy a liminal position, allowing them to experiment with a form of liberation in gender relations (Croucher, 2013), but the duration of their residence in the destination country and entering a conjugal relationship lead to the re-establishment of locally promoted gender norms (Despres, 2021). For Western men, although they may perform forms of masculinity that are inaccessible in their country of origin, their trajectories are nevertheless often marked by ambivalence, particularly with regard to their status as foreigners, which is sometimes associated with a vulnerable position (Farrer, 2010; Maher and Lafferty, 2014; Lapanun, 2018). I propose to further explore these “tangled mobilities”² (Fresnoza-Flot and Liu-Farrer, 2022) by drawing on the case of French men who have
migrated to post-Soviet countries (Ukraine, Belarus and Russia) and have engaged in intimate or conjugal relationships with women in the destination country.

Who are these men who head East? Despite the notoriously harsh climate conditions in this part of the world, less significant economic disparities compared to other regions, and the fact that access and the right of residence are not necessarily facilitated,³ are these men seeking a “better life” by migrating to these countries? If so, what kind of life, and on what terms? What privileges are activated for these French men in these migratory flows? To what extent do they benefit from a white, European, heterosexual masculinity? Although West-East mobility is not a mass phenomenon,⁴ it sheds light on “counter-current” migration (Amico and Despres, 2016), which are a priori less linked to post-colonial power relations. Nevertheless, these men still find themselves part of a “hierarchy of nationalities” (Cosquer, 2021) in which, as holders of Western and French passports, they occupy a prime position. As “French men”, they enjoy a favourable “racialised national reputation” (Ibid.), perceived positively by post-Soviet women as men who are more “modern”, “serious” and of “good quality” (Sizaire, 2016; Patico, 2009). In other words, their movement leads to the “convertibility” of some of their attributes (Thai, 2008; Williams, 2010). By asserting their nationality outside their country of origin, these men achieve class and gender mobility. The pioneers of intersectionality, represented by the Combahee River Collective, pointed out the difficulty of “separat[ing] race from class from sex oppression because in [their] lives, they are most often experienced simultaneously” (Combahee River Collective, 2006: 64). This also applies to racial, class and gender privilege, which are activated at the same time (Jaunait and Chauvin, 2012). If “no person can experience gender without simultaneously experiencing race and class” (West and Fenstermaker, 1995: 13), then moving from one gender regime to another necessarily involves class and race mobility, in addition to gender mobility.

This article is based on a multi-sited ethnographic study conducted in France, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus between 2012 and 2019, which focused more broadly on the gendered globalisation of the marriage market (Sizaire, 2021a). During my investigations, I navigated between several spaces: international marriage agencies that match French and Western men with post-Soviet women; embassies and consulates where couples initiate procedures for marriage, registration of their children and other administrative matters; various informal spaces, ranging from hostels to receptions organised by French consular bodies and CouchSurfings⁵ events; and temporary flat-sharing with French or foreign residents. In the course of my travels, I met French men living in these countries and conducted in-depth biographical interviews with fourteen of them, as well as with six of their wives. I will draw on their accounts in my analysis, taking seriously the justifications and critiques they raise in describing their experiences (Barthe et al., 2013), as they provide powerful testimony to the changes, particularly normative changes, that they experienced through migration. By putting the new norms they encountered into words, they reveal the practical contradictions they faced during migration, particularly in terms of gender. The accounts of their wives, which generally align with the husbands' descriptions, mirror the justifications they had to provide to their partners during the conjugal socialisation process.

All the men, aged between thirty and fifty-six, had moved for professional or training reasons, apart from two who had followed their wives. Three profiles of men emerged
from the fieldwork: international students, expatriates and entrepreneurs. I will start
by looking at the first group—younger men primarily seeking class mobility through
their move abroad and their conjugal relationship. I will then show that the other two
profiles—expatriates and entrepreneurs—primarily realise gender mobility that can
take different directions: some men are delighted to have changed gender regime and
demonstrate their complete adaptation to the new norms and practical rules, while
others work to transform their masculinity to align it with the new regime under which
they now live. It should be emphasised that all these men were from modest social
backgrounds, none came from particularly wealthy or bourgeois families. Very often,
their mothers were homemakers or secretaries and their fathers held intermediate
positions, often acquired by remaining in the same company throughout their lives,
enabling them to move up the career ladder. Thus, while class and gender mobility are
distinguished in the analysis, they are intertwined.

This sample is enriched by a residential ethnology, which allowed me to gather
observations and engage in informal exchanges with other French men, particularly
living in Russia. It should be noted that the fieldwork was not made easier by my
position: identified as a woman and as a French national, I may have represented to
some of these men the very women they had fled. As a doctoral student in social
sciences, travelling and living alone in these countries, in other words with a career
rather than a family life, I was undoubtedly seen by some of them as embodying the
figure of the “overly” emancipated woman. The discourse to which I had access was
therefore euphemistic at times,⁶ and those who were willing to share their experience
were also those who were able to critically engage with it (by agreeing to have it
examined by a sociologist).

8

Moving abroad for social advancement

Moving to a non-Western country with European citizenship provides access to “wages of Westernness” and “access to certain advantages based on a dominant position in (racialised) nationality relations” (Le Renard, 2019). For some of the interviewees, living abroad is first and foremost an opportunity to climb the social ladder through professional opportunities that are inaccessible in France. In post-Soviet countries, they also have access to partners who enable them to adopt a bourgeois masculinity.

9

Becoming a "big shot"

While foreign travel is the preserve of the upper middle classes, enabling them to
acquire international affluence (Wagner, 2007), settling and working beyond national
borders offers the prospect of upward social mobility for the working and middle
classes (Bidet, 2018; Pinel and Le Bigot, 2022). This strategy was particularly prevalent
among the youngest interviewees who met their partner during their first experience
of international student or professional mobility. They did not see being abroad as a
leisure activity or holiday, but rather as offering experiences that could open doors
firmly closed to them in France. For example, Sebastien described his first international
experience as part of an exchange linked to the twinning of his hometown with a town
in Poland in the following way:

10
"Oh, it was a shock, because the family was very wealthy, and the town is a bit, well, quite upmarket, actually. It's right in the middle of a national park. The house was huge, there was a swimming pool heated at thirty-four degrees, it wasn't your average Polish family. [...] So it was a shock at sixteen, and I thought, for fuck's sake learn English, learn to speak English. From then on, I was probably the one who participated most in English lessons. Let's just say that it was the turning point for me when it came to foreign countries." (Sébastien, aged thirty-one, unemployed)

11 Sébastien understood that going abroad would give him access to an international network and to social categories that were out of reach in his own country. From a modest social background—his father was a tradesman and his mother a primary school teacher—Sébastien's shock during this first visit was twofold: firstly, he realised that he had “preconceived ideas” about the world; secondly, he became aware of his international social position. His nationality gave him access to (material and symbolic) social goods that were inaccessible in France. This attribute, which had no value in his country of birth, became a capital asset beyond its borders. Seduced by his Polish experience, Sébastien continued to travel as part of his higher education. During an internship in Romania, he experienced this feeling of new power at the intersection of class and race repositioning within the hierarchy of nationalities:

"I was part of a European programme that paid for my travel and gave me a monthly allowance, which wasn't much, 400 or 500 euros, but in Romania I was given accommodation, so 500 euros was a lot [laughs]. The salary there is 100 euros, so obviously I was sort of a big shot..." (Sébastien, aged thirty-one, unemployed)

12 Being a “big shot” meant gaining access to a higher social and economic position than local people. In the same way that nationality only acquires value in an international context, economic superiority only exists as a result of geographical movement, in comparison to the average incomes earned by locals in the country of residence. Moving abroad, as Sébastien had already observed in Poland, allows people to reposition themselves advantageously in social relations in general. Men who consider expatriation are often seeking to move up the social ladder to attain a higher and more favourable social position than they could in France.

## "In France, we're not going to make it big"

13 Several of the men interviewed met their partners while studying abroad, sometimes in a third country, such as China or Finland. After this initial encounter, they began a long-distance relationship, sometimes lasting several years, with many uncertainties surrounding the future of the relationship and the possibility for the couple to be reunited. Men who eventually settled in their partner's country often did so because their partner had no plans to move to France. While the reverse situation generally involved women migrating through marriage, abandoning their careers for their married life (Riaño and Baghdadi, 2007; Roulleau-Berger, 2010), this was much rarer among the men interviewed. Apart from two men, all of them conditioned migration on their work opportunities: their arrival in Russia, Ukraine or Belarus was part of professional mobility or a temporary return to studies to qualify for an expatriate post. They rarely talked about migration or the difficulty of joining their partner, but referred to foreign countries as a gateway to better professional opportunities. Thomas, married to a Belarusian woman whom he initially joined in Russia on an expatriate contract, spoke about this quest for social advancement “abroad”:
"At the start, regardless of the fact that I was married to a foreign woman, I wanted to work abroad. That was the first thing, I wanted to work abroad, that's for sure. I'd been thinking about it for a long time. That's why I was determined to do my internship abroad. It didn't matter where. I wasn't trying to find the country where I wanted to live, I was trying to find out if I could work abroad. [...] I said to myself in France, we're not going to make it big, even as an engineer... Well, they're cutting everything back there too, but usually when you went abroad, ten years ago, you had a coefficient based on your contract in France, so you know ten, twenty or thirty percent more, plus you had accommodation, plus a car, phone, etc." (Thomas, aged thirty-six, engineer)

14 Thomas knew that by going abroad for work, he would get a better salary and certain privileges that he would not have had in France. Through several internships in Russia, he obtained an expatriate post in a French multinational company, enabling him to enjoy a lifestyle like that of the upper classes, particularly by hiring domestic staff. Like several of the interviewees, Thomas is from a modest social background and his parents invested heavily in his education, steering him towards an international career path from the outset. These family strategies are also seen among other interviewees who, by undertaking international student migration, viewed as a "resource for pursuing upward social mobility" (Jamid et al., 2020: 31), become "transclass" individuals (Jaquet, 2014). Thomas understood that by moving geographically, he would be moving socially. Similarly, when Paul's football career was in jeopardy, he turned to foreign countries to plan his professional future:

"I realised that I had entered the real world. My football career was over. I was going to carry on playing football because I wanted to keep playing well, but if I was going to earn a decent living, I'd have to, excuse the expression, work my arse off. I'd have to do something big and at that point I saw going abroad as an opportunity." (Paul, aged thirty, manager)

15 As soon as he got the chance, Paul moved to Finland to study for a semester, where he met his Russian wife. He joined her in Russia the following year, although he did not yet have employment, but he learned the Russian language and, armed with this linguistic capital, rapidly obtained a position as a sales executive in a French company based in Moscow. As for Thomas and other interviewees, international experience—studying or working “abroad”—represents a means of achieving upward social mobility, while entering a transnational marital relationship is seen as providing strong support to realise this project.

## Adopting bourgeois masculinity

16 By becoming expatriates and marrying foreign women, these men develop geographical roots in several countries, enabling them to pursue an international career, supported by their wives, who largely take charge of domestic affairs and thus help them to adopt a bourgeois masculinity. According to Connell and Wood (2005), bourgeois masculinities, although specific to each geographical region, have certain common characteristics such as compulsory heterosexuality, division of family labour, symbolic gender differences and emotional distance between men and women. In their study of “mobile managers” residing in Australia, the authors identified the emergence of a new form of hegemonic masculinity departing from the bourgeois model. However, as in the findings of Le Renard (2019) in her study of expatriates in Dubai, the men interviewed do not distance themselves from a bourgeois masculinity: on the contrary, they embrace it, because the national context in which masculinity is enacted strongly
determines the development of certain forms of masculinity over others, since they are
part of locally promoted gender regimes.

17 In Thomas's case, he had not necessarily anticipated the marital configuration in which he finds himself. Before they married, his partner worked for a multinational company, but when their first child was born, she decided to take parental leave. At the time of our meeting, the couple had had two more children and Alla had not been in employment for eight years. The family organisation is based on a strong differentiation of roles:

Thomas: "When it comes to household resources, a Belarusian woman considers that it is her husband who is the breadwinner. In France, when you're in a couple, the wife has to, often the wife wants to, contribute in order to be financially independent, and so on. Basically, in a Russian couple, the bloke doesn't do much at home, he's not the one who washes the floor, who does the dishes, he has to bring money home. The wife feeds the child and takes care of the whole family, all the household chores, that's the typical profile."

Author: "What's it like for you?"

Thomas: "Well, it's a bit different because sometimes we only cook for ourselves, sometimes for everyone because we've got the bed & breakfast and in Moscow I used to leave early and come back late, so it's true that we had a good life. We were a long way from the economic problems and incomes of France, of the average French person I'd say. So economically speaking, there were no worries. It was a matter of organisation. We had nannies, we also had a cleaner in Moscow, so in fact it was Alla who brought up the children, I had to bring money home, and the household chores were done by someone else, apart from the cooking, washing up, washing the floor and so on."

Author: "So how do you see this organisation in the couple?"

Thomas: "At the beginning, that wasn't what attracted me at all. This difference, I didn't even know about it in fact. It was only after ten years in Russia that I realised." (Thomas, aged thirty-six, engineer)

18 Through contact with his partner and by living in post-Soviet countries, Thomas becomes aware of the norms that apply to conjugal relationships. In this extract, he describes them and compares them to those he believes exist in France. On several occasions during the interview, he made these comparisons without specifying whether some norms seemed better to him than others, but he nevertheless highlighted the adaptability needed to conform to the norms of post-Soviet gender regimes. Thomas therefore achieved two types of mobility during his migration: firstly, class mobility by earning an income well above that of the "average French person" and, secondly, gender mobility, because, whether he initially wanted it or not, he finds himself in a dominant position favoured by the gender regime, to which his wife Alla adheres:

"Here, a woman has to be a woman, who is taken care of, who is courted, who takes care of the children, who is always beautiful and who lives her life as a woman. I don't understand feminism. If feminism means putting women above men, it's absurd. All over Russia, it's considered absurd. In our country, it's really a man's job to feed his family, a woman has to look after the children. It's clearer like that. It's like that in every family. It's the culture, it's for everyone, that's how it is. It's not because I've decided that's the way it is. We always say that men decide all the important issues. Women and men are different planets." (Alla, aged thirty-two, housewife)

19 Alla essentialises genders. In her view, men and women are inherently different and, on this basis, devote themselves to different activities determined by their gender. Professional success is a man's domain, childcare and housework are for women: this is how she describes the pattern implemented in her couple. Thomas' professional success has enabled her to achieve the status of "lady of the house", with staff to relieve her of part of the housework. This marital configuration also reflects the
bourgeois ideal rehabilitated at the end of the Soviet period (Zdravomyslova and Temkina, 2005).

20

Thomas was in a particularly traditional marital configuration that I rarely observed in my fieldwork. In general, Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian women partners had jobs, so they took on not only their paid work but also the family and domestic duties from which men were exempted. While Thomas claims to have been unaware of this social organisation before moving to Russia and that it was not what attracted him, other interviewees sought out post-Soviet countries precisely because of this gender role configuration.

## Migrating to change gender regime

21

Many studies show that in South-North movements, men suffer gender downgrading, leading them either to return to their country of departure or to seek a wife of the same origin (Charsley, 2017; Thai, 2008). On the other hand, migration of Western men to the Global South entails a rise in gender status, enabling them to perform forms of masculinity which are inaccessible in their home countries (Lapanun, 2018). These downward and upward shifts reflect a change in gender regime, experienced as beneficial or detrimental. Migrating to the East comes with amplified access to women's sexuality, which plays a role in men's decision to settle in these countries. However, in order to fully benefit from post-Soviet gender regimes in the context of conjugality, it is necessary to manage to adequately conform to their norms.

## Access to women's sexuality and sense of hypermasculinity

22

The boundaries between sex tourism, marriage migration and lifestyle migration are porous (Brennan, 2004; Salomon, 2012; Despres, 2017b; Jaisuekun and Sunanta 2021), and this porosity was also apparent in my study, as illustrated by Guy's remarks:

> "Ukraine is like France thirty years ago, like when I was young. The distinctions between people are clearer, so a woman is really a woman. But then there's the domestic woman and the woman who's not domestic. A domestic woman will immediately respond by making the house her own. That's it, it's hers. The woman who's not domestic will look at it and think: well, he's got money, so I'm going to be able to have fun." (Guy, aged forty-eight, company director)

23

Guy racialises Ukrainian women and confines them to the two ends of the continuum of economic and sexual exchange (Tabet, 2004): on the one hand, there are women to marry, and on the other, women to have fun with, in other words, whores. These remarks, made in 2013, reflect the situation that prevailed at the time in Ukraine, where two practices were commonplace: "wife hunting" and "sex tourism". I was introduced to these two categories by the German owner of a hostel in Kyiv, referring explicitly to the circulation of European or North American men, who travelled in search of matrimonial or sexual encounters. At the intersection of these two practices were businesses—some dedicated to matrimonial matchmaking, others focused solely on selling lucrative illusions, making Western men believe that they could access a multitude of sexually available women (Sizaire, 2021b). This configuration has also been observed in China in the city of Shanghai, described as a "sexual paradise" for Western men (Farrer, 2010). In the conclusion to his study, Farrer (2010) discusses the
hypothesis of a context offering men a sense of “hypermasculinity”, qualifying it with the idea of symbolic emasculation rooted in their outsider status within Chinese society. In my fieldwork, as we shall see, some men did indeed experience a form of symbolic emasculation due to the unsuitability of their gender practices in their intimate relationships. However, this emasculation is only temporary and generally allows them to access and perform a form of “hypermasculinity” constructed at the intersection of class and (racialised) nationality relations.

## "Staying for the chicks"

"Initially, you know, when you arrive in these countries, especially when you're in your forties, you're kind of in a permanent state of levitation because you're surrounded by pretty girls. You go out at night, you go to restaurants, so you're going to places where there are always pretty girls. You're not in the real world. What's more, they know who they're dealing with, they see a guy coming along, he's appealing, he's got, how can I put it, he can offer a certain standard of living to this kind of... well, he can give the girl he's with a certain standard of living, so it makes it quite easy to meet girls." (Étienne, aged fifty-six, entrepreneur)

24 Like many of the interviewees, Étienne “decided to move East” after a marital breakdown, because he “wanted a different life”. After twenty-five years of marriage to a French woman his own age, Étienne found himself “on his own” when his wife left him and moved to Canada with their two grown-up children. Étienne then went to live in Ukraine for several months with the aim of setting up a business. During this period, he “wandered around a bit”, “enjoyed himself a little” and then had his first marital experience with a Ukrainian woman who gradually “nibbled away” at him. In his words, he did not manage to “stand his ground” in the relationship and ended up being “walked all over”. But that did not discourage him, because “[he] likes Russian culture, and well [he]’d obviously met some girls, which [he] liked a lot”. He then went to Belarus, where he opened a restaurant, and for a few years he “flitted around”, referring to numerous affairs with Belarusian women, until he met his current partner at a dance evening in Minsk: the “usual thing”. Less usual perhaps is the age difference between them: Elena is twenty-five years younger than him. Étienne now says that he will “never leave Minsk again”, because he has “regained his sense of balance” and “revealed himself as a man”.

25 This revelation came about through his experience of a change in gender regime: by moving from France to Ukraine and then to Belarus, Étienne's life was transformed. His attributes were converted: his gender, age, nationality and economic situation gave him a new sexual attractiveness that he did not have in France. He found himself surrounded by “girls”, which surprised him at first (“you're not in the real world”), and discovered a new feeling that is particularly well illustrated by the term “levitation”. In other words, Étienne was put on a pedestal simply due to his status as a heterosexual French man. Equipped with these attributes (which have little value in France) in Ukraine and Belarus, he became highly desirable to some of the local women. Jean-Paul had the same experience. He explains openly, in front of his wife, that he stayed “for the chicks”:⁷

> Jean-Paul: "I came here to set up a company. I was single. I got here. Fucking hell, there's nothing but hot chicks. Only hot chicks who are up for it. Well, of course, I wasn't going to say no. So, I didn't leave. I've never left."

> Oksana: "He stayed for the chicks!!"

> Jean-Paul: "I stayed for the chicks."
Oksana: "You see how cynical he is and how romantic and cynical he is at the same time, you know?"

Jean-Paul: "You know very well I stayed for the chicks, come on, that's nothing new."

Oksana: "But..."

Jean-Paul: "I never hid it from you."

Oksana: "But, I don't care anyway, yes, actually I understand. If I'd been a guy... I understand. There's no problem..."

Jean-Paul: "And if you were a French guy, you'd understand even better." (Jean-Paul, aged forty-five, entrepreneur)

26 Although he has been married for two years to Oksana, who is twenty years younger than him, and they have a child together, Jean-Paul is not afraid to say loud and clear in front of her that what convinced him to stay was not the fact that he had started a family with her, but that he had been reassured about his status as a man by finding himself coveted by a multitude of women when he arrived. This leads Oksana to sum up: "He stayed for the chicks", while trying to downplay her husband's comments by adding that he was "cynical". Despite her attempts to normalise his remarks, Jean-Paul continues to stress his motives and Oksana finally concedes, saying she understands him. Later in the interview, when Jean-Paul talks about his numerous sexual conquests, she once again summarises her husband's experience by saying: "You consumed a lot of Belarusian meat". Throughout the interview, Oksana is constantly trying, with difficulty, to save face. Two aspects of her position are worth highlighting: on the one hand, she defends her husband by attempting to portray him in a different light, describing him, for example, as "romantic"; on the other, she denigrates Belarusian women rather than her husband, reducing them to the status of consumable commodities. This interaction alone illustrates the position of power held by men in gender relations, and by French men in particular: they are seen, at least initially, as more serious, kinder and more faithful spouses, giving them an advantageous position in the dating market, and they are excused, even understood, for their behaviour and remarks, however crude they may be.

27 In post-Soviet countries, French men thus find themselves in possession of a new capital, that of "European citizenship" (Lévy, 2019)—as Jean-Paul's insistence on being perceived not just as a "guy" but as a "French guy" forcefully illustrates—giving them easier access to women's sexuality. Sébastien, who married and followed his wife to Russia, sums up how his presumed nationality affects how he was perceived abroad: "You've got a European passport, so you must be making 4,000 euros a month, so you must have money, you've got style". Alongside their presumed economic capital, these men also benefit from a "racialised national reputation" (Cosquer, 2021): thought to be more modern than post-Soviet men, they become highly desirable partners (Constable, 2003; Patico, 2009; Sizaire, 2016).

28 Étienne is also conscious that he projects this image when he says: "We're going to be nice to them and they're going to like it", or that "the guy can give the girl a certain standard of living". Étienne, Sébastien and Guy are all aware of the economic-sexual exchanges taking place in these intimate relationships, which are part of a context where women's sexuality is transformed into a service, for which they may become the clients and beneficiaries by (re)assuming a dominant position in gender relations. Otherwise, as in the case of Étienne who was "walked all over by a Ukrainian woman" because he was "too nice", in other words not dominant enough, they can be stripped of their status as men and become "wimps" or "guys with no balls". In order to activate the privileges of class,
race (racialised nationality) and sexuality, these men must first and foremost “do gender appropriately” (West and Zimmerman, 2009). If they don’t, they run the risk of losing their “accountability” as men and no longer being seen as such, forfeiting the combination of other privileges in the process. If masculinity disappears, so does the racialised construction that goes with it (Farrer, 2010: 75).

## Do gender appropriately or relearn male domination

29 Most of the men we interviewed, like Jean-Paul, did not need to make any effort to adhere and conform to the dominant gender regime. Franck, who had been living in Moscow for a year at the time of our meeting, emphasises above all the satisfaction he derives from the new practical rules in which he is now immersed.

> "Russian women are more appealing. They take better care of their men. In my experience, well, for example, a little thing, if I tell her something hurts, she comes and gives me a massage. A French woman would say, "Oh right, if it hurts, go and see a physio". No, but it's true, you've got to call a spade a spade. Living with Lud, I come home, everything's ready, everything's done, the house is clean. I mean I get it, she was at home, it's easier than when my ex used to go to work, but even so. I used to do the man's work and the woman's work. When you're only doing the man's work, I mean going out to work, and your wife is doing, you know, her role as... it's not pejorative what I'm going to say, it's not saying anything bad about... But the Russian conception of a wife is that she doesn't work, she's there to bring up the children, to support her husband, that's it, and that's how they see it. I didn't invent it. It's how they see it. And then, I love it, being looked after. I like that [laughs]." (Franck, aged thirty-eight, entrepreneur)

30 Franck met his current wife on an international dating site, having registered shortly after his former partner left him. To justify this transnational marital choice, he links his experience to that of other French men who have “lived through hell with French women”, arguing that it would make it possible to get rid of his partner at any time: “I’m going to get a foreign woman and when it goes wrong, go home and, that was my aim at the start. I try, I never tried, I’ll try, if it goes wrong, go home, go home, leave me alone”. It is as if entering a relationship with someone of the same nationality would mean that there would be no way of freeing oneself from the bond later. Franck stresses the power held over a foreign woman who, by leaving her country, finds herself in a position of vulnerability unknown to women of the same nationality. Once again, transnational conjugality makes it possible to use one’s nationality to (re)gain power in intimate and conjugal relationships (Lévy, 2019). After living together in France for a year, Franck chose to move to Russia with his wife, where they opened a restaurant. Far from putting him in the same position as that presumed to apply to his partner, i.e. that he could be sent back to his country at any time, Franck entered a gender regime where, in his view, women “play their role as women”. This “paradise” for French men exists because gender relations are more unequal than in France, so that women are much more constrained by the system of economic and sexual exchanges and by the “straitjacket of gender” (Rubin, 1975: 200). A woman is “a real woman”, because she performs her dependence in the interaction, as Guy relates by using many comparisons:

> "A French woman will always ask you for equality or independence, but a Ukrainian woman will never ask for that. [...] You'll never see a Ukrainian girl wanting to pay for a restaurant, because she won't understand. Now you go with a French woman, she'll say we'll go half and half, I'm going to keep my independence. [...] In Ukraine a man doesn't grow old, he ages through alcohol, through many things, but he's always approached as a man. Unlike in
France, where a fifty-year-old man is no longer approached as a man, he's approached as a friend, as an elder, as lots of things. He's going to have a long life, but he's no longer approached as a man, a man in the true sense of the word." (Guy, aged forty-eight, company director)

31 This lesser independence allows men to regain power in gender relations and rediscover their sexual attractiveness, in cases where they no longer had any, particularly with young women. Being approached as a man "in the true sense of the word" means being approached as a potential sexual partner by all women, especially younger ones. This is what Jean-Paul discovered on his arrival in Belarus and what led him to "stay for the chicks". While the feeling of "levitation" experienced by Étienne is easily accessible to the majority of Western men—without even needing to migrate, thanks to the international matchmaking industry (Sizaire, 2021b)—and access to women's sexuality is also possible within a framework of economic-sexual exchanges accepted in intimate interactions, ranging from sexual intercourse to sexist relations of ordinary seduction, access to conjugality and to the related benefits described above may be conditional on men's ability to perform gender appropriately. Two of the men interviewed recount the same experience where, after having been symbolically stripped of their status as men, they strove to regain this position in the country of their current wives (Belarus and Russia). It is worth taking a closer look at Étienne's experience, as he describes it here, by linking it to that of Western foreign men in general:

"When you arrive, the danger is that, well, you see how guys behave and all that. When you start getting to know girls, you see what they tell you about guys, that guys dump them like shit, that they're often drunk, they're often not, how can I put it, they behave a bit like savages with them. So, we arrive, we say yes, but that's good because we're going to be nice to them and they're going to like it and that's the big danger. If you're too nice to a Russian girl, she won't understand, she'll think he's just a wet rag, because they're used to having quite harsh, confrontational relationships with men. So, if she meets someone who's too nice, too weak, her strong personality will take over, she won't see him as a man, as a guy anymore, and then she'll take everything she can from him, because this guy will be too nice for her, he'll be like a wet rag, so they take everything they can from him and that's the danger. So they like us because we're nice, we're careful, but if we're too nice, we end up, I'm telling you, being seen as wimps, guys with no balls." (Étienne, aged fifty-six, entrepreneur)

32 Étienne draws clear boundaries by using the pronouns "we" and "us" to refer to Western men, and "them" to refer to local men, the "savages" encountered by women, categorised as "Russians" and "girls". However, unlike Le Renard's study (2019: 152), which reveals, the extent to which gender enables Western men to position themselves as the "holders of good masculinity, considered modern and focused on the couple and the family", Étienne describes how he sought not to distinguish himself—which was his initial approach—but to move towards the configuration of gender roles prevailing in his country of residence. This difference can be explained by transnational conjugality: in Le Renard's study (2019), the men were generally in endogamous couples, with women of the same nationality, and they cultivated their difference in relation to Emiratis. Étienne seeks to conform to the expectations of the destination country and, above all, to women's gendered expectations, in order to gain access to their sexuality and conjugality. So, he learns to be less nice and to "show [his] teeth". Julien, who is twenty years older than Étienne, followed the same path. He considers that his "upbringing as a modern French European man" prevented him from "acting like a Russian man" when he first met a Russian woman of his own age in France. In concrete terms,
his gender practices, which, he says manifested themselves in his use of compromise, discussion and gentleness, led to the marital breakdown, because they did not meet his partner's expectations. At the heart of their intimate and conjugal interaction were two gender regimes. He came out of the relationship symbolically “castrated”, but convinced that the “French thing, the European thing” did not suit him and that he needed to make a change in his conjugal practices, in particular to “stand his ground”. Étienne also concluded that he had not been able to “get the upper hand” enough in his marital relationship. These two men thus take a reflective look at their experiences and the changes they had to make to their gender project. In this sense we can speak of a genuine reform of their masculinity, i.e. the implementation of a gender project focused on learning a dominant masculinity, similar to the men studied by Gourarier (2017) in the seduction communities, but in a different way, since the learning process is notably facilitated by their partners:

> "Lena often says, she often tells me, you're too nice [...] That's our weakness, we can't be too nice. We have to show, we have to be strong enough to be able to be dominant in the relationship. That's what they expect. She has a very strong personality, we don't fight, but, well, we get on each other's nerves a bit and at first I tended to be a bit diplomatic, you see. Yes, well. OK, but one day she said to me: 'Wait a minute, you're too nice, I want a guy who's a guy, so when I shout, shout louder'. And that's how it calms down. [...] And also in business, she says to me 'Étienne, you need to show your teeth from time to time'. So I'm lucky to have rebuilt my life with her, because, well, she shows me a lot of things that I didn't consider before, aspects of everyday life, of married life, of life, Russian life, you know." (Étienne, aged fifty-six, entrepreneur)

33

Both Lena and Julien's current wife explain to their partners the type of masculinity they need to embody to respond to the dominant gender regimes both in their relationship and in society as a whole, since it also applies to professional situations and, more broadly, to public life where a man is expected to be aggressive and authoritarian. Although Étienne says he has “revealed himself as a man”, with the help of his wife, this “revelation” is above all the result of sustained observation work and a performance. “Slamming one’s fist on the table”, “being a strongman”, “showing one’s teeth” and “making decisions” are all “prosaic methods” (Barthélémy and Quéré, 2007: 10) of making oneself accountable as a man in the context of the country (and the intimate relationship) in which they find themselves. Just as the case of Agnès analysed by Garfinkel (1967: 183) highlights “how deeply embedded are appearances-of-normal-sexuality for members’ recognition in commonplace scenes as unavoidable, unnoticed textures of relevances”, the efforts made by these interviewees to “pass” as men also reveal “ways of being, doing, attitudes and expressions that will be recognised and pass as typical attitudes of [masculinity]” (Lépinard and Lieber, 2020: 62). By empirically exploring a new reality, particularly a new gender regime, Julien and Etienne found material for reflection on and documentation of “social arrangements based on sex category [rendered] accountable as normal and natural, that is, legitimate ways of organising social life” (West and Zimmerman, 1987: 146). In other words, their transnational migratory and conjugal experiences lead them to produce precise descriptions of what it means to “do gender” in a post-Soviet country.
Conclusion

34

The film *Cerise* (2015), directed by Jérôme Enrico, vividly illustrates some of the ideas developed in this article. It tells the story of a teenage girl who joins her French father in Ukraine, where he has relocated to set up a butchery business. In one of the few scenes where he speaks to her, as he lets her taste some charcuterie produced in his factory, he sums up what he has gained through migration: "You see, there are good things about having a butcher for a father. I'm respected here. I'm not the pathetic little cook anymore. Back home, even in 100 years, I wouldn't have made it." Relocating one's professional activity beyond national allows for upward class mobility, in this case becoming a "French" butcher abroad. In addition to this class mobility—supported by race mobility within racialised nationality relations—the film highlights the gender ascension brought about by migration: from the beginning to the end of the film, the character is constantly surrounded by women who are portrayed as available for both sexual and marital relationships.

35

While some of the interviewees were not necessarily seeking other gender relations, but rather social advancement, most of them end up conforming to the norms of the dominant gender regime by adopting a bourgeois masculinity, relying on their wives to help them to integrate locally and pursue an international career, free from family and domestic constraints. Others, however, migrate precisely because of the gender regime prevailing in the destination country. Their primary aim is not to have a career and climb the social ladder, but to regain a dominant position in gender relations. As Morokvasič (1986) observed in his analysis of the journey of Yugoslav migrant women seeking to escape the sexist oppression of the societies they left behind, "emigration is a struggle", the migration of French men to post-Soviet countries can be seen as a similar process. They struggle to maintain or regain a dominant position and reclaim power in class, race and gender relations. Gender regimes thus enable an understanding of the gendered geographies of power: they shed light on geographical scales, both social and spatial, based on a joint analysis of the role of nations in the production of gendered ideologies and the changes in position that occur when moving from one gender regime to another. These changes can be observed by paying particular attention to the cognitive capacities of people on the move as they reflect on, produce and do gender throughout their migratory experience.

36

The analysis of transnational migration—whether privileged or not, whether involving men or women, whether directed towards the North, South or East—, by closely observing the normative changes experienced by individuals on the move, drawing on the concept of regimes (here specifically applied to gender regimes, as gender posed a practical contradiction for interviewees, but which could be extended to other regimes such as race or kinship regimes), reveals how national contexts shape social and power relations. The learning process that migrants undergo, during which they decode and analyse the norms and rules of the destination societies as they raise practical problems for them, constitutes a valuable field of investigation for understanding the social order, both in its vulnerability and its (re)production.
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## NOTES

1. All first names have been anonymised.

2. This conceptualisation aims to bring together the contributions of transnationalism and intersectionality to understand international mobility.

3. While Ukraine allows Europeans to avoid visa procedures, this is not the case for Russia and Belarus, where entry visas must be renewed regularly.

4. To give an idea of the proportion they represent, the *France Diplomatie* website reported that 4,767 French nationals were registered in Russia, 999 in Ukraine and 260 in Belarus in 2021, compared with 51,008 in Morocco, 32,812 in Algeria and 21,332 in Senegal (https://webapps.france-diplomatie.info/carte-registre/, consulted on 17/09/2024).

5. CouchSurfing is a commercial enterprise whose aim is to provide a temporary accommodation service, partially free of charge, via its website. Popular with international travellers, the platform also enables festive events to be organised bringing together locals and visitors to the country.

6. A study conducted by the sociologist Farrer (2010) on Westerners in China illustrates this: by becoming friends with the men studied and being identified as a peer, he was able to gather comments, particularly on men's sexuality, that were largely absent from my study, with the exception of one man (Jean-Paul) who embodied this type of comment, while explaining to me that others would not speak to me in the same way.

7. This verbatim resonates with the title of Despres' (2017a) article. However, while she concludes that Western women in conjugal relationships with Zanzibari men did not stay only for the boys, the men presented in this sub-section stay mainly for the "chicks", or rather for the local gender regime.
ABSTRACTS

Drawing on a study of French men in relationships with post-Soviet women in post-Soviet countries, this article examines these privileged migratory flows through the prism of intimacy and gender. This theoretical shift offers a fresh perspective on these mobilities, moving beyond the traditional focus on class and social ascent, to explore the intersection and reconfiguration of power dynamics during migration. In this way, the privileges activated through displacement are highlighted in the intimate, professional, and public spheres. By migrating and moving from one gender regime to another, most of the men studied experienced upward mobility in both gender and class, closely linked to nationality (racialised) relations.

À partir d'une enquête menée dans les pays postsoviétiques auprès d'hommes français en couple avec une femme locale, cet article propose d'étudier ces flux migratoires privilégiés au prisme de l'intimité et du genre. Ce déplacement théorique permet d'éclairer différemment ces mobilités, non plus seulement depuis une perspective de classe et d'ascension sociale, mais bien dans l'intersection et la reconfiguration des rapports de pouvoir au cours de la migration. De cette manière, les privilèges activés dans le déplacement s'éclairent conjointement, dans la sphère intime, professionnelle et publique. En migrant et en passant d'un régime de genre à un autre, la plupart des hommes enquêtés expérimentent des mobilités ascendantes de genre et de classe qui s'articulent étroitement aux rapports de nationalité (racialisés).

A partir de una encuesta realizada en países post-soviéticos a hombres franceses en pareja con mujeres locales, este artículo propone estudiar estos flujos migratorios privilegiados a través del prisma de la intimidad y del género. Este desplazamiento teórico permite una perspectiva diferente sobre estas movilidades, ya no solo desde una perspectiva de clase y ascenso social, sino más bien en la intersección y reconfiguración de dinámicas de poder durante la migración. De esta manera, los privilegios activados en el desplazamiento se iluminan conjuntamente, en los ámbitos íntimos, profesionales y públicos. Al migrar y pasar de un régimen de género a otro, la mayoría de los hombres encuestados experimentan movilidades ascendentes tanto de género como de clase que están estrechamente vinculadas a las relaciones de nacionalidad (racializadas).

INDEX

**Palabras claves:** regímenes de género, movilidad de género, masculinidades, migraciones privilegiadas, privilegio, conyugalidad transnacional, jerarquización de nacionalidades

**Keywords:** gender regimes, gender mobility, masculinities, privileged migration, privilege, transnational conjugality, hierarchy of nationalities

**Mots-clés:** régimes de genre, mobilités de genre, masculinités, migrations privilégiées, privilège, conjugalités transnationales, hiérarchisation des nationalités
## AUTHORS

### LAURE SIZAIRE

Socio-anthropologist, Postdoctoral Marie Curie Fellow, Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium; member of *Institut Convergences Migrations* (French Collaborative Institute on Migration); laure.sizaire[at]ulb.be

## TRANSLATORS

### ALEXANDRA POMÉON O'NEILL

### KATHERINE BOOTH