Cinzia D Solari
Cinzia D. Solari is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UMass Boston. She is a feminist ethnographer whose work has focused on post-Soviet peoples as they make their way in a capitalist world. Dr. Solari has used the tools of global ethnography to investigate the intersections of migration, modernity, and the production of neoliberalism. Recent investigations into how pro and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is deployed by nation-states in the international area have led to her current grant-funded research which focuses on nonbinary and transgender youth.
Her most recent book with co-author Smitha Radhakrishnan, The Gender Order of Neoliberalism (Polity Press 2023) is winner of the 2024 Immanuel Wallerstein Book Award, Political Economy of the World System Section (PEWS) of the American Sociological Association (ASA). The book argues that our Western understandings of neoliberalism do not travel well because we have only acknowledged one of neoliberalism’s pre-histories, liberalism, and we must recover socialism and post-colonialism as part of the historical transnational networks that “cooked up” neoliberalism and our current world order. Placing three world regions in conversation—the US, the former Soviet Union, and South and Southeast Asia—reveals that gender is foundational to making the neoliberal global order work. The erasure of collective transnational organizing, and particularly the erasure of the Soviet Union from our collective knowledge, has made it seem there is nothing outside neoliberalism. The authors show that templates for feminist imaginings of an anti-capitalist, anti-racist world already exist and must be recovered to create a fairer future.
Dr. Solari’s first book, On the Shoulders of Grandmothers: Gender, Migration, and Post-Soviet Nation-State Building, won the 2020 Mirra Komavrsky Book Award from the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS). Through in-depth interviews and ethnographic work with migrant grandmothers caring for the elderly in Italy and California and their adult children in Ukraine, On the Shoulders of Grandmothers investigates how migrant grandmothers built the “new” Ukraine from the outside in through transnational networks. By comparing the experiences of individual migrants in two different migration patterns—one a post-Soviet “exile” of individual women to Italy and the other an “exodus” of families to the United States—Dr. Solari exposes the production of new gendered capitalist economics and nationalisms that precariously place Ukraine between Europe and Russia with implications for the global world order. This global ethnography explains the larger context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Solari is a first-gen scholar. She earned a B.A. in History and Italian Studies from Brown University in 1997 and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010.
Address: Department of Sociology
University of Massachusetts
100 Morrissey Boulevard
Boston, Massachusetts 02125-3393
United States
Her most recent book with co-author Smitha Radhakrishnan, The Gender Order of Neoliberalism (Polity Press 2023) is winner of the 2024 Immanuel Wallerstein Book Award, Political Economy of the World System Section (PEWS) of the American Sociological Association (ASA). The book argues that our Western understandings of neoliberalism do not travel well because we have only acknowledged one of neoliberalism’s pre-histories, liberalism, and we must recover socialism and post-colonialism as part of the historical transnational networks that “cooked up” neoliberalism and our current world order. Placing three world regions in conversation—the US, the former Soviet Union, and South and Southeast Asia—reveals that gender is foundational to making the neoliberal global order work. The erasure of collective transnational organizing, and particularly the erasure of the Soviet Union from our collective knowledge, has made it seem there is nothing outside neoliberalism. The authors show that templates for feminist imaginings of an anti-capitalist, anti-racist world already exist and must be recovered to create a fairer future.
Dr. Solari’s first book, On the Shoulders of Grandmothers: Gender, Migration, and Post-Soviet Nation-State Building, won the 2020 Mirra Komavrsky Book Award from the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS). Through in-depth interviews and ethnographic work with migrant grandmothers caring for the elderly in Italy and California and their adult children in Ukraine, On the Shoulders of Grandmothers investigates how migrant grandmothers built the “new” Ukraine from the outside in through transnational networks. By comparing the experiences of individual migrants in two different migration patterns—one a post-Soviet “exile” of individual women to Italy and the other an “exodus” of families to the United States—Dr. Solari exposes the production of new gendered capitalist economics and nationalisms that precariously place Ukraine between Europe and Russia with implications for the global world order. This global ethnography explains the larger context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Solari is a first-gen scholar. She earned a B.A. in History and Italian Studies from Brown University in 1997 and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010.
Address: Department of Sociology
University of Massachusetts
100 Morrissey Boulevard
Boston, Massachusetts 02125-3393
United States
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Books
What do mompreneurs, angry working-class men, and migrant domestic workers all have in common? They are all gendered subjects responding to the economic, political, and cultural realities of neoliberalism’s global gender order.
In this ambitious book, Radhakrishnan and Solari map the varied gendered pathways of a global hegemonic regime. Focusing on the US, the former Soviet Union, and South and Southeast Asia, they argue that the interconnected histories of imperialism, socialism, and postcolonialism have converged in a new way since the fall of the Soviet Union, transforming the post-war international order that preceded it. Today, the ideal of the empowered woman – a striving, entrepreneurial subject who overcomes adversity and has many “choices” – symbolizes modernity for diverse countries competing for status in the global hierarchy. This ideal bridges the painful gap between aspiration and lived reality, but also spurs widespread discontent.
Blending social theory, rich empirical evidence, and a multi-sited understanding of neoliberalism, this book invites all of us to question taken-for-granted knowledge about gender and capitalism, and to look to grassroots international movements of the past to chart the path to a fairer future.
Book Reviews
Hübner, Jamin A. (2024) "Book Review: The Gender Order of Neoliberalism," Journal of International Women's Studies: Vol. 26: Iss. 1, Article 24. Available at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol26/iss1/24
in various migration contexts. The concepts of exile and exodus emerge from her
deep understanding of structural and discursive elements in both Ukraine as a sending
country and Italy and the United States as two very distinct destination countries.
Based on this insight, Solari develops a framework for understanding transnational
processes at the intersection between gender, nation-state building, and globalization.
society in transition, where motherhood is the cornerstone of its state-building process.
Based on an impressive number of 160 personal interviews in both Italy and the United
States, Solari has produced a compelling and beautifully written study of post-1991
Ukrainian mass migrations, with middle-aged women their most prominent driving
force. The author breaks new ground in treating the process as exile and exodus
respectively.
Papers
Genere e guerra si intrecciano indissolubilmente nell'analisi della sociologa Cinzia Solari, tra le massime esperte di Ucraina ed ex-Urss, che individua nell'attacco di Putin la promessa globale di una nuova modernità, fondata sulla salvaguardia della maschilità virile e omofoba
In times of war, gendered analyses—already marginalized in geopolitical thinking—are often seen as superfluous. When I am asked as a feminist sociologist with regional expertise on Ukraine and the former Soviet Union (FSU) to comment on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, my interlocutors expect me to talk about women, first as victims and then as empowered resistors. However, I suggest the gendered lens reveals that Russia’s war on Ukraine is a significant part of an oppositional “modernity of manliness” project that—despite Western media representations of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a lone dictator who might be mad—is offering a world vision that appeals to many in disparate locales.
What do mompreneurs, angry working-class men, and migrant domestic workers all have in common? They are all gendered subjects responding to the economic, political, and cultural realities of neoliberalism’s global gender order.
In this ambitious book, Radhakrishnan and Solari map the varied gendered pathways of a global hegemonic regime. Focusing on the US, the former Soviet Union, and South and Southeast Asia, they argue that the interconnected histories of imperialism, socialism, and postcolonialism have converged in a new way since the fall of the Soviet Union, transforming the post-war international order that preceded it. Today, the ideal of the empowered woman – a striving, entrepreneurial subject who overcomes adversity and has many “choices” – symbolizes modernity for diverse countries competing for status in the global hierarchy. This ideal bridges the painful gap between aspiration and lived reality, but also spurs widespread discontent.
Blending social theory, rich empirical evidence, and a multi-sited understanding of neoliberalism, this book invites all of us to question taken-for-granted knowledge about gender and capitalism, and to look to grassroots international movements of the past to chart the path to a fairer future.
Hübner, Jamin A. (2024) "Book Review: The Gender Order of Neoliberalism," Journal of International Women's Studies: Vol. 26: Iss. 1, Article 24. Available at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol26/iss1/24
in various migration contexts. The concepts of exile and exodus emerge from her
deep understanding of structural and discursive elements in both Ukraine as a sending
country and Italy and the United States as two very distinct destination countries.
Based on this insight, Solari develops a framework for understanding transnational
processes at the intersection between gender, nation-state building, and globalization.
society in transition, where motherhood is the cornerstone of its state-building process.
Based on an impressive number of 160 personal interviews in both Italy and the United
States, Solari has produced a compelling and beautifully written study of post-1991
Ukrainian mass migrations, with middle-aged women their most prominent driving
force. The author breaks new ground in treating the process as exile and exodus
respectively.
Genere e guerra si intrecciano indissolubilmente nell'analisi della sociologa Cinzia Solari, tra le massime esperte di Ucraina ed ex-Urss, che individua nell'attacco di Putin la promessa globale di una nuova modernità, fondata sulla salvaguardia della maschilità virile e omofoba
In times of war, gendered analyses—already marginalized in geopolitical thinking—are often seen as superfluous. When I am asked as a feminist sociologist with regional expertise on Ukraine and the former Soviet Union (FSU) to comment on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, my interlocutors expect me to talk about women, first as victims and then as empowered resistors. However, I suggest the gendered lens reveals that Russia’s war on Ukraine is a significant part of an oppositional “modernity of manliness” project that—despite Western media representations of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a lone dictator who might be mad—is offering a world vision that appeals to many in disparate locales.
have consequences for how this work is performed and experienced by workers. Surprisingly, the division is not based on gender. Instead, immigration laws filter Jewish and Orthodox
Christian immigrants from the former Soviet Union into two separate sets of resettlement institutions. The characteristics of these separate institutional settings shape the discursive tools available to these two groups, leading Jewish refugees to deploy professionalism while Orthodox Christian immigrants deploy sainthood. These discursive practices affect gendered identities, allowing workers in some cases to renegotiate hegemonic notions of masculinity and create new models of “feminine” caregiving.