The impact of rural emptiness on gender relations in postsocialist Albania

This paper explores impacts of dramatic levels of outmigration from Puka, a remote region of northern Albania. Since 1991 depopulation, economic decline and state withdrawal have created conditions of what Dzenovska calls rural emptiness. Drawing on focus group discussions with women from eight villages, it explores how conditions of rural emptiness have led to a transformation of gender contracts, with women taking on additional responsibilities. However these changes have been accommodated within a re-traditionalised patriarchal system through the devaluation of tasks assigned to women, their increased surveillance by male relatives, and erosion of women’s social life outside the household.