From digital advocacy to e-commerce: Poor Roma Women in the Digital Landscape of Romany “Banana Republic”

Roma women, among the most marginalized population in Europe, endure pervasive multidimensional systemic violence emerging as the victims of double discrimination - facing gadje (non-Roma) racism and sexism within Roma communities. This paper adopting a feminist and Critical Romany Studies standpoint, introduces the missing class dimension by examining the position of poor Roma women as reproductive workers. Utilizing content analysis of digital materials from prominent Roma leaders and organizations, I explore the digital subjectivity of poor Roma women within contemporary mainstream Roma politics. I propose in the paper that rather than advocating for justice and life opportunities for these women in the digital space, the Roma elite distances and relegates them to "outsiders within”. In Roma advocacy shifting from human rights to a market model, the digital domain serves mainly as an advertising platform. Advertising Roma to the European market as traditionally plentiful and exploitable working bodies under the label of “Roma resiliency” in what can be seen as “banana republic” politics, the Roma elite further commodifies the reproductive labor of poor Roma women, treating it as a competitive advantage, and accounting for it as an externality. Paradoxically, this Roma politics rooted in the pervasive “race to the bottom” approach of racial capitalism is constructed on a false historical and political continuity and monopolization of the critical, dissident, revolutionary legacy of Roma leaders from the 60s and 70s. The analysis of the available digital material also reveals the Roma elite’s failing attempt to deconstruct stereotypical cultural archives, today reduced to cultural management in service to the market-oriented Roma mainstream politics. In conclusion, I claim that as the Roma elite embraces dominant models of political, economic, and cultural production taking the role of the middlemen/women, using digital spaces as selling platforms, the poor Roma women encounter race, class, and gender betrayal. This exclusion and exploitation rob them of the democratic and emancipatory potential within the limited realms of political, economic, cultural, and digital commons available to the Roma communities in Europe.