Transnational Labour Migration and the Melodrama of Mobility. Constructing the Public Problem of the Children “Left Behind” in Romanian Media

The purpose of this article is to develop melodrama, as a set of stylistic and thematic attributes, into an analytic tool which can be incorporated into the study of public problems and their construction. The major claim of this article is that, “the melodrama of mobility” structures, as a series of visibility patterns, the media discourse on issues of public interest, more specifically the issue of the so-called “orphans of migration” and the phenomenon of maternal migration. With its insistence on the ideal of the monogamous family, the camouflaged critique of materialism and public institutions and the superiority of love over social and economic pressures, the melodrama dramatizes labour migration and mobility in terms of a threatened (national) domesticity. By approaching suffering as a form of psychological trauma, melodrama manages to transmit powerful personal stories which create identification through pathos, but risks at the same time to transform labour migration into a private solution to a private problem, devoid of any institutional support.