Re-gendering the Border: Chronicles of Women's Resistance and Unexpected Alliances from the Mediterranean Border [in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, December 2017 (preprints)] (original) (raw)
Related papers
Perfect victims and monstrous invaders: media, borders, and intersectionality in Italy
Perfect victims and monstrous invaders: media, borders, and intersectionality in Italy, 2021
This article explores the reconfiguration of public, political and media discourses on migration to Italy’s Southern coasts since the re-making of the Mediterranean border regime, beginning in 2013. Combining our respective anthropological and cultural studies approaches, this article looks at how borders filter and control, and examines the semiotic implications of borders through shared reflections on the tightening of the EU border regime and Italy’s political positions on migrants and refugees. In the first section, Pinelli analyses border politics by looking at the shifts in humanitarian and political registers constructed on refugee women since 2010. Drawing on her ethnographic research, Pinelli demonstrates how these discursive registers legitimise the refusal of other migrants and exclude women from recognition as political and historical subjects. In the second section, Giuliani applies cultural and critical visual studies approaches to understand how two opposing media discourses on incoming migrants converge in construing the moral panic against migrants’ threats and, consequently, Italy as in need of protection. In bridging these two sections, our aim is to offer a feminist intersectional perspective to understand how sedimented categories of gender, race, sex, and class regulate relations between the receiving State and subjects who are the signers of historical hierarchies of difference (refugees, migrants, women), and to simultaneously explore the processes which construct the receiving ‘imagined community’ as white, innocent and under siege.
The introduction discusses the origins of this themed section of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, based on a 2017 interdisciplinary conference about migration and the migrant experience in Italy. The co-editors recognized early on that the U.S. media was paying inadequate attention to migrant landings in Italy during the so-called refugee crisis around 2015–16, and engaged scholars active in Italy, the U.K. and the U.S. to provide further nuance to this particular migratory flow, and in particular to question how the term ‘crisis’ was used in describing it. In response to a public debate increasingly prone to alarmism, the articles produced after the conference investigate the contradictions of the Italian reception system of migrants and refugees; the often glossed-over labour, race, and gender aspects of the flows; and the critical conditions of the Mediterranean crossing as represented in film and theatre. The contributions specifically bring forward the migrants’ voices to challenge the exclusionary practices adopted in Italy and Europe in favour of structured legal channels, and to reveal the growing crisis of E.U. democratic principles.
PHRG Peace Human Rights Governance, 2020
Women migrants are a particularly marginalised component in the mixed flows that since the early 2000s have interested Italy and Europe. The areas of provenance of such flows have been many: North Africa and the Middle East (namely Syria and Kurdish areas); Sub-Saharan, North-Western (Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Gambia…) and Eastern Africa (Somalia, Eritrea); Pakistan, Afghanistan, South-East Asia (Bangladesh in particular); the Western Balkans (especially Albania) and Ukraine; and, among the EU member states, Romania and Bulgaria. The paper intends to illustrate some challenges that the reception structures designed to cope with the specific needs of such female population has had to face, in the light of both the changing characteristics of migrations and the mutating European and domestic legal frame. In particular, we try to identify how the tripartite system dealing with persons seeking international protection, person victims of human trafficking, and women affected by gender-based violence, has used and implemented intersectional analysis and practices. Even if the concept of intersectionality had its beginning in the analysis of the condition of Black American women’s experience, it soon incorporated new identities and forms of discrimination and has been scholarly used to study women’ condition, gender theory and equality policies (Crenshaw 1991; Hancock 2007; Walby 2012a, 2012b; Walby et al. 2014; Kantola and Nousiainen 2009; Verloo 2006). The mixed flows1 that have characterized irregular migration from Northern Africa and the Middle East, as well as from other parts of the world through the Mediterranean routes, towards Europe and namely Italy, have stimulated the attention of practitioners, scholars and decision makers also for ‘intersectionality’ in relation to the composition of migrants and to the procedures in identification and assistance processes. Social workers, anti-trafficking agencies, immigration and asylum officers, humanitarian workers and law enforcement officials in Italy and in other EU Countries have gradually realized that to cope with the multifaceted needs of migrants, namely of irregular migrant women, involved in transborder flows, including as asylum seekers, a diversified and dynamic approach need be adopted. An intersectionality lens has to be used regarding both migrant women and the multi-agency- multi-disciplinary reception system. ‘Mixed flows’ are a phenomenon that will characterize migrations also in the coming years, as a direct consequence of multiple factors, including of the shrinking of avenues for regular immigration in the EU (Degani 2017, UNODC 2018b). Irregular migrants’ flows are concentrated in some routes, the most profitable for traffickers and smugglers, but also the most dangerous for migrants and trafficked people. This trend is in some measure a consequence of such limitation in alternative legal pathways towards the EU area. Operators of public and private agencies working with marginalized migrants, namely migrant women and girls, have increasingly acknowledged the need to adopt a more integrated modus operandi and join their efforts. In receiving or transit European states, reception structures strive to support the resilience of migrant women both at their arrival and in the following phases of reception and assistance, by combating discriminatory patterns, enhancing their human capital and, in most cases, preventing their victimization or re-victimization via sexual and gender-based violence and other severe forms of exploitation. The assumption in this paper is that intersectionality is key in operationalizing these joint struggles, especially as the legislation in European countries – the case at stake is Italy – tends to contrast an intersectional/multi-agency approach (that is, an approach based on the human rights of migrants), restoring a rigid typification of protection claims. This paper presents reflections emerged from a literature review of scholarly works on mixed migration flows in Italy and Europe and on intersectionality as stemming from a feminist and human rights perspective, as well as data and observations made in a long practice of conversations and collaboration with structures that implement anti-trafficking and antiviolence policies in Italy. In particular, this paper takes stock of seminars and exchanges carried out in the framework of the project ‘Migrant Women at the Margin: Addressing Vulnerabilities in Intersectionality between Violence and Exploitation/Mwm’, funded by the Cariparo Foundation, Visiting Programme 2018. Section 1 of the paper describes a possible narrative of the phenomenon of marginalised (‘vulnerable’) migrant women attempting to entry in Italy and entitled to be included in the domestic reception system, illustrating the need of adopting an intersectional lens. This is intended to characterise not only the way their socio-economic and socio-psychological condition is to be comprehended and analysed, but how public policies and a legal response ought to be framed and implemented. Section 2 presents a short description of the operating system of receiving and accompanying the journey of ‘vulnerable’ migrant women in Italy. We notice that the conditions are present for deploying an intersectional mode of providing support and tackling the human rights of women involved in persecutions, trafficking, domestic and other forms of gender-based violence, despite the existence of institutional and political-cultural hindrances and rigidities. One of the main obstacles to the unfolding and mainstreaming of such approach is however the Italian legal frame. Since the 1990s, and particularly during and after the ‘migrant crisis’ of 2014-15, laws have been enacted following patchy and contradictory trajectory. Space still remains however to navigate the current legal and political landscape and establish practices of positive cross-referral that can effectively promote the rights of women at the margin.
Engendering Security at the Borders of Europe: Women Migrants and the Mediterranean Crisis
Since the start of 2015, European and world attention has turned to a “crisis” unfolding in the Mediterranean: that of the thousands of migrants risking their lives to try and reach Europe from the opposite shores, and many of them dying in the process. Although media and politicians have portrayed this is a new problem facing the EU, in fact this Mediterranean “crisis” is not a completely new phenomenon. Migrants have been attempting to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe (and dying on the way) for many years. What is new is the scale of the influx of migrants - the current conflict in Syria, together with ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Eritrea and Somalia have certainly swelled the number of those arriving across the Mediterranean, - and also a more diversified demographic spread amongst the migrants, with more and more women and children on the boats crossing to Europe. Although it is impossible to get accurate statistics for the number of migrants trying to reach Europe, let alone accurate gender-disaggregated statistics, due to the irregular nature of this migration, it seems that while previously those crossing the Mediterranean by boat were in the majority men, there are now more and more women undertaking the crossing. This article will attempt to explore some of the gendered aspects of this Mediterranean migration, analyzing the experiences of women migrants, and the particular insecurities which they may face as well as their strategies for resistance and survival. The article will look particularly at the experiences of Syrian migrants, who now form a large percentage of those who are trying to reach Europe across the Mediterranean, and will examine the experiences of women to see how gendered forms of insecurity are created and how these are negotiated by these women. It is perhaps ironic to note that whilst European leaders have all recently reinforced
European policies attempting to regulate international mobilities, internally as well as in their external impact, push people around Europe and its ‘neighbourhood’ in search for a safe haven. This phenomenon is called transit migration and its routes run along different hubs, which sometimes become more permanent dwellings. Building on ethnographic insights gained with people on the move, characterised in official discourse as undocumented migrants or asylum-seekers, this paper examines mobile circuits around the Mediterranean basin. This analysis departs from the frame of smooth functioning of administrative power that seeks to contain individuals in the places assigned to them, and thus regulate and stop irregular forms of global mobilities. The paper highlights mobile persons’ potential of disturbing this power, indeed resisting it in different ways. In so doing, they challenge not only the administrative and legal categorisations but also question taken-for-granted assumptions within fluid migrant communities and among solidarity advocates. The paper deploys an auto-ethnographic approach to critically engage the researcher’s positionality, and to engage with the intersection of hostilities and hospitalities.
The Struggle of Migrant Women across the Mediterranean Sea (by: Alarm Phone)
American Quarterly
Stories of women struggling across sea borders are rarely heard. When we do hear them, women are oten simply portrayed as subordinate, exploited, and passive victims who depend on male companions, and who lack individual migration projects and political agency. The erasure of their agency and voices is also the effect of hegemonic narratives on migration to Europe, in which “the migrant” is routinely imagined as young, able-bodied, and male: more an abstract figure than a human being, and commonly constructed as a dangerous subject against whom border enforcement and deterrence policies are legitimized. Knowing well that the personal is political, and the political is personal, we wanted to hear women’s voices and stories, and be inspired by their disobedient movements, their strength, their resilience, and their resistance.This Alarm Phone report was published shortly after International Women’s Day in 2018, a day when women led demonstrations all over the world.
Book - The New Gendered Plundering of Africa: Nigerian Prostitution in Italy
The New Gendered Plundering of Africa: Nigerian Prostitution in Italy, 2019
This ethnographic study on Nigerian street prostitution in Italy transforms the understanding of the phenomenon of prostitution, questions the impact of European and Italian migration and prostitution laws on human rights, and investigates the legal, political and socio-economic conditions that create a permissive environment for trafficking. Precious first-person accounts by Nigerian women give a privileged perspective on tortures and inhumane treatment prevalent in the migratory route from Africa to the European “promised land”, culminating in the daily experience of self-destruction in Italy. Neither the Palermo Protocol nor the current European, Italian and Nigerian prosecution and protection policies, still based on gender-imbalanced philosophies, are able to restore the requisite freedom and rights. This book is the result of research mainly conducted in the migration landmarks of the Sicilian capital: namely, the port, nightlife streets, refugee camps, hospitals, African churches, Nigerian ghettos, and the prison. Sicily, the world capital of the mafia, is the main European docking area of the current African migration wave and represents the geopolitical middle-ground between the opulent and the plundered world.