Migrant Women, Multicultural Experiences and Active Participation. New Challenges for Italian Society from a Post-Colonial Feminist Perspective

The paper is based on the qualitative analyses of interviews and focus groups with migrant women who have experienced some form of participation (or exclusion) in three selected areas of Italian society (politics and in general civic engagement, trade unions, education). It offers a critical perspective of what is the state of art about the link and possibilities offered by national law and the real opportunity for migrants to exercise an active/effective participation in public life. As the research has shown, immigrant women active in Italian society very often have to direct most of their efforts towards trying to overcome general stereotypes, especially if they are of some specific and easily recognizable groups, such as Nigerian or Muslim women. Their biography oscillates between invisibility and the (media) overexposure as target of populist discourses, in a hierarchical power structure that put immigrant women in a subordinate position and in a multiple discrimination framework. Intersectional analyses help to understand their life’s paths, and the obstacles they meet interacting with mainstream society as well as with their national/community groups of origin. In a feminist perspective, how to rethink the construction of identities from experiences of women living displacement, oppression or forms imposed integration in the globalized current scenario? How to analyze the migratory experience and the efforts of migrant women to be an active part of a multicultural society through their experiences? What are the categories and the practices of the feminist post-colonial/de-colonial thought still valid or in need of an overhaul in order to comprehend their experiences? The life stories of these women, studded with fractures of meaning, of discontinuities, of asymmetries of material and symbolic power, create a short-circuit in Western mainstream society and offer an important opportunity for a moral and intellectual growth for feminist thought and activism.