Shifting Boundaries of Self and Other: Moroccan Migrant Women in Italy

05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 321 Shifting Boundaries of Self and Other Moroccan Migrant Women in Italy Ruba Salih UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX ABSTRACT This article suggests that both the multicultural perception of ‘community’ as a bounded and internally homogeneous body and the celebration of migrants as hybrids and anti-essentialist actors fail to acknowledge the complex- ity of processes of identity construction. The first reifies and essentializes migrants’ cultural identities, denying subjective contestations over notions of cultural and religious authenticity. The celebration of migrants as progressive and counterhegemonic ‘hybrids’, however, reinforces essentialist understandings of ‘migrants’, producing a hierarchy between experiences of displacement. The article suggests that it is essential to understand the ways in which migrants con- struct imagined, transnational and local communities. It provides a picture of the ways in which Moroccan migrant women in Italy draw and experience boundaries of exclusion and inclusion, of Self and Other in their day-to-day practices and discourses. In particular, it argues that Moroccan women define themselves both vis-a-vis Italians as well as by drawing boundaries between themselves and other Moroccan women and men. KEY WORDS ethnicity N hybridity N identity N Islam N Moroccan women COMMUNITY, HYBRIDITY AND IDENTITY Two main trends characterize the ways in which migrants are increasingly portrayed in Europe. The first, an expression of multicultural perspectives in Italy and elsewhere, tends to define migrants in terms of their belonging to ‘communities’. Within this perspective, migrants are perceived as members of homogeneous ethnic groups sharing a rather bounded and static ethnic culture, whose meanings are interpreted in a universal way by all the members who, as Yuval-Davis (1993: 627) aptly puts it, are supposed to ‘speak with a unified cultural voice’. The European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 7, 2000: 321–335 [1350-5068(200008)7:3;321–335;013658] 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 322 322 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 7(3) Critiques of the perception of migrants as homogeneous ethnic communities have prepared the ground for the second main paradigm in which migrants are perceived, influenced by recent Anglo-American academic literature (see Bhabha, 1990; Clifford, 1994; Gilroy, 1993). Post- modern accounts propose de-essentialized representations of cultures and identities where migrants, displaced people and refugees epitomize hybridity as resistance to bounded constructions of ‘communities’ and where the latter are replaced by the notion of diaspora (Gallissot and Rivera, 1996). Rather than the fusion of two cultural systems or identities, hybridity is better conceived as a ‘third space which enables other pos- itions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives’ (Bhabha, 1990: 211). Living as diasporic subjects implies a radically different experience of displacement than migration. While immigrants’ communities may be assimilable in such a way that they can constitute ‘a new home in a new place’, a diaspora culture ‘mediates, in a lived tension, the experiences of separation and entanglement, of living here and remem- bering/desiring another place’ (Clifford, 1994: 307). This article criticizes attempts to describe experiences of identity construction in such binary categories. As Kaplan (1998) has suggested, these interpretations run the risk of producing a hierarchy between experiences of displacement where the representation of ‘hybrids’ as progressive subjects reinforces essentialist understandings of ‘migrants’. The latter are seen as either reproducing traditional cultural values and roles or as assimilating into western cultural frames. This article argues that there are multiple paths through which migrants renegotiate their cultural identities, and suggests that the rejection of assimilation does not bring them necessarily to hybridity. My argument is that naming migrant women and men in terms of their belonging to a ‘community’ often leads to hom- ogenizing the varieties of cultural experiences and subjectivities they embody, and it hinders processes of rooting and uprooting beyond fixed relations to local places and bounded cultures. However, it is also important to explain the ways in which ‘communities’, in terms of shared identities, are constructed or imagined by migrants themselves, by highlighting how gender and ethnicity operate and intersect. As Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1989) have pointed out, women play a crucial role as transmitters and signifiers of ethnic identity and culture, which boundaries are defined around issues such as sexuality, marriage and family. In fact, notions of cultural authenticity and purity revolve fre- quently around the control of women’s bodies and behaviour (Sahgal and Yuval-Davis, 1992; Saint-Blancat, 1999). By drawing on a larger study (Salih, 1999), that explores the transnational lives and identities of a group of Moroccan women living in the region Emilia-Romagna (Italy), in a context of increasing global cultural 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 323 Salih: Shifting Boundaries of Self and Other 323 connections and movements, this article analyses the testimonies of three Moroccan migrant women.1 The narratives of Jamila, Amal and Ratiba have been chosen among others because they disclose different ways of renegotiating cultural identities which contest essentialism from within and from outside their ‘community’ without endorsing hybridity. Rather than rejecting altogether the idea of ‘community’ driven by anti- essentialist purposes, Moroccan women often exhibit a shifting and con- textual negotiation of the boundaries of their ‘community’, contesting dominant notions around cultural authenticity and competing for affirm- ing their own. One of the arguments of this article is that migrant women contextually negotiate boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of Self and Other, according to the diverse and sometimes intersecting hegemonic discourses that they may be facing in different places and phases of their lives. Indeed, Moroccan women define themselves vis-a-vis Italian society and by drawing boundaries that include or exclude ‘other’ Moroccans or Muslims, located within and outside their local, face-to-face relations. A picture of high heterogeneity among Moroccan migrant women emerges, which shows how multiple boundaries of ‘communities’, imagined or real, are drawn, where different conceptualizations of Islam also play an important role. RENEGOTIATING ISLAM, AUTHENTICITY AND TRADITION At a general level, the ‘new migration’ flows to Italy occur within a frame- work of changing socioeconomic conditions in comparison with the industrial expansion of the 1950s and the 1960s in Europe (Koser and Lutz, 1998). Italy represents a postindustrial society which is undergoing a process of economic restructuring with contradictory implications for migrant women and men’s insertion in the labour market. In this context, Italian migration policies have changed considerably in the last 10 years, increasingly linking a politics of control and restriction of immigration with the development of a multicultural agenda aimed at recognizing migrants’ cultural difference2 (Melotti, 1997). However, very often the rubric of the respect for cultural difference has reinforced the representation of Islam as a set of static and immutable practices that members of the ‘Muslim community’ are expected to automatically and uniformly reproduce in continuity with supposedly past practices and beliefs. As the affaire du foulard in France, and also similar debates in Italy, have con- firmed,3 in the European imagination Muslim women are constructed as the ‘traditional’ women and as the ‘miserable victims par excellence’ (Lutz, 1997: 96), as opposed to women who do not adopt religious symbols or do not practise Islam who are portrayed as modernized, that is ‘westernized’. This portrayal reproduces binary categories where the 05 Salih (to/d) 29/6/00 8:30 am Page 324 324 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 7(3) ‘West’ is associated with modernity and secularism, whereas the ‘rest’ is coupled with tradition, backwardness and religion.4 In this article I wish to challenge such assumptions by providing a picture of the different role played by Islam in women’s assertions of their subjective cultural and religious identities. It will emerge how the various ways of experiencing Islam lay bare multiple identity renegotiation processes and may reveal women’s diverse relations with the new place they inhabit. Whereas some women renegotiate Islamic practices in various ways and display a certain degree of plasticity (lived more or less painfully), others adopt Islam as the main sign of their identities, sometimes in continuity, but more often in discontinuity with attitudes and affiliations they held in their country of origin. Elsewhere (Salih, 1999) I have conceptualized these different ways of conceiving of and practising Islam in Italy as expressions of opposing representations of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ and their complex articulation with ‘authenticity’. For Islamist women, modernity is possible only through knowledge and devout practice of Islam, which is nonetheless invoked as a break with past traditions. This new Islam represents their way

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