Women Migrants From East to West

Gender, Mobility and Belonging in Contemporary Europe

Luisa, Dawn Lyon, Enrica Capussotti, Ioanna Laliotou, Luisa, Dawn Lyon, Enrica Capussotti, Ioanna Laliotou

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781845452780
• eBook ISBN: 9780857453662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Based on the oral histories of eighty migrant women and thirty additional interviews with 'native' women in the 'receiving' countries, this volume documents the contemporary phenomenon of the feminisation of migration through an exploration of the lives of women, who have moved from Bulgaria and Hungary to Italy and the Netherlands. It assumes migrants to be active subjects, creating possibilities and taking decisions in their own lives, as well as being subject to legal and political regulation, and the book analyses the new forms of subjectivity that come about through mobility.

Part I is a largely conceptual exploration of subjectivity, mobility and gender in Europe. The chapters in Part II focus on love, work, home, communication, and food, themes which emerged from the migrant women's accounts. In Part III, based on the interviews with 'native' women – employers, friends, or in associations relevant to migrant women – the chapters analyse their representations of migrants, and the book goes on to explore forms of intersubjectivity between European women of different cultural origins. A major contribution of this book is to consider how the movement of people across Europe is changing the cultural and social landscape with implications for how we think about what Europe means.

Cover image: Painting by Carla Accardi. Reproduced with the kind permission of Luca Barsi of the Galleria Accademia, Via Accademia Albertina 3/e, 10123 Torino.

Part I

Subjectivity, Mobility and
Gender in Europe

Chapter 1

On Becoming Europeans

Rosi Braidotti

The notion of a ‘new’ European identity as a multicultural social space within the framework of the European Union (EU) is controversial to say the least, especially in the current political context of increasing Euroscepticism. The EU is positioned simultaneously as a major player within the global economy and as an alternative social space. In other words, the EU can be seen as perpetuating the theme of Europe, appointing itself as a centre which universalizes its own ‘civilization’. However, it also constitutes a solid social democratic and hence progressive project, which not only counteracts the aggressive neo-liberalism of the U.S.A. on a number of key issues (privacy; telecommunication; genetically modified food and the environment), but also values human rights and world peace.

In this chapter I will emphasize the progressive potential of the EU. This project entails the re-definition not only of the interrelation of the member states, but also of the power-relations within them. This process of revision of identity triggers contradictory reactions. Not the least contradictory is the simultaneous celebration of trans-national spaces on the one hand, and the resurgence of hyper-nationalisms at the micro-level on the other. The global city and Fortress Europe stand both face-to-face and as two sides of the same coin (Sassen 1995). In relation to this, I want to defend a process of the ‘becoming-minoritarian' of Europe (Deleuze and Guattari 1980) as a way of both bypassing the binary global–local and of destabilizing the established definitions of European identity. My position rests on the assumption of the decline of Eurocentrism as a historical event, and that this represents a qualitative shift of perspective in our collective sense of identity. Several political movements today, ranging from the Green Party to the European Social Forum, give top priority to a post-Eurocentric vision of the European Union. Some progressive thinkers, including the feminist scholars in this book, are also critiquing nationalism as a necessary step towards the construction of a new European citizenship.

My aim in this chapter is to draw out a number of theoretical connections between different elements and themes which are discussed elsewhere in this book, such as the interrelation between identities, subject positions and affectivity or love relationships on the one hand, and issues of citizenship on the other. My orientation is philosophical and I practice philosophy as the art of connection making. I follow both Foucault's redefinition of the philosopher as a technician of practical knowledge, and the feminist commitment to produce relevant knowledge claims that reflect the lived experience of women and of other marginal subjects. This philosophical practice is enacted through cartographic analyses of specific problem areas. My contribution, both in this chapter and in this project as a whole, focuses on the cluster: gender/subjectivity/Europe. The approach is meta-methodological, rather than meta-discursive. As a materialist cartographic practice, poststructuralist philosophy is well suited to the task of mapping out complex interactions among many structures, subjects and relations. I see it fundamentally as a critique of power, understood both in the negative sense of constraints (potestas) and in the positive sense of empowerment and the production of discursive practice (potentia). By stressing these interrelated elements, I hope to take forward the discussion on the progressive and critical possibilities of the ‘new’ Europe.

It is also the case that continental philosophy – prior to and including poststructuralism – is historically connected to the issue of European identity and ‘civilization’. Since the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, the ‘crisis’ of European philosophy has both reflected and highlighted larger socio-political issues linked to the geopolitical status of Europe and to the growing sense of crisis about European identity. Nietzsche and Freud, then Husserl and Fanon, and later Adorno and the Frankfurt school are evidence of this trend. According to the poststructuralist generation – Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Irigaray – the crisis of philosophical humanism coincides historically with the decline of Europe as an imperial world-power, especially after the Second World War. Nowadays, wise old men like Habermas and Derrida and progressive spirits like Balibar have taken the lead in the public debate by stressing the advantages of a post-nationalist sense of the European Union.

In so far as Continental philosophy carries an in-built question about European identity, philosophical self-reflexivity – which in my case takes the form of a materialist cartography – has a unique contribution to make to the debate on Europe. It can help to de-segregate intellectual debates which tend to stay confined within set discursive communities. Philosophical reflection assesses and often resets theoretical lines of demarcation and thus it can produce discursive interconnections along areas or questions of common concern.

My argument is about the ‘becoming-minor' of Europe, in the sense of a post-nationalist European space. This project rests on two sets of arguments: one political, the other historical. Politically, on the Continent, the opposition to the European Union is led by the authoritarian Right, which is nationalist and xenophobic. As Stuart Hall (1987; 1990) put it, the great resistance against the European Union, as well as the American suspicion of it, is a defensive response to a process that aims at overcoming the idea of European nation-states. The short-range effect of this process is a nationalist wave of paranoia and xenophobic fears, which is simultaneously anti-European and racist. I have argued that late postmodernity (Braidotti 2002a) functions through the paradox of simultaneous globalization and fragmentation. It is as if the law of the ‘excluded middle’ did not hold, and one thing and its opposite can simultaneously be the case (Appadurai 1994: 324–39). Thus, the expansion of European boundaries coincides with the resurgence of micro-nationalist borders at all levels in Europe today. Unification coexists with the closing down of borders; the common European citizenship and the common currency co-exist with increasing internal fragmentation and regionalism; a new, allegedly post-nationalist, identity coexists with the return of xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism (Benhabib 1999). The disintegration of the Soviet empire marks simultaneously the triumph of the advanced market economy and the return of tribal ethnic wars of the most archaic kind. Globalization means both homogenization and extreme power differences (Eisenstein 1999).

Strong opposition to the EU is also voiced, however, by the nostalgic Left, which seems to miss the topological foundations for international working class solidarity. The cosmopolitan tradition of socialism militates against the European dimension: solidarity with the third world always carries a politically-correct consensus, whereas an interest in European matters is often dismissed as being vain and self-obsessive. Speaking as a left-wing feminist intellectual, I must say that the Left has often been unable to react with energy and vision to the historical evidence of the dislocation of European supremacy and the coming of the American empire (Hardt and Negri 2000). The Left has also been slow to understand the non-dialectical and schizophrenic nature of advanced capitalism (Deleuze and Guattari 1972; 1980). In this light, the feminist, pacifist and anti-racist movements can be of great inspiration in drawing more lucid and relevant political cartographies of contemporary power relations.

Historically, the project of the European Union originates in the defeat of fascism and Nazism after World War II. The moral and political bankruptcy of European ‘civilization’ was exemplified by the holocaust perpetuated against the Jewish, and Roma populations, as well as the persecution of homosexuals and communists by the Nazi and fascist regimes. The life and work of one of the initiators of the project of European federation – Altiero Spinelli (Spinelli 1988; 1992) – testifies to this, as does his wife Ursula Hirschmann (Spinelli 1979; Hirschmann 1993), and Ursula's brother Albert Hirschman (Hirschman 1945; 1994). The project of the EU is consequently grounded in anti-fascism, anti-nationalism and anti-militarism (Spinelli and Rossi 1998). It was imposed on the European nation-states as a punishment for two Franco-German wars that spilled over into global wars. In the context of the Cold War, the new European community, as a showcase of Western superiority, also played the role of streamlining the reconstruction of Europe's war-torn economy.

The two branches of my argument – the political and the historical – converge upon a single conclusion: that the European Union as a progressive project means a site of possible political resistance against nationalism, xenophobia and racism, bad habits that are endemic to the old imperial Europe. It follows therefore that the question of the European Union no longer coincides with European identity, but rather constitutes a rupture from it and a transformation. The scholarship reflects this double-track: there is far more work on European identity, as such, than on the European Union. Feminists are especially notable for their absence from discussions on the post-nationalist project of the EU, and are prone to facile anti-Europeanism.

This view of Europe as a post-nationalist project is very attuned to feminist critiques of power. Europe as a world-power has practiced a form of universalism that has implied the exclusion or consumption of others. In a poststructuralist frame of reference, these constitutive ‘others’ are the specular complements of the subject of modernity. They are the woman; the ethnic or racialized other; and the natural environment, including animals, plants and forests. They constitute, respectively, the second sex or sexual complement of Man; the coloured, racialized or marked other that allows the Europeans to universalize their whiteness as the defining trait of humanity; and the naturalized environment against which technology is pitched and developed. These ‘others’ are of crucial importance to the constitution of the identity of the Same: they are structurally connected to it – albeit by negation. One cannot move without the other, therefore the redefinition of European identity intrinsically poses the question of the social and discursive status of ‘difference’, both in the sense of sexual difference and that of ethnic diversity.

The project of European unification involves a process of consciousnessraising, which in turn expresses a critique of the self-appointed missionary role of Europe as the alleged centre of the world. In an argument that runs parallel to feminist theory, this vision of Europe promotes a re-grounding of this pretentious and false universalism into a more situated, local perspective. As the work of feminist philosophers like Genevieve Lloyd (1985) has pointed out, universalistic claims are actually highly particular and partial. Feminist epistemologists, especially Sandra Harding (1991) and Donna Haraway (1990a), have produced some of the most significant critiques of the false universalism of the European subject of knowledge. They have also offered powerful alternative accounts of both subjectivity and of an enlarged sense of scientific objectivity. This process of epistemological revision runs parallel to new theorizations of the Subject. While it does not always result in such theorizations, it does however amount to a revision of the ethnocentrism implicit in a universalistic posture which positions Europe as the centre of the knowing subject: science as the white man's burden (Harding 1993). Such a dislocation of pseudo-scientific assertions of white superiority amounts to a re-grounding of Europe, no longer as the centre, but as one of the many peripheries in the world today. This process of consciousness-raising is a sober awakening to the concrete particularity of the European situation.

The Politics of Location as Method and as Strategy

The politics of location is the method and the strategy which was developed (Rich 1987) and later theorized by feminists to account for consciousnessraising. It is also a way of making sense of diversity among women, understood as the binary opposites of the phallogocentric subject. This practice is coupled with that of epistemological and political accountability which is understood as the practice that consists of unveiling the power locations which one inevitably inhabits as the site of one's identity. The practice of accountability (for one's embodied and embedded locations) as a relational, collective activity of undoing power differentials is linked to two crucial notions: memory and narratives. They activate the process of putting into words, that is to say bringing into symbolic representation, that which escapes consciousness. In relation to migrant women themselves, the emphasis on remembering and narrating is central to the methodology of this project. Through all the chapters we see how these stories provide evidence of the plurality, ambivalence and contradictions of the subject. And through these analyses, we can see the richness and the complexity of these processes.

A ‘location’ in fact, is not a self-appointed and self-designed subject-position. It is a collectively shared and constructed, jointly occupied, spatiotemporal, territory. Because it is so familiar, it escapes self-scrutiny. The ‘politics of location’ consequently supports the process of consciousnessraising and results in a political awakening (Grewal and Kaplan 1994). ‘Politics of locations’ are cartographies of power which rest on a form of self-criticism, arrived at through a critical, genealogical self-narrative; they are relational and outside-directed. These ‘embodied’ accounts illuminate and transform our knowledge of ourselves and of the world. Thus, black women's texts and experiences make white women see the limitations of our locations, truths and discourses. Feminist knowledge is an inter-active and self-reflexive process that relies on networks of exchanges. It brings out aspects of our existence, especially our own involvement with power that we had not noticed before (Mohanty 1992).

‘Figurations’ of alternative feminist subjectivity¹ differ from classical ‘metaphors’ precisely in calling into play a sense of accountability for one's locations. They express materially-embedded cartographies and as such are self-reflexive and not parasitic upon a process of metaphorization of ‘others’. The figurations that emerge from this process act as the spot-light that illuminates aspects of one's practice which were blind spots before. By extension, a new figuration of the subject functions like conceptual personae. As such, it is no metaphor, but acts rather as a cognitive map, i.e., it is a materially embedded and embodied account of one's power-relations. On the creative level, it expresses the rate of change, transformation or affirmative deconstruction of the power one inhabits. ‘Figuration’ materially embodies the stages of a metamorphosis of a subject position, which veers towards all that the phallogocentric system does not want it to become (Braidotti 2002a).

A range of new, alternative subjectivities have indeed emerged in the shifting landscapes of postmodernity. They contribute to the creation of a new social imaginary to replace established representations of women. They are contested, multi-layered and internally contradictory subject-positions, all of which does not make them any less ridden with power-relations. They are hybrid and in-between social categories for whom traditional descriptions in terms of sociological categories such as ‘marginals’, ‘migrants’, or ‘minorities’ are, as Saskia Sassen (1995) suggests, grossly inadequate. From the angle of ‘different constitutive others' this inflationary production of different differences simultaneously expresses the logic of capitalist proliferation and exploitation, but also the emerging subjectivities of positive and self-defined others. It all depends on one's locations or situated perspectives. Far from seeing this as a form of relativism, I see it as an embedded and embodied form of enfleshed materialism. It is important to resist the uncritical reproduction of Sameness on a molecular, global or planetary scale by approaching differences in a non-dialectical and multi-layered framework which stresses their subversive potential.

The work on power, difference and the politics of location offered by postcolonial and anti-racist feminist thinkers² who are familiar with the European situation helps us to illuminate the paradoxes of the present. One of the most significant effects of late postmodernity in Europe is the phenomenon of trans-culturality in a pluri-ethnic or multi-cultural European social space. World-migration – a huge movement of population from periphery to centre, working on a world-wide scale of ‘scattered hegemonies’ (Grewal and Kaplan 1994) – has challenged the claim to an alleged cultural homogeneity of European nation-states and of the incipient European Union. Present-day Europe is struggling with multi-culturalism at a time of increasing racism and xenophobia. The paradoxes, power-dissymetries and fragmentations of the present historical context require that we shift the political debates from the issue of differences between cultures, to differences within the same culture. These are the shifting grounds on which periphery and centre confront each other, with a new level of complexity that defies dualistic or oppositional thinking. In this book, our research on the internal European migrations show what this approach can mean for Europe and European women.

Feminist theory argues that if it is the case that a socio-cultural mutation is taking place in the direction of a multi-ethnic, multi-media society, then the transformation cannot affect only the pole of ‘the others’; it must equally dislocate the position and the prerogative of ‘the same’, the former centre. In other words, what is changing is not merely the terminology or metaphorical representation of the subjects, but the very structure of subjectivity, the social relations, and the social imaginary that support it. Again, the research presented within this project gives some indications in this direction. It is the syntax of social relations, as well as their symbolic representation, that is in upheaval. The customary standard-bearers of Euro-centric phallocentrism no longer hold in a civil society that is, amongst others, sexed female and male, multi-cultural and not inevitably Christian. More than ever, the question of social transformation begs that of representation: what can the male, white, Christian monotheistic symbolic do for emerging subjects-inprocess? The challenges, as well as the anxieties evoked by them, mark patterns of becoming that require new forms of expression and representa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Editors' Introduction
• Part I - Subjectivity, Mobility and Gender in Europe
• Part II - Subjectivity in Motion: Analysing the Lives of Migrant Women
• Part III: - Processes of Identification: Inclusion and Exclusion of Migrant Women
• Conclusions - Gender, Subjectivity, Europe: A Constellation for the Future
• Appendix 1 - Summary of individual interviewees
• Appendix 2 - Summary of interviewees' characteristics by nationality
• Notes on Contributors
• Index