Ruba Salih

Moroccan migrant women: Transnationalism, nation-states and gender

Most writing on transnationalism emphasises the counter-hegemonic nature of transnational practices, by portraying them as acts of resistance and as signs of the decline of the modern nation-state. Those analyses which do acknowledge the role of nation-states and global economic restructuring in shaping and directing transnational social and political fields fail, however, to explore how these structures operate in a gendered way. By shedding light on the material and the normative conditions which forge, shape, or impede Moroccan womens movements and their transnational practices, this article suggests that rather than a uniform process, transnationalism is a complex and varied terrain experienced differently according to gender and class and their interplay with normative constraints. While not denying the symbolic and emotional significance of womens transnational practices between Italy and Morocco, this article suggests that the material, economic and normative conditions under which migrant women live impinge upon the construction of their social personhood within a transnational field.

Reformulating tradition and modernity: Moroccan migrant women and the transnational division of ritual space

In this article I analyse the rituals that transnational migrants who live and work in Europe (mainly Italy) perform in Morocco during their return there for summer holidays. The transnational dimension of rituals and ceremonies reveals the diverse ways in which Moroccan families gain social recognition across transnational space. I explore how migrants construct and display their identities contextually and in opposition to multiple Others. By performing the traditional rituals associated with important turning points in their lives in Morocco, migrants seek to reintegrate themselves and maintain their membership of their community of origin. At the same time, however, these performances bring to the surface a hidden agenda: the assertion and exhibition of migrants’ differences with respect to those who have stayed behind. These rituals, which provide a perspective through which to analyse the intersection of global and local interconnections, also reveal complex and shifting interpretations of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, and the practices in which these are embedded. I conclude by suggesting that, in this process, migrants develop a creative interplay with ‘traditional practices’ by subverting, reformulating and giving new creative shape to their meaning and content.

Shifting Boundaries of Self and Other. Moroccan Migrant women in Italy

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 complexity 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 construct 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.

Refugees and cathartic politics. From human rights to the right to be human

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are often described as living in a condition of waithood, suspended from law and awaiting return to their national homeland, where they will finally turn into qualified political lives. This frame, stemming from Hannah Arendt‟ legacy, fetishizes rights and the nation-state as the spheres where the human ceases to be a mere biological body subject to humanitarian relief and finally turns into a fully-fledged subject of rights. This article, on the other hand, interrogates the possibility of political lives in grey areas. It asks what conditions of being human are attainable in a context of juridical suspension? Can exile become grounds for an articulation of rights that overcomes the political, juridical and emotive national frame as the only space for existing in the world? I suggest understanding Palestinian refugees‟ political subjectivity in Lebanon today, not through the frame of defeat and demise -or as bare lives (Agamben, 2005), but through the Gramscian lens of the cathartic moment. I explore the political work of catharsis as an emotional, moral and rhetorical form of collective outbreak from national frames. Through catharsis and paroxysm refugees expose the fallacies of humanitarianism and nation-state based conception of rights and instead articulate a novel imaginary of a borderless humanity as basis for politically qualified lives. Ruba Salih is a social anthropologist and a Reader at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her recent publications include: (2017) “Bodies that Walk, Bodies that Talk, Bodies that Love. Palestinian Women Refugees, Affectivity and the Politics of the Ordinary” Antipode 49/3:742–760 and a special issue of the Arab Studies Journal (2014, Vol. XXI n.1) on “Cultures of Resistance in Palestine and Beyond: The Politics of Art, Aesthetics, and Affect (with Sophie Richter-Devroe) This is the accepted version of a forthcoming article that will be published by Duke University Press in South Atlantic Quarterly: http://saq.dukejournals.org/content/by/year Accepted version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/24473/ 2 She is working with Sophie Richter-Devroe on a book titled Palestinian Refugees. The politics of exile and the politics of return, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming)

Policing gender mobilities: interrogating the ‘feminisation of migration’ to Europe

ABSTRACT This article proposes a gendered critique of the European Neighbourhood Policy, a framework that, amongst other things, aims to facilitate the mobility of migrants to the EU from the bordering countries. We highlight the ambivalences of European gender and migration regimes, and we take issue with the celebration of the ‘feminisation of migration’. The former fails to offer opportunities to women to safely embark on autonomous migratory projects, the latter contributes to reproduce traditional gender biases in the countries of origin as well as of destination. We conclude by suggesting that the EU critique to emigration countries for failing to tackle women’s discrimination is less than persuasive when assessed vis-á-vis with the curtailment on women’s independent mobility across European borders.

Book Review: Once Again, Sisterhood is not Global: Gender Relations, Migration and Domestic Work in Italy

In contrast to the widespread tendency of analysing migrants’ ‘integration’ into European societies, from a unilateral viewpoint on behalf of migrants, Andall’s book, Gender, Migration and Domestic Service: The Politics of Black Women in Italy, is an interesting and well-documented analysis, which has the merit of analysing gender relations within Italian society through the looking-glass of migrant women’s absorption into domestic service in Italy. A careful and thorough investigation of the experiences and conditions of black, female migrant domestic workers in Rome, Andall’s book subverts the common perception of female migration to Europe as a movement from tradition to modernity, unveiling the pitfalls of gender relations within Italian society and spotting the contradictions of Italian women’s strategies of emancipation. The book shows how migrants’ status in Italy as domestic servants is embedded within the prevailing historical characteristics of the domestic work sector, traditionally constructed as a low waged, marginal and private domain. However, while up until the 1970s live-in domestics were mainly Italian working-class women hired by upper-class families, in the last 30 years there has been an increased demand for live-in domestics as a consequence of the new needs of the Italian family. While feminist constituencies in Italy have tended to explain this phenomenon primarily in terms of Italian women’s achievements through their entrance in the labour market, Andall’s main argument throughout the book is that the conditions for working outside the house for Italian women are made possible by a contradictory process whereby immigrant women are exploited and confined to the live-in domestic sector, a situation leading to what Andall defines as the ‘distorted’ emancipation of Italian women (p. 281). Indeed, Italian women have been able to reconcile their productive and reproductive roles by delegating to other women the burden of domestic work, without challenging the rigid division of domestic labour within Italian culture. In contrast with what happened in other European countries, in Italy the idea that domestic work is to be accomplished by women has not yet been challenged. Moreover, Andall’s careful analysis of the intersection of class, gender and ethnicity in the historical evolution of domestic work in Italy highlights how the sector is acquiring increasingly ‘racialized’ traits, developing a hierarchy at the top of which are Italian working-class women performing the hourly paid domestic work while at the bottom lie migrant women, employed almost exclusively as live-in domestic