Sabrina Marchetti

In today’s Europe, migrant domestic workers are indispensable in supporting many households which, without their employment, would lack sufficient domestic and care labour. Black Girls collects and explores the stories of some of the first among these workers. They are the Afro-Surinamese and the Eritrean women who in the 1960s and 70s migrated to the former colonising country, the Netherlands and Italy respectively, and there became domestic and care workers. Sabrina Marchetti analyses the narratives of some of these women in order to powerfully demonstrate how the legacies of the colonial past have been, at the same time, both their tool of resistance and the reason for their subordination.

This article looks at the gradual development of a 'global governance of paid domestic work' by assessing the impact of the ILO Convention n. 189 on campaigns for domestic workers' rights in different countries. Here I compare the case of Ecuador and India as two contrasting examples of the ways in which state and non-state organizations have positioned themselves around the issue, revealing how the context-dependent character of domestic workers' rights can ultimately condition the mobilisation of different actors in each context. On the basis of the theory of 'strategic fields of action', I also define the promulgation of C189 as an 'exogenous change' that has differing impacts on the relevant social actors in two countries. As I will show, these national differences give shape to a very different modality in campaigns for domestic workers' rights, resulting in different roles, purposes and scope of action for key social actors.

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.

Questo articolo si basa su di un’intervista condotta da Sabrina Marchetti e Barbara De Vivo con Domenica Ghidei Biidu e Elisabetta Hagos nel 2009. In quanto componenti della diaspora eritrea in Europa, Ghidei Biidu e Hagos contribuiscono con questa intervista alla memoria della dominazione coloniale italiana nel Corno d’Africa sulla base del patrimonio di conoscenze che entrambe hanno ereditato dalle proprie famiglie.
L’intervista si sviluppa lungo delle linee di analisi e riflessione che rendono con efficacia l’importanza della dimensione di genere nel movimento nazionalista eritreo e nelle migrazioni di tipo postcoloniale e diasporico, così come nel processo di memorizzazione che le ha accompagnate. S’illustrano inoltre la dimensione culturale e quella simbolica della relazione attuale fra popolazioni ex colonizzate ed ex colonizzatrici. Infine, quest’intervista rappresenta un contributo originale nell’ottica del ‘fare storia’ rispetto al ruolo particolare che hanno avuto le donne eritree nei periodi di transizione politica e nelle connessioni fra Eritrea, Etiopia e Italia.

What does it mean to talk about 'gender' in relation to migration? When confronted by this question, scholars and students who already know what 'migration' means are puzzled by how they should put this together with an equally vast realm of concepts and facts – those that consider what gender is. Or, to be more precise: what gender does. For this purpose, in this chapter I am providing an overview of what gender does to migration, illustrating some of the ways in which taking a gender perspective changes the way we understand the link between migration and globalisation, and how gender-based differences and inequalities affect (and are affected) by global migrations. I will do this, first of all, by introducing the relevance of gender issues to migration debates, and thus speak of the 'feminisation of migration'. This, I contend, can be seen at a quantitative and qualitative level. Therefore, the chapter delves into a specific dimension of the feminisation of migration by taking the case of domestic and care workers to discuss issues such as the 'international division of reproductive labour' and the 'global care chain'. In the second part of the chapter I offer an historical overview of the scholarship that has developed around the gender–migration–globalisation nexus in the last 40 years. At the end, I outline other possible directions for research in this field. WHAT DOES GENDER DO? THE FEMINISATION OF MIGRATION The overlap between the questions of gender, migration and globalisation gives rise to a complex discussion whose key terms have many different definitions and where facts are interpreted in often contrasting ways. My suggestion is to approach this complexity by distinguishing between a quantitative and a qualitative dimension in which gender and global migrations enter in relation. At the quantitative level, the main questions are: how many women are migrating? How many men? And how have their numbers changed over time? It is important to emphasise how, at this level, gender is considered to speak of the binary division between men and women as based on a set of biological and physical features differently ascribed to male and female models, thus overlooking cases of transgender or intersexual people and with no distinctions on the basis of age, sexual orientation and so forth. At this level, what is of interest are usually the numbers of migrant women, their relative proportion to those of men, their nationalities and then, in more detail, what are their destinations, occupations , marital status and so on. At this quantitative level, we speak of the 'feminisation of migration' to describe the increase in the percentage of women in international migration – which, for instance

This chapter looks back at the historical phase of postcolonial migrations in order to elaborate on encounters between the formerly colonized and their former colonizers, and on what this might mean for the making of a postcolonial Europe. This is done through the analysis of fifteen in–depth interviews with Afro–Surinamese women who arrived in the Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s and have worked there in the domestic sector.

The narratives of these women emphasize the central role of resentment, i.e., the emotional inheritance of past violence, hatred, and domination which permeates the interactions between the descendants of the colonizers and of the colonized, in their sentiments and imagination. Resentment is thus a legacy that is passed from one generation to another, remaining alive through time and eventually physically travelling with those who migrate, accompanying them on their journeys.

Importantly, the notion of resentment has the capacity to explain the attitudes of the formerly dominant and dominated alike. As I argue in this chapter, on the one hand, it allows for explaining xenophobic tendencies amongst white Dutch people as propelled by feelings of resentment expressed in colonial nostalgia and regretful tones against migrants; and, on the other hand, resentment can be seen as part of the everyday experiences of Afro–Surinamese and other postcolonial migrants, whose inclusion in Dutch society is haunted by the presence of a collective memory of slavery. Thus, resentment offers a powerful entry point for understanding that a postcolonial transition for Europe does not mean simply overcoming colonial Europe, but instead is a process through which this past is continuously negotiated, discussed, and re–articulated in new ideas and political practices.

This article proposes a gendered critique of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), a policy 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 regimes of gender and migration, 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 falls short of persuasiveness when confronted with the curtailment on women’s independent mobility within the ENP framework.

“W il Duce. Onore a Luca Traini. Uccidiamoli tutti sti negri”

Questa la scritta, corredata da svastica e croce celtica, apparsa nei bagni di una biblioteca dell’Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia il giorno 6 marzo 20181. La scritta si riferisce a uno degli ultimi episodi di attacco cruento da parte di italiani verso persone di origine africana. Il razzismo verso persone di pelle nera in Italia non è cosa nuova2 e mostra un intero repertorio di immagini, convinzioni, rappresentazioni e stereotipi che accompagnano il carattere violento del rapporto fra persone bianche e nere, nelle sue forme quotidiane, ma specialmente nei casi estremi di aggressioni cruente. Dopo gli spari di Macerata, con Luca Traini che ha ferito 6 persone, e ancor più dopo l’omicidio di Idy Diene a Firenze da parte di Roberto Pirrone, chiunque fosse ancorato all’immagine degli ‘italiani brava gente’ dovrà definitivamente ricredersi......

Parlare di genere nelle migrazioni richiede uno sguardo attento e capace di cogliere le trasformazioni in corso. L'intervento di Sabrina Marchetti alla conferenza internazionale The challenges of a world on the move che si è tenuta a maggio a Roma

Sempre più comuni in Italia affidano l'assistenza domiciliare delle persone anziane alle cooperative, una delle conseguenze è un'alta burocrazia per tutti. Seguiamo la giornata tipo di un’operatrice: tablet alla mano e un'auto elettrica come luogo di lavoro

Feminist scholarship and movements worldwide have extensively engaged in theorising reproductive labour as an undervalued element of local and global political economies and have been pushing for the recognition of unpaid care and domestic work ‘as work’. At the same time, since the late 2000s the conditions of paid domestic workers have become an object of a new wave of mobilisation. Demands for equal labour rights and decent work for this category of workers have been put forward at the national and international level, while new international legislation has been adopted, such as ILO Convention 189. Despite these potentially convergent elements, it is not clear to what extent feminist theories on the valorisation of reproductive labour can be extended to, or can include, the case of paid domestic workers. In order to address this issue, in this article we present a comparative analysis of the relationships between feminist actors and domestic workers’ groups in Ecuador and Colomb...