Gendered Asylum in the Black Mediterranean: Two Nigerian Women’s Experiences of Reception in Italy

Abstract

Women comprise less than 15% of people crossing the Central Mediterranean, yet their representation in or erasure from accounts of precarious migration influences public notions of migrant deservingness in critical ways. This chapter recognizes European border spectacle as both racialized and gendered and posits the post-arrival reception period as a key site of negotiation of notions of deservingness. Drawing on ethnographic research I conducted in Italian reception centers, I discuss how these dynamics are especially salient in the case of Nigerian women who confront widespread associations of their presence in Italy with sex trafficking. In oral history interviews with two Nigerian women, interviewees described how they navigate “invisible obstacles” during reception: their awareness of others’ assumptions about them affected how they positioned themselves in relation to others, and where they spent time. Situating this discussion within the Black Mediterranean framework, I show how these circumstances are not new aspects of migration “crises” but in fact recall colonial notions of foreignness and blackness. My discussion advocates for an intersectional approach to the study of Mediterranean migration that engages migrant reception as a racialized, gendered set of processes, as well as, for migrants, a period of active, rather than passive, waiting.