Italians with veils and Afros: gender, beauty, and the everyday anti-racism of the daughters of immigrants in Italy

Abstract

This paper explores the everyday anti-racist practices of the female children of immigrants in Italy. We analyse two case studies: first, a group of Muslim young women in Italy who have publicly re-appropriated what is popularly known as ‘Islamic fashion’; and second, a group of young Afro-Italian women who meet both online and offline to share resources about the care of ‘natural’ Afro-textured hair. We argue that transnational feminist analysis can shed light on the complex ways that aesthetics and the female body are implicated in struggles for social and legal recognition in Italy among the so-called second generatio

Global gendered anti‐Black belonging and racial ideology

“…In this sense, gratuitous violence required the “ungendering” of Black women from the perspective of feminine Whiteness as the overrepresentation of the allegedly innocent human in need of protection. Colonialism also transplanted racialized and gendered conceptions of human belonging and non‐belonging that constructed and normalized White masculine national identity and granted White women national belonging while also denying them an independent identity from that of men's (Frisina & Hawthorne, 2018; Hartman, 1997; Kilomba, 2008). Meanwhile, violence directed at Black women of the African diaspora ushered in racist and sexist stereotypes and images (Collins, 2004; Emejulu & Sobande, 2019; Otele, 2021) of the so‐called hypersexual and deviant gendered Black body in relation to the gendered and racialized White gaze.…”

Italian Youth in International Context

“…In the following excerpt, this refusal is expressed in terms of a contrast between 'them' and 'us': In the above sentence, a refusal of parental religion and culture can be framed in a more general effort of adolescents to affirm their own identity and to engage in developmental separation -the process of individuation from their parents. There is evidence, however, that the ways young Muslim women negotiated religious belonging in a non-Muslim country may vary from refusing to use religious symbols like the veil, or using discursive strategies to defend their religion, to public re-appropriation of Islamic symbols (Cicognani et al, 2018;Frisina and Hawthorne, 2018).…”

“…When it was proposed to the 'Senato' (i.e. the other branch of Parliament) for approval in 2017, it encountered opposition from the right-wing and centre-right conservative parties (Frisina and Hawthorne, 2018) and therefore was not passed. The Yellow-Green government elected in March 2018 (a coalition of Lega and 5SM-five stars movement) struck down the reform in view of adopting a broader, explicit anti-migration policy.…”

Racialized im/migration and autonomy of migration perspectives: New directions and opportunities

“…In Australia, public declarations of diversity, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism contradict the various forms of racialized marginalization faced by Asian and African migrants and thus expose the underlying whiteness of the nation‐state (Boese & Marotta, ; Jayasuriya, ). In response to gendered xenophobic racism, second generation African and Arab young women in Italy have articulated counter‐aesthetics by valorizing Islamic fashion and natural Afro‐textured hair within the context of emergent struggles for socio‐legal recognition (Frisina & Hawthorne, ). This scholarship on racialized im/migration reveals what Silverstein () aptly identified a decade earlier as the “shifting racialized landscapes in the new Europe” that would generate a unique contested political and scholarly terrain over issues of migration, race, and nation.…”