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 generation.

KEYWORDS:

• Italy
• second generation
• Islamophobia
• racism
• gender

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Corrigendum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Camilla Hawthorne http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9274-1321

Notes

1. As Andall (2002) notes, even those who technically fulfill the requirements for naturalization are not necessarily able to successfully acquire Italian citizenship. For instance, she writes that the children of Eritrean immigrants who arrived to Italy in the 1970s and took up residence in ‘occupied’ homes due to housing shortages did not always have their births officially registered with local governments. As a result, when they applied for Italian citizenship upon turning eighteen, they found themselves lacking official documentation to prove that they had been resident in the country from birth.

2. On Law No. 91 (1992), which affirmed the principle of jus sanguinis, see also Njegosh (2015). To understand the scope of this exclusion, one must remember that minors with non-Italian citizenship number around one million people in Italy (Istat 2013).

3. A. Frisina organized and facilitated the focus group, and doctoral candidate Sandra Kyeremeh participated as observer. The participants were contacted through announcements that were placed around various high schools in Padua.

4. For background the use of this expression, see Giuliani (2015), Patriarca (2015), and Perilli (2015).

5. In 1991, African-American taxi driver Rodney Glen King III was brutally beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers. Outrage surrounding a jury’s acquittal of the three of the four officers involved (they could not agree on charges for the fourth officer) culminated in a mass uprising in Los Angeles in 1992.

6. For a genealogy of the dehumanization of Muslims as ‘monsters’, see Arjana (2015).

7. For a useful overview of the ‘digital diasporas’ literature, see the special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, ‘Migration and the Internet: Social Networking and Diasporas’ (2012), edited by Pedro J. Oiarzabal and Ulf-Deitrich Reips.

8. For an example in Italy, see the editorial by political scientist Giovanni Sartori in which he affirms the ‘non-integratability of young Muslims’, citing the ‘third generations’ in England and France (who, he argues, are ‘more fervent and brutal than ever’) in order to justify his arguments against the reform of Italian citizenship law (http://www.corriere.it/editoriali/09_dicembre_20/sartori_2eb47d0c-ed3e-11de-9ea5-00144f02aabc.shtml).

9. For an investigation of the origins of the term ‘Islamophobia’ at the end of the nineteenth century, see Bravo López (2011).

10. On the racism of European states against Muslims, see Fekete and Sivanandan 2009.

11. On the parallels between this process and anti-Semitic naturalizations, see Klug (2012, 678) and Meer (2013).

12. Recent cases of Islamophobia and outright Islamophobic violence in Italy have been tied to the rise of ISIS (Vergani and Tacchi 2015). See also Frisina (2016) and the second edition of the annual European Islamophobia Report, www.islamophobiaeurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Introduction_2016.pdf

13. She preferred to not have her name published and asked that we use her initials instead.

14. Interview with A. Frisina, 7 September 2014, Padua.

15. On the origins and multiple meanings of the veil, see Pepicelli (2012).

16. Through pages like that of K.N., many Muslim women have decided to follow the religious teaching of the veil because it is ‘aesthetically beautiful’. Wearing the veil in an elegant fashion becomes a form of bodily discipline (Foucault 1988) that is at once individual and collective, and is learned through countless online hijab tutorials. This form of discipline follows the precept of ‘modesty’ that, in the Islamic tradition, disciplines the bodies of men but especially those of women, rendering them ‘inconspicuous’ so that they will not be sexually provocative. Nonetheless, today modesty is a polyvalent value, ambiguous and contested among Muslims – not just in words but also through ‘visual debates’ about what, how, and when to cover or reveal (Moors 2013).

17. In the colonial imaginary, the fact that veiled women appeared to be ‘difficult to reach, unavailable’ did not only represent the inferiority of the culture of the colonized, it also unleashed masculine fantasies of lustful women (i.e., the harem) that had to be conquered and made docile (Yeğenoğlu 1998).

18. For the young Muslim women interviewed in our research, the most interesting fashion styles do not come from Great Britain or the United States but rather from designers based in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Turkey.

19. Interview with A. Frisina, 3 December 2014, Padua.

20. For more information about the diffusion of Islamic fashion among African-Americans, see the documentary Fashioning Faith (2009), http://www.der.org/films/fashioning-faith.html.

21. On global Islamic fashion, see Sandikci and Ger 2010 and Lewis 2015.

22. For more information, see http://people.com.celebrity.lupita-nyongo-is-peoples-most-beautiful/ and www.huffingtonpost.it/2014/03/24/lupita-nyongo-dencia-creme-sbiancano-pelle_n_5019840.html.

23. See, for instance, the special issue of Feminist Theory, ‘Beauty, race and feminist theory in Latin America and the Caribbean’ (2013), edited by Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa and Megan Rivers Moore.

24. Evelyne was the subject of a 2014 documentary by Massimo Coppola, Nappy Girls (http://video.corriere.it/nappy-girls/5291ec12-4416-11e4-bbc2-282fa2f68a02).

25. Interview with C. Hawthorne, 8 July 2014, Milan.

26. Interview with C. Hawthorne via Skype, 25 July 2014.

27. The DREAMers are a movement of young people who arrived, undocumented, to the United States as children traveling with their parents; they are seeking a legalization of their immigration status. The name DREAMer comes from the legislative proposal entitled ‘DREAM’: Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors.

28. Interview with C. Hawthorne, 8 July 2014, Milan.

29. As Tamara E. Holmes notes in an article for Black Enterprise, the U.S. Black hair care industry is worth over 600 million dollars (4 October 2013). Similar figures are not available for Italy.