Etnografia terrona di soggetti eccentrici. Pratiche, rappresentazioni e narrazioni per contrastare il razzismo e l’omofobia in Italia

This thesis explores the current reconfiguration of feminism in Italy, particularly the practices and self-representations of women who struggle against racism and homophobia from a postcolonial standpoint and with a freely interpreted sense of sexual difference. These women create spaces of resistance that allow the emergence of new political positionalities, which go beyond western categories of ‘lesbian’, ‘feminist’ and ‘migrant’ by re-signifying them in novel ways. These “eccentric subjects” (de Lauretis 1999) work on the separatisms inside social movements, confounding their ideological polarizations by living difference as instances of vital conflict. They thus open up forms of participation based on the need for transversality. The analysis of the activists’ bodily itineraries and of the movements’ practices and cartographies shows that two main elements of connection exist between these women, who are characterized by multiplicity: on the one hand, their genealogies and origins; on the other, the dimensions of visibility, invisibility and representation. This terrona ethnography draws on a post-exotic anthropological tradition predicated on the researcher’s auto-ethnographic implication, and on a revision of the relation between research participants and the notion of the field. The thesis connects experiences in Paris, Palermo (southern Italy) and Verona (northeast Italy), problematizing forms of cultural competition and the representation of (different parts of) Italy from a postcolonial perspective.