In recent years migration has no longer been
perceived as a one-way definitive move from an origin to a target-point,
but increasingly as an always undoable and redoable process of redefinition
within new contexts and value-systems, prompted by global processes
of inclusion such as EU enlargement. As national boundaries are becoming
blurred and people are travelling, studying and changing jobs across
borders, national perceptions of identity are giving way to wider conceptualisations
of selfhood as always in the making, always changing masks to fit within
new contexts.
How do these processes of fluidisation of boundaries affect women,
their social performance in relation to the old public/private dichotomy
and their knowledge-production? How do women’s transnational migrant
experiences vary across the world (e.g. in Europe as compared to America)
and to what extent are concepts such as nomadism and postcolonialism
relevant to them? How are these experiences reflected in the international
media and literature and how have they been reflected in language?
This section will explore the social and cultural practices that emerge
in women’s transnational migration. The concept of performance
will be used in a broad sense, starting from a theatrical model, but
also revisiting Erving Goffman’s, J.L.Austin’s, J. Hillis
Miller and Judith Butler’s theories of performance, performativity
and masquerade from the perspective of female selfhood on the move.
