Mardi 28 mars Après midi (Jules Ferry/Ulm)

Présidence Gabrielle Houbre, Université Paris-VII/Institut Universitaire de France (Paris, France)

14h – 16 h Images genrées de la migration/ Picturing Gendered Migrants

Discutant : Serge Weber, Université Aix-Marseille

• Silke Betscher, Université de Brème (Allemagne), Gendered Perspectives on Images of "Self" and "Other" in Photography of Labor Migration to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. [Visions genrées de soi et de l’autre. Photographies des migrations de travail en république fédérale d’Allemagne des années soixante aux années soixante-dix].

For a few years, German museums have organized special exhibitions about the history of labor migration to Germany. Also, several groups of migrants initiated a public debate about the need for a migration museum aimed at creating a suitable space of representation. Photographs, especially private pictures which document the experiences of migrants and the process of migration, are an important medium for showing the history of migration.
My dissertation analyzes the images of self and other that can be seen in pictures of labor migration and so called guestworkership in 1960s and 1970s Germany by evaluating private and public photographs of this era. Thereby, I aim to transfer the “visual turn” Cultural Studies and History have taken in the last years into the History of Migration in a gendered perspective.
In my talk, I will present some central points of my doctoral dissertation project. I aim to work out the different subject constructions that underlie these pictures. Starting from the insight that photographs are spaces of knowledge and truth production, it is necessary to see them as historically, socially and culturally determinated constructions. This is valid for the pictures themselves as well as for the act of taking them and the social practices that developed around the pictures. In order to underline the performative character photographs have as discoursive strategies of adoption, I would like to apply Spivak’s term „worlding“ (i.e. doing world) to the act of taking photographs and to the photographs as objects.
Photographs as historical sources contain three layers of analysis that need to be adressed: 1. pictures as material objects, 2. the social practice of taking photographs, and 3. the different contexts in which the photographs are used. The social practice of taking photographs is directly related to the social functions of taking photographs and making use of the pictures.
Photographs are, without doubt, an important medium of social communication. One of the most important functions of photography is that photographs serve as individual and collective storage for memories, and that they can be used as evidence that says: “This is how it was.”
Private photographs as egodocuments hold an important function within the construction of identity. They are material expressions of autobiographic memory.
Referring to Gender Studies the biographical research has shown how strong the biographical self-construction is contoured and influenced by gender specific imaginations. These imaginations and the ways of self-representation are rebuilt in a lasting mutual process.
Also, there are discernible gender differences in the way autobiographic memory is structured, which media it relies on, and how these media are contextualized in autobiographic memory.
In the context of migration, photographs serve specific functions: They become an important medium of self-construction and self-assurance in times of change and insecurity, a medium of contact between home and place of residence, an a medium of appropriating foreign environments.
In order to provide historical context, my presentation will begin with a short overview of the beginnings of labor migration to Germany after 1945. In a second part, I will outline the importance of photography as a historical source. In the main part of my presentation, I will highlight the most important theories and questions regarding the importance and functions of photography in the context of migration by using specific examples.



SPIEGEL, October 1964

As Monika Mattes recently pointed out, gender aspects have seldom been the focus of historical studies on labor migration to Germany. Thus the ways female migrants have been either neglected or stereotyped in contemporary media representations of migration continue to influence our historical knowledge. In the 1960s and 1970s print media, hardly any pictures of female migrants can be found, and articles typically portrayed gender roles in the migrants’ communities as backwards. Using private photographs of these years as sources can fill some of the gaps and correct some of the stereotypes: The self-performance of female “guest workers” stands in sharp contrast to the stereotypical images. Pictures of first-generation Turkish migrant women, for example, contrary to common cliché, show self-confident women, often dressed very stylishly.

Privat photograph, DoMit Archiv, Köln

However, not only the constructions of subjectivity visible in the pictures render themselves to gender analysis, but also the origin and functional context of the photographs. I will compare the photographs taken by male and female migrants in order to explore whether there is a gender specific difference in the social practice of photographing.
Let me give another example:
There are many private pictures that show the situation inside the corporate residences. My thesis is that men, especially those who had served in the military, were familiar with this setting. So the pictures they made of themselves have much in common with army pictures, documenting a specific period in most men’s life. Therefore, they reflect a specifically male kind of self-representation.

Privat photograph, DoMit Archiv, Köln SPIEGEL, October 1964

Privat photograph, DoMit Archiv, Köln

The picture showing women in their residence, by contrast, represents a specifically female social situation. Sitting on the ground talking to each other while performing tasks of everyday life is a situation that is typical for southern European female life. Here the original outdoor situation, where women meet each other in front of the house or in the yard is transformed into a new setting. By doing so ”home” and thereby identity is practiced.
I will use the previous and some other examples to show the main thesis of my dissertation and to work out questions which can be put to the photographs as a source of a gendered migration history.

• Nancy C. Carnevale, Montclair State University, Department of History (USA), The World Turned Upside Down: Representations of Women in the Language of Italian American Comic Theater [Un monde sans dessus dessous. La représentation des femmes dans le théâtre des Italiens d’Amérique. XIXe siècle et début du XXe siècle]

This paper looks at representations of women in the comedic musical sketches or "macchiete" of Eduardo Migliaccio, the popular, Italian American stage performer who went by the name Farfariello. Farfariello's work is unique because he often performed in the Italian American idiom, a mixture of standard Italian, dialect, English, and Italianized English words. In this paper, I argue that male immigrant fears and concerns regarding their lives in the New World found expression in the anxieties about relations with women seen in these comic skits and songs. The themes examined include: how communication problems men had with women--both Italians and Americans--mirror the language problems immigrants faced in everyday life; the equation of women with both proper forms of speech, whether English or Italian, as well as with the maintenance of the Italian dialect, and; the way the comparative freedom in courting women in the U.S. was used to represent the differences between southern Italian and American life and how this is related to the use of the English language. A bit from the piece "Italian Language," illustrates the way gender and language are bound up in many of these skits. The male Italian immigrant narrator, making a pun on the similarity between the English word "woman" and the Italian word for men (uomini), notes "The inglish [sic] is the italian language up side down. For instance in english woman means woman in italian women means men .
see . . up side down."
Since much of the work on Italian immigration (as well as immigration histories in general) are community studies, the experience of women is all too often subsumed under men's. Similarly, while in recent years there has been an attempt to correct this imbalance through studies devoted exclusively to immigrant women, immigration historians have generally not incorporated a gendered analysis in their work. The paper also broadens the usual approach immigration scholars take towards language in American immigrant life which is generally limited to a consideration of English as an index of assimilation. By focusing on the Italian immigrant idiom, my study reveals the meanings that the immigrant’s themselves attached to language, their own as well as English. My work thus contributes to our understanding of immigrant subjectivity, an area of increasing interest to immigration scholars.
While my discipline is history, I take an interdisciplinary approach in this paper which crosses the boundaries of history to include performance studies, cultural anthropology, sociolinguistics, and psychoanalytic theory. I hope my presentation will stimulate discussion on methodological issues as well as on the subject at hand.

• Judith E. Meighan, Syracuse University, College of Visual and Performing Art (USA), Tragedy to Triumph: Depicting Migration in Italian art 1880-1920 [De la tragédie au triomphe. L’image dm?u migrant dans l’art italien, 1880-1920] [Texte]

During the period 1880-1920 when millions of Italians left their birth country for greater economic opportunities abroad, artists in Italy addressed the great Italian diaspora in major works of sculpture and painting. In this paper, I will contrast what is known of this well-documented, heavily researched migration with the contemporary works of art. These paintings and sculptures employed gendered concepts of tragedy (female) and triumph (male) and echo the period’s struggle to forge a strong national identity.
For the most part, artists rendered narratives in verismo sociale, a figurative style that embraced clarity and emphasized sentimentality. Contrary to the overwhelmingly male migration (before 1900 more than three-quarters of Italian immigrants were men), artists chose to tell the stories through the female figure which could acceptably convey longing and loss and evoke pathos in the viewer.
Sculptor Domenico Ghidoni employed this gendered visual strategy in his well-received figural group, The Emigrants, which won two awards when exhibited in 1891. The catalogue described the work as a mother and daughter sitting on a bench with all their worldly belongings looking back to the shore as the ship leaves the harbor. For a reviewer of the day, the mother’s look conveyed sadness and longing as she gazes toward the receding shore of the country she will never see again. The adolescent child nods in an awkward sleep, exhausted by the ordeal, but also innocent of the difficulties ahead. Even today, historian Vincenzo Vicario (1994) finds the mother’s face etched with the anxiety of waiting, the anguish of being far from the things she loves and preoccupied with the uncertain future.
The Emigrants joined Segantini’s The Two Mothers and Previati’s Motherhood, all on view in 1891, in establishing the importance of mother and child as a powerful carriers of social meaning. In the case of The Emigrants, though, feminization of the migrant experience permitted an acceptable outlet for the tragic aspects of deracination and for conveying the vulnerability of the migrant. With the two female figures, Ghidoni could successfully communicate layers of emotion that viewers would find discomforting in males figures, even though the majority of migrant were male. Ghidoni safely feminized the situation intending the work to be a social critique of the failings of the new Italian nation. The artist expected to awaken in his viewers, most of whom were in positions of comfort, an awareness of the tragic national loss.
Only two decades later in 1911, Umberto Boccioni, newly minted as a Futurist artist, confided to the avant-garde poet Apollinaire that he was working on paintings that depicted departure and arrival at a train station. In fact, Boccioni made many versions of the three companion images known collectively as Stati d’Animo (translated as States of Mind). The lead painting, titled States of Mind: The Farewells, showed the greatest alteration from the first version, now owned by the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Milan, to the well-known second version, on permanent display at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
A careful study of the two version shows that Boccioni started with a more conventional narrative of Italian migration as the pulling apart of family bonds represented by linear forces reminiscent of two strongly attached horseshoe magnets being wrenched apart. Among the separating couples and families one can recognized the soft felt hat that typified the contadino, the impoverished agricultural worker, the dominant class among emigrants. Though relying heavily on abstracted forms with only subtle gender cues, Boccioni in this first version, nevertheless, repeats the migration narrative as one of painful separation and the female forms appear to show the greater amount of grief.
In the second version, the one that traveled to Paris, London, Berlin as a centerpiece of the new Futurist art, The Farewells draws upon Boccioni’s own memories of his travel throughout Europe. He developed the metaphor of his coming of age as an avant-garde artist in two abstracted figural groups. To the viewer’s left, shown in a series of stages, a child grows and pulls away from the encircling arms of the mother. On the right, in a single image, a child comes away from the father. Close by two grown men embrace. Departure and arrival: leaving youth and moving to an adult bonding in a male-dominated world. Dividing these two groups are multi-layers of locomotive engines and train cars, appearing and disappearing, moving in different directions. The story is no longer the negative effects of migration but the transformative power of international travel in constructing the Italian avant-garde artist. In the case of Boccioni and his States of Mind paintings, the travel continues in 1912-3 as he and his paintings make a triumphant tour of Europe. In the Futurist vision, the masculine Italian artist leaves Italy not as a troubled migrant but as an emissary of bold and forward-moving Italian talent --- and he returns to the country of his birth as a conqueror.

• Ginger Jones, Louisiana State University at Alexandria (USA), From Bella to Belle: Images of the Southern/Italian/American Woman in Louisiana » [De la « bella italiana » à la belle du sud. Images des italo-américaines en Louisiane].

Between 1880 and 1910 the state of Louisiana recruited and settled hundreds of Italian men to replace Black plantation workers who had fled the state at the end of Reconstruction. Most of these workers from Sicily and Southern Italy went to work in the sugar and truck-farming parishes and stayed there, although many settled in and around New Orleans. These transplanted Italian villagers lived in an environment sustained by shared language, appearance, clothing, social habits, cuisine, religion, and folk beliefs. Most held jobs within walking distance of their homes; social life revolved around family.
While the male Italian immigrant may have faced challenges in his move from Italy to Louisiana, the female Italian immigrant faced even greater difficulty. The smaller numbers of Italian women (only about one third of all Italian emigrants to America during this time were women and children) who were able to travel with, or who followed, their husbands to Louisiana rarely left their homes except to go to market, to Mass, or to church-related events such as weddings, baptisms, and funerals. Southern Italian and Sicilian culture isolated women even more than it did men. Few Italian immigrant women had attended school in Italy, and so few spoke standard Italian. For the most part, these women communicated only in regional dialects, best understood by those who had emigrated from the same area of Italy.
The dominant social rules of Louisiana were similar to the Mediterranean patterns the Italians were used to. Catholic churches in Louisiana had French, Spanish, and even Italian priests. The rituals of behavior necessary for emotional survival could be practiced in Louisiana. As Italian men discovered new freedoms while maintaining old customs, their wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters did not. In Louisiana, as in Sicily, one could not speak to the wife of a Southern Italian man without first asking her husband’s permission. Italian-American women who settled in the South were as marginalized as they had been in Italy. In the culture of the American South as well as in the immigrant Italian culture, husbands were superior to wives, and boys superior to girls. Southern families practiced a double standard of conduct, as did Italian immigrant families.

The contrast between the reality of the Southern Italian American woman’s life and the images of her in film and popular culture could not be starker. Such images portrayed her as either simple and motherly, stirring sauce on her stove, or earthy and passionate, a woman-of-the-soil, weary and smoldering with sensuality. My essay will look at the development of the public image of the Southern Italian American woman, specifically in Louisiana, from 1910 to 1960, the first half-century after the peak of Italian immigration to the state. I want to consider how this image developed from silent female immigrant to expressive Southern Belle. I will consider whether these images reflected the reality of the Southern Italian woman who lived in Louisiana.

In the American South, a “belle” is a handsome young lady who attracts the notice of society. Probably the most famous Southern Belle in literature is Scarlett O’Hara, protagonist of Margaret Mitchell’s historical novel of the pre and post-Civil War South, Gone with the Wind, the 1939 film adaptation of which carried this image to the world. Even Southerners accepted this self-absorbed but charming character as an accurate reflection of a social realty. The myth of the Southern Belle portrayed her as a powerful White, Protestant woman, usually of Anglo-Saxon descent. She was a coquette, socially but not sexually active. For the 19th century Southern male, sexual activity and desire were displaced onto the body of the Black female, usually a slave. After Emancipation, a woman of lesser social status filled this role. American and especially Louisiana history abounds with stories of wealthy plantation owners who kept slave mistresses, and of wealthy men of Northern and Western European descent who made mistresses, rather than wives, of Creole and biracial women. I will examine whether the portrayal of the sultry woman of Italian descent comes from this social structure.
The early 20th century Southern belle in Louisiana, usually without the burden of children to care for (she, if she had children at all, had a housemaid to help care for them), could wield as much power as her 19th century counterpart. Instead of contributing to the management of a plantation, this belle influenced society. Female Italian immigrants swayed by an environment that praised the charming, manipulative behavior of a belle, and inspired by her social success, tried to instill the same behavior in their daughters and granddaughters, hoping the children would attain a similar influence. Like the Louisiana belle, the daughters of Italian immigrants sought to date without a chaperone, to marry a financially and professionally accomplished man, to have fewer children than their mothers, and to freely pursue a career beyond the family-owned business. Though second and third-generation Sicilian and Southern Italian American women in other parts of the United States sought similar goals, as did the children and grandchildren of many American immigrants, my essay will determine if the Italian American woman of the South saw assimilation of the behaviors and tactics of the traditional belle as key to social and personal success.
The social position of Italian-American women changed more quickly in Louisiana than it did in the Northern States because marrying outside one’s ethnic community was much more common in Louisiana than elsewhere. French, Spanish, Creole, and some Negro women had established their own businesses, and legally married men from other ethnic groups. The problem was how to attract the successful man regardless of background, rather than becoming betrothed within one’s ethnic group. Many Italian-American women in Louisiana were so successful in appropriating the image of the Southern belle that this Southern/Italian/American woman became widely represented in plays and novels of the 1950s. My paper will look at the transition from silent wife to successful independent woman, from bella to belle.

16 h 15 – 18 h 15 Récits et mémoires/ Gendered Narratives of Migrations

Discutante : Christianne Harzig (Arizona State University)

• Yves Frenette, College Glendon, Université York (Canada), Genre, génération et transnationalisme. La correspondance d'une jeune Franco-américaine au Québec, 1912-1918 [Gender, Generation, Transnationalism. Letters from a Young Franco-American Girl].

La communication portera sur la correspondance d'Alma Drouin, née à Laconia, au New Hampshire, de parents canadiens-français. En 1912, elle quitte les États-Unis pour le Québec afin de parfaire son éducation. Elle fréquente jusqu'en 1918 différents couvents des Sœurs de l'Assomption situés sur la rive-sud du Saint-Laurent, puis devient pensionnaire à Montréal. Durant ce séjour, Alma Drouin envoie et reçoit 165 lettres, ces dernières provenant majoritairement des membres de sa famille demeurés au New Hamsphire. Ces lettres - la plupart rédigées en anglais - permettent de pénétrer dans le monde des jeunes Franco-Américaines de la deuxième génération et d'étudier les représentations qu'elles se font des hommes, de leurs parents, et du Canada et des États-Unis. Elles permettent aussi d'observer de l'intérieur la constitution d'un réseau épistolaire largement dominé par les femmes, réseau qui dans le cas de Alma Drouin qui décède à 102 ans, donnera lieu à la rédaction de plus de 2000 lettres.

• Bruno Tur, Université Paris-VIII (Paris, France), Loin du village, des « filles faciles et forcément enceintes » : les immigrées espagnoles à Paris et leur village d'origine dans les années 1960-1970 [Easy and pregnant. The Spanish Girls in Paris seen from the village during the 1960’s and 1970’s]. [Texte]

Dès la fin des années 1950, des Espagnols quittent leur pays pour émigrer en Europe, particulièrement à Paris. Ceux qui partent sont surtout des jeunes hommes et des jeunes femmes issus de milieux ruraux. Nés pendant la Guerre Civile (1936-1939) ou pendant les premières années du régime franquiste, ils ont entre 16 et 20 ans au moment de leur arrivée dans la capitale française.
Dans un premier temps, le projet migratoire est envisagé dans sur une courte durée (trois ou six mois) : il s’agit pour eux de gagner un maximum d’argent, le plus rapidement possible, afin de revenir au village et rembourser une dette ou d’acquérir une maison. Pourtant, pour beaucoup, l’expérience migratoire durera de nombreuses années, parfois jusqu’à la retraite.
C’est dès le moment où le départ est envisagé que les rapports masculins/féminins (particulièrement pères/filles) sont modifiés. En effet, il est important de relever que, pour la première fois dans l’histoire de l’immigration espagnole, des femmes –qui plus est, de jeunes femmes– partent seules (1) : elles n’accompagnent ni un époux, ni un père ou un frère. Ceci est encore plus paradoxal lorsqu’on songe au statut des femmes sous la dictature du Général Franco (1939-1975). En les laissant partir, on redoute qu’elles échappent aux contrôles social, religieux et patriarcal, très forts dans les campagnes espagnoles des années 1950-1960, alors même que Franco évoque dans ses discours à la Nation les « dangers qui guettent les jeunes espagnoles » à l’étranger. Pour les jeunes hommes, au contraire, l’expérience est perçue comme plus formatrice que dangereuse. Notre communication montrera comment les jeunes femmes, avec l’aide de leurs mères, organisaient le départ contre la volonté des pères, contournant l’autorité de ceux-ci sans jamais la remettre en cause.
Quoiqu’il en soit, une fois les Espagnols installés en France, l’éloignement –entrecoupé de nombreux retours au village d’origine pendant les vacances– modifie les opinions qu’ont les uns des autres et perturbe les relations entre ceux qui sont restés en Espagne et ceux qui sont partis. Notre communication se propose donc d’analyser ces changements en montrant que le regard porté, au village, sur les immigrés espagnols à Paris n’est pas le même selon qu’il s’agisse d’un homme ou d’une femme.
Dès la fin des années 1950, on assiste en Espagne à la naissance d’un discours populaire sur les afrancesados, les immigrés espagnols en France. Puisqu’en revenant au village, les émigrés relatent (inventent ou exagèrent) leur réussite parisienne, on guette leurs manies, leurs nouvelles habitudes (alimentaires, vestimentaires, etc.), leur « embourgeoisement ». Les regards modifient les relations entre personnes : les amitiés se défont, les rapports avec les adultes s’enveniment.
Si les critiques n’épargnent aucun des deux sexes, ce sont les femmes qui sont les principales visées. Par exemple, jusqu’au milieu des années 1960, les espagnoles à Paris sont perçues comme des filles faciles forcément enceintes. Il n’est pas curieux de constater que ces rumeurs sont lancées par quelques jeunes hommes restés au village ; le départ massif des jeunes femmes est perçu comme une fuite des ventres. Seul le mariage met un terme à ces rumeurs.
Nous nous attacherons donc à analyser la construction, l’émergence, la diffusion et la disparition, les similitudes et les différences des discours sur les immigrés selon leur sexe, en montrant que si le départ des hommes fut tout de suite accepté, celui des femmes suscita de vives réactions avant d’alimenter l’imagination populaire. Pour ce faire, nous nous appuierons principalement sur les sources utilisées dans nos travaux de recherche terminés ou en cours : entretiens oraux, correspondances, photographies et documents audiovisuels.

(1) Celles qui partent pour Paris sont principalement employées comme « bonnes à tout faire » dans la capitale.
(2) Entretiens menés en France et en Espagne entre 2001 et 2005, auprès de personnes ayant émigré ou non.
(3) Principalement des échanges de cartes postales, mais aussi quelques lettres.

• Adlai Murdoch, University of Illinois, French Department (USA), Narrating Metropolitan Caribbean Communities: Gender, Diaspora, Identity [La mise en récit des communautmés antillaises en métropole. Genre, Diaspora, Identité. France, seconde moitié du XXe siècle]

This paper seeks to address two related issues; the ramifications of the cultural and demographic phenomenon of Caribbean postwar migration that took thousands of French West Indians to the former colonial capital of Paris between 1950 and 2000, and the ways in which the female axis of this wave of displacement was made specifically subject to the particular patterns of difference, exclusion and subjugation that joined the department to the
metropole. In point of fact, despite the ethnic, geographical and cultural differences separating the periphery from the metropole, the implicit égalité of the departmental statutes of 1946 were deliberately undermined through the formation of state-run agencies like ONI and BUMIDOM in the 1950s whose aim was to promote and facilitate migration. Indeed, in the wake of the exploitation of the Caribbean labor market that followed, there are now more than half a million persons in the so-called 'third island' claiming West Indian birth or background, and most recent census figures estimate these communities to be virtually 1% of the population. By the same token, however, this influx -- part of a larger wave of postcolonial and labor-related migration into France -- also led to the promulgation of the increasingly restrictive Pasqua laws of 1986 and 1993 and their further tightening by the Debré law of 1997, betraying an ongoing pattern of immigration restriction and narrowing of the criteria of entry and residence that has restricted immigrant access to French nationality through the superficialities and stereotypes of race.
This project thus examines the implications of the gender-inflected patterns of difference for the framework of the contemporary French family, as new patterns of difference and exclusion are engendered in the metropole by these migration-based demographic shifts. Ongoing gendered divisions of labor join with sexual discrimination in employment to exacerbate these cultural and identitarian hybridities that increasingly destabilize our current notions of nationality and belonging. The ways in which the memories and images of the discrimination engendered by this migrant movement subvert traditional notions of a universalist Frenchness, and are increasingly indelibly inscribed in contemporary literature by Caribbean women is a highlight of this project.
I propose to analyze the ways in which these groups implicitly differentiate themselves from the larger immigrant cultures of the metropole, from the nationalist patterns of the patrie and from the established identitarian framework of their culture of origin. The role played by gender in this issue should be neither overlooked or ignored; indeed, it has come to play an increasingly large and visible role in recent immigration crises in France. One result of this increased visibility is the heightened attention paid to the category of the immigré; particularly since in France the term is used to refer not only to those residents who have migrated from another country, but also to those with ethnic origins in France's ex-colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. Such discriminatory perceptions and practices are also applied to members of ethnic minority communities in France originating from the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique (and French Guiana and Réunion as well), since the French apply the term immigré to those viewed as ethnically different from the French majority, even though such people might be born in France and indeed, their family might have lived in the metropole for generations.
Following a radical shift in French governmental policy in the mid-1970s, an ineluctable feminization of France's immigrant population was set in motion, as the editors of a recent study women and immigration in France point out, "Since the suspension of immigration for work by the French government in 1974, however, the main source of immigration has been for family regroupment, which successive governments have not been able to outlaw. This immigration for family regroupment has led to a feminization of the population of immigrant origin as wives and children came to join the male workers already in France. In addition, women have immigrated autonomously into France" (Freedman and Tarr, 1). The result of this cultural and demographic exclusion is the marginalization of feminist subjectivity within a context of differential Frenchness, as the stereotyping of this substantial body of women -- wives, mothers, daughters -- has tended to subsume their cultural, political, and identitarian heterogeneity into a universalist framework of assimilation and its other. As assumptions of extra-hexagonal origin -- and, often, illegal entry -- exacerbate the tribulations of the mainland experience for the Franco-Antillais, then, it is little wonder that so many of them claim to have discovered, or realized, their antillanité when confronted with the true face of Frenchness. When this implicit racism is compounded by sexism for the ever-growing female contingent of domiennes, the home-grown familiarities of creole language and culture maintained by these displaced, transplanted communities often frame the space of the new metropolitan "home" and its paradoxical corollary of partial presence within the "foreign" territory of the metropole.
A telling example of these forces occurs in the novel L'Exil selon Julia, in which Gisèle Pineau interrogates the complex issues attached to patterns of migration to and exile within the metropole. Pineau's first-person narrator recounts a series of key moments in the life of her Guadeloupean family, and her vignettes draw a parallel between the arc of the family's growing experience of exclusion and the alienation and difference that have been the corollaries of the departmental period of Guadeloupean and Martiniquan history in the modern period. However, where discourses of nationalism seek to elide the hierarchies and oppositions that ground the hybridities spawned in the wake of the colonial encounter, even as metropolitan patterns and practices of exclusion elide the difference(s) of the large European immigrant populations on French soil, these departmental discourses of displacement adopt an approach that concentrates on the pitfalls of assimilation and the continuing sense of "unhomeliness" that is the lot of the departmental migrant.
Pineau emphasizes the point of view of her young female protagonist, and her feelings of difference and estrangement in the heart of the metropole, as she learns key lessons of subversion and survival from the example of her narrator's paternal grandmother, Julia: Man Ya, as she is called, essays a series of paradigmatic encounters with the inalterability of the metropolitan vision of self and Other, illuminating in the process an idea of cultural singularity and creative difference that are the product of her firm knowledge of self and confidence in her own cultural identity. These themes of metropolitan otherness, and its attendant racisms, illuminate the experience of narrator and grandmother and, by extension the body of Caribbean women they represent.

• Yvonne Rieker, University of Muenster, Department of Political Science (Allemagne), Love Crossing Borders - Changing Patterns of Gender Relations among Italians Migrants in Germany [L’amour par dessus les frontières. Transformation des rapports de genre chez les migrants italiens en Allemagne].

My presentation concentrates on three issues characterising the Italian immigration to Germany:
1) Only a negligible percentage of women coming from southern Italy in the 1950s and 1960s were labour migrants.
2) A significant number of these female immigrants nevertheless became engaged in oc¬cupational activities. Their work experiences differed considerably from their previous way of life in Italy.
3) As a consequence of the Italian women’s gainful employment the family hierarchy un¬derwent some important changes.
ad 1) Although the German labour administration made efforts to recruit female labour migrants in Italy, the results were negative. The main reasons were the importance of Catholicism and a specific conception of ‘honour’ in the Mezzogiorno. The Catholic con¬cept of family implied the restriction of women to the role of a devoted wife and mother. The construction of male and fe¬male honour restricted women’s freedom of movement and any female occupational activities apart from housework or family business. Italian women immigrated to western Germany mainly for family reunification or for marriage settlements.
ad 2) During the course of migration the need for female employment in immigrant families became soon apparent because of the financial aims the migrants were striving for. This implied the adjustment of the mostly unskilled female employees to new and unfamiliar working conditions of exact time schedules and strict discipline. Unlike in southern Italy, work and ‘leisure’ were precisely separated in Germany. The immigrants no longer had time at their disposal as they used to have.
ad 3) As a consequence the Italian women’s gainful employment, their subsequent contribution to the family income and enhanced self-consciousness, gender roles underwent changes. Women improved their position in the family hierarchy. These changes were more demanding and difficult to adjust to for men. Their self-images had to be redefined, especially if they had to take on ‘female’ tasks like child minding.
My remarks are based on archival studies, sociological research, data collection and on 30 narrative interviews with Italian immigrants living in Germany since the 1960s. They came from southern Italy, mostly from small villages in Puglia and Sicily. The men went to Germany as labour migrants. They were employed in the mining, metalworking, car or construction industry or at the German Federal railway. Some managed during the course of time to establish a family business, a restaurant or an ice-cream parlour.
The majority of the women came from the same villages of origin as their husbands. They usually migrated after their marriage to join their husbands in Germany. Most of them have two to four children and work in part-time jobs.