Gender and Sexuality in the Migration Trajectories : Studies between the Northern and Southern Mediterranean Shores (Innovations in Qualitative Research)

The concept of “gender” has recently become one of the symbols of what many consider “a clash of civilizations” between the West and Muslim countries. Recent events highlight how gender issues are emblematic of the basic traits of a country's culture, and thus constitute some of the elements allowing for the construction of dividing lines between cultures, arbitrarily distinguishing between the “evolved” and “backward” ones, therefore with the aim to establish demarcation lines between “Us” and the “Others”. The existential condition of migration leads to formation of multiple and diasporic identities, de- territorialized and reassembled at the individual level. In this scenario the integration of migrants is the result of a two-way process, in which rely significantly the social representations that migrants are being built on the population and of the host society (before and after the arrival) and intangible resources (cognitive and relational) experienced by migrants. Gender studies usually employing a constructionist perspective have seldom dealt with the issue of migration by analysing the experiences of the migrants themselves. The few studies have highlighted how migrants' gender and sexuality underline the persistence of a model of domination and alteration typical of the colonial era, emphasizing the social identity allocation mechanisms used by Western societies that follow essentialist visions of migrants' ethnic and sexual identity, that is, of a social status considered as inferior and undesirable. There are several theoretical and methodological challenges calling for a perspective that takes into account the interconnection between gender, sexuality and migration. Studies on sexuality have now taken two roads, often strongly polarized and non-communicating between them: on the one hand, also because of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, appeared a new generation of surveys on sexual behaviour of Western (and others) populations and on the c