Paper short abstract:

This research focuses on those migrants who are also homosexuals, trying to explore their fluctuation between groups and contexts usually detached. An ethnographical approach allows a description of migrants' feelings and performances around their everyday experiences of belonging and exclusion.

Paper long abstract:

During the past few years in Italy, the spread of racist and homophobic incidents have increased. My fieldwork focused on African homosexuals living in Italy and it is based on a multi-sited fieldwork carried out through in-depth interviews. My goal was to discuss the experiences of those migrants who could potentially undergo multiple discriminations, as a foreign and/or as a homosexual.

This research explores the everyday problems of those invisible migrants who have to mediate between multiple identities. It was found that they usually hide their sexuality to protect themselves from the social stigma that is widespread among many of the migrants' communities and the supposed racism within homosexuals' associations.

In both environments, these migrants live a liminal condition of disquiet; in fact, their social status can change constantly in relation to different contexts. Although contesting the rules of gender roles presents many risks, some of them try to react against the boundaries by behaving in unusual and creative ways in order to overcome their isolation.

In conclusion, the focus on this subject sheds light on the transformations of gender roles and their implications with social and religious issues. Therefore, this fieldwork deals with processes of conflict and exclusion, describing how cultural boundaries function and at the same time how they might be contested by those outsiders who live at their limits. Consequently, it highlights the opposition - and/or the adaptation - between the feeling of cultural belonging to a community and self-affirmation as a homosexual person.