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Paper short abstract:

Situated within the changing political contexts in Eritrea and Italy, I explore the extent to which competing conceptions of gender roles, between the home-country and the country of settlement, are negotiated and reconstructed across different dimensions.

Paper long abstract:

Migration is a gendered experience, shaping individuals differently. Literature on migration suggests that with the experience of displacement from one’s cultural and social moorings to another, ‘traditional’ social structures tend to be weakened, resulting in changes to the traditional division of labour and understating of gender relations and roles. By looking at the case study of Eritrean women in Milan, in this paper I argue for a more nuanced analysis of the ways in which gendered norms and power dynamics across multiple transnational spaces are renegotiated over time.

Situated within the changing political contexts in Eritrea and Italy, I explore the extent to which competing conceptions of gender roles, between the home-country and the country of settlement, are negotiated and reconstructed across different dimensions, by looking at participants’ narratives around their sense of identity and positionality within the Eritrean community in Milan.

While Eritrean women experienced an unprecedented up-ward social mobility during the liberation movement (1961-1991), both in the continent and in the diaspora, ‘traditional’ Eritrean gendered norms were nevertheless situationally evoked and expected within the private space of the home. Based on eight months of fieldwork, in this paper I examine the case study of Eritrean women in Milan and their experiences between the late 1970s and 2015. I explore the changing Eritrean-specific gender roles emerging within transnational spaces and explore the extent to which they remain the same or different over time, and across generations.