Paper short abstract:

The identity negotiation, peculiar of migrant condition, involves a reformulation of women's reproductive health behaviour. The establishment of a community of practices allows, counterwise, to transform models of belonging into resources useful to overcome the social and sanitary subalternity.

Paper long abstract:

An inquiry on the transformations of reproductive health behaviour in migratory context implies the evaluation of two intertwined processes. The first is the crossing of national borders who produces the assumption of new procreative patterns. The second is the admission of people with different cultural backgrounds into the italian health care system. Referring to the findings of ongoing etnographic research within the Senegalese community who populates the Valdelsa area (Siena- Italy) I will try to highlight the processes of identity negotiation embodied in the procreative experience. Moreover, beside this culturalist approach, this paper aims to underscore the forms of health inequalities to which migrant women are subjected. Such inequalities are reflected in a partial access to health resources, in a difficult establishment of relationships with health professionals and in being subjects of stereotyped representations: a condition who forces women to a position of double subalternity, as patients and as strangers. The analysis of such health inequalities will be accompained by a study of some socio-therapeutical practices - transnanational and internal to their peculiar community at the same time - which will be understood as instrument of resistance to a subaltern condition experienced both in the social and in the sanitary realm. In fact the Senegalese culture, inscribed in body's memory, is actualized by women as a resource capable to balance their marginality in the italian health care system: is within the space between power relations and identity negotiation where takes place a community of practices that makes the procreative experience an event "between Senegal and Italy"