Paper short abstract:

Discourses on sexual practices and imaginaries of desirable conjugal partners are configuring the way some young Ecuadorian transmigrants represent their identities. How are the imaginaries of belonging shaped by (or shaping) new configurations of gendered subjects of the transnational citizenship?

Paper long abstract:

Today, in our postcolonial world systems, the territory has lost his property of signifier of power for the establishment of the hegemonic ideologies. The representation of identities has been split off the territories and new techniques of discipline through subalternization are appearing, while transnational practices are challenging the classical forms of sovereignty. But how are people experiencing these new politics of representation inside the transnational field?

Doing fieldwork in Madrid, with young Ecuadorian transmigrants coming from an indigenous community, I realized how discourses on sexual practices and imaginaries of desirable conjugal partners were configuring the way some young Ecuadorians transmigrants represented their identities. I then concentrate my study on the imaginaries of belonging and the construction of transnational citizenship that is at stake in new configurations of gendered subjects.

Central to these analysis is the concept of political subject, as the new politics of migration are constituting what we could call the "transmigrant subject". Under this question stays the dichotomy between agency and structure, between struggle and subjectivization, and, mostly important in postcolonial theory, the problems of mimicry and membership (J. Ferguson) that are central in the establishment of the coloniality of power. Through this theoretical framework, I look how the young transmigrants resist and/or subordinate themselves in the way they construct gender inside (and outside) the community, accepting or rejecting (in part or entirely) the hegemonic norms of masculinity/femininity; in short: which model of transnational citizenship they (re)shape and what kind of peripheral constructions of identities are going on.