Renata Pepicelli’s research while affiliated with LUISS Guido Carli, Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali and other places

In the late xix century and the beginning of the xx century, Arab nationalism identified women as the “bearers of the nation”, the symbolic repository of group identity. Nationalists, both modernists and conservatives, shaped the image of the nation around an idealized image of the woman, functional in different political projects. If the latter exalted women’s domestic roles as part of the defense of the Islamic cultural authenticity, the former criticized women’s seclusion and promoted their inclusion in the public sphere as an essential part of the making of the modern nation. The woman unveiled became a symbol of modernity and progress. In nationalist projects, politics of modernity intersected deeply with the gender issue. This article analyzes, from a gender perspective, modernist discourses on the nation and women, and studies the way in which women were involved in such debates. It underlines, on one hand, how women participated in anti-colonial struggles and on the other, their challenge, resistance and renegotiation of men’s nationalist projects. Through poems, tales, novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, journalistic articles, speeches educated women from the upper and middle classes shaped their nationalist and feminist agenda, in continuity and in contrast to the men’s. To combat national forms of patriarchal domination, firstly, under colonial rule, and, subsequently, under the independent state, some of them established feminist organizations. During colonization, women’s struggles were characterized by both nationalist and feminist goals, but having achieved independence, women had to fight to obtain their rights as citizens in the new nation-states. Post-independent governments marginalized women and/or co-opted their claims in what is called “state feminism”. Focusing on three countries, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria, this essay highlights differences and similarities in nationalist discourses and projects in the Arab world.

This paper investigates the multiple dimensions in the identity constructions of the daughters of the Muslim migrations to Italy. It focuses on the transformations in the way girls and young women relate to religion, in the transition from the generation of mothers, who emigrated from countries with a Muslim majority, to the generation of daughters, who grow up in a European context where Islam is a minority religion. It discusses ‘transmissions’, ‘translations’ and ‘betrayals’ in the migration experience, from a standpoint which highlights the specificities of gender and of generation. The article is based on an intersectional analysis of biographical accounts by Muslim girls and young women of Bengali and Moroccan origin who were born and/or grew up in Italy. Intersecting religious identity with other identity lines such as national belonging (to the parents’ country of origin and to the country where they were born or grew up), gender, class, color and age, multiple reactions and positions emerged. In this context, the religious dimension inherited/experienced/reinvented/called into question by the daughters of migrations appeared to be in constant evolution. Indeed, the stories contained herein of young Muslims tell of the emergence of European Islam.