Traiettorie di migrazione e apprendimento al femminile: madri marocchine a Torino

The case study analyses the family, education and migration trajectories of Moroccan mothers who attend courses organized by two different Adult Education and Training Centres in Italy. The aim of the research is to explore how migrant women construct and represent their individual agency, using a multidimensional approach. The Moroccan female trajectories are positioned in a stereotypical discourse about the women’s proper role in the migrant network. Usually the mothers do not perform themselves as an autonomous agent. Nonetheless, despite this fact, it can be recognized that the women interviewed are not merely dependent migrants, as they explicitly leave their country to expand their capabilities. Moreover, they elaborate their migration strategies actively, create intercultural relations and assure the family reproduction by strengthening a gendered system of transnational care exchange. A concrete example of these processes is their participation in the courses previously cited, with which these women actively try to contrast the stigmatization, to help their children in the school environment and also to increase their job opportunities. [...] Some graduated mothers stop looking for a job because they refuse the underemployment. In conclusion, looking deeper in the relational and discursive dynamics that would arise from the case study, I would like to demonstrate that female identities and projects are continuously constructed through the migrant narratives, narratives that are in ongoing generation by their protagonists. The incorporation of heterogeneous stories into these gendered narratives originates a new stratified discourse about women’s migration, in which the stereotypical representations of Moroccan femininity could be - gradually - changed.