Rewriting Migrant Identities across Women’s Literature

REWRITE will explore identities de/reconstruction processes in the migrant literary works produced by women during the last two centuries, in order to contribute to the European Pillar of Social Rights and to rethink the European Union’s (EU) integration and social cohesion policies from an intersectional perspective.

The main aim is to explore the transformation process in migrant women’s identities, by exploring the self-reflexivity in migrant women writers from a critical discourse analysis, advocating for social change, which is crucial for a new understanding of the limitation of politics.

REWRITE aims to bridge the gap between gender-based human mobility and social change via the comparative analysis between the European integration policies and the role and impact on the simultaneous processes of identities de/reconstruction, by: 1) analysing existent emblematic novels from 20th and 21st centuries focused on two main dilemmas: identity and belonging; integration and exclusion; 2) creating a new body of critic women’s writings, “tradition much ignored due to the inferior position of women in male-dominated societies”, related to human mobility.

The project’s timeline will examine the body of migrant, exile, intercultural literature of women writers from the multidimensional analytical lens of the migratory career (as key for the identification of central turning points articulated in women’s heterogeneous biographies and in-between transformation spaces for self-realisation.

Core questions are: Which are the main dominant discourses (systemic) and experiences (individual) about race, class, gender roles, shaping migrant women identities and critical writings, linked to power/oppression relationships? Which are migrant women’s positioning and representations in-between spaces?

Might be literature expression of identity construction processes in challenge of dominant writing and opinions? Rethinking identities is relevant for gender equality and social cohesion.