Le madri nella cosiddetta violenza basata sull’onore. Riflessioni dalla ricerca etnografica in Alto Adige

Abstract

This article draws on ethnographic research conducted in South Tyrol on the understanding of gender-based violence (GBV) and empowerment among migrant women. It examines key concepts like honour in relation to so-called honour-based violence (HBV), increasingly reported by young migrant-origin women seeking support from local services. Focusing on the involvement of mothers in the perpetration of this violence and building on findings from a subsequent research project on how social services interpret migrant women’s parenting, the article interrogates culturalist readings of GBV, which mobilise honour as a central explanatory framework and contribute to processes of othering embedded in anti-migration narratives. At the same time, this obscures the transversal patriarchal structures that implicitly and explicitly emerge from the interviewed young migrant-origin women, and within which women negotiate their position in relation to gender and age hierarchies, as well as social and political frameworks. The analysis further highlights a moral dispositive centred on ideals of motherhood, generating a specific moral semantics related to oppositional categories and producing a teleology of migrant women’s emancipation that invests motherhood itself, while masking structural conditions arising from intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, and class in migratory contexts. The article argues for moving beyond this moral semantics, as it risks reinforcing reductive interpretations of so-called HBV.