Domestic Work and Intercultural Violence.

A Study of Some Romanian Migrant Women’s Personal Narratives

Abstract

Part of the research conducted in the framework of the EU-funded FP7 collaborative project, Gender,
Migration and Intercultural Interactions in the Mediterranean and South-East Europe: an interdisciplinary
perspective (Ge.M.IC.) (2008-2011), the study focuses on issues related to violence in the context of migration,
with a view to underlining its impact on the victims’ gender and national identity1. Relevant material for the study of violence as a multifaceted phenomenon was provided by the victims’ personal narratives in which
individual ways of making sense of a past, influenced by the overlapping of certain social and cultural patterns,
could be revealed to sustain or run counter “the cultural discourses constructing [this] experience” (Sangster in
Perks and Thomson, 1998: 88). Dwelling particularly on the stories of four women from the city of Galaţi, in
search of employment as illegal domestic workers in Italy and Spain, this paper attempts to cast new light on the
gendered consciousness of the specific category they belong to, that of migrants subject to various forms of
violence in a larger social and ideological context.