Erased Narratives of Care: Migrant Women’s Urban Experiences Beyond Stigmatisation

Public representations exercise great power over the future of individuals and places. They can orient perceptions and decisions by building narratives articulating particular interpretations of social and territorial dynamics. These narratives inform public agenda-setting, highlighting issues and suggesting priorities of intervention. The public representations of multicultural neighbourhoods produced by the media usually emphasise the exceptional characteristics of areas with a high concentration of immigrants, depicting diversity as a threat. These stereotypical representations cast people with migrant backgrounds in a homogenising light, often focusing on the supposed negative behaviours and presence of men while ignoring women and girls. While men become hyper-visible, migrant women remain invisible and unacknowledged as relevant social actors. By linking the literature on the stigmatisation of multicultural neighbourhoods and the marginalisation of women in the social and urban domain, the chapter describes the case of the multicultural neighbourhood of San Siro (Milan, Italy), where women’s narratives of solidarity and mutual care struggle to be recognised as alternative representations of highly stigmatised places and communities.