The Speech of Migrant Women: Audibility in Public as a Performative Exercise of Citizenship

The chapter aims to reflect on the relationship between citizenship and migrants’ recognition by paying attention to the dimension of their public audibility (not only to their visibility). Paraphrasing and reversing the question “can the subaltern speak?” (Spivak 1988), the chapter asks whether migrant women’s voices are heard, that is whether their speaking produces listening in the public, whether it makes them recognisable as subjects capable of acting and being counted. On the basis of the theory of acts of citizenship (Isin 2008), I also ask whether the words spoken in public by migrant women represent a particular performative exercise of citizenship, in other words, whether speaking makes them citizens, beyond their legal status. To answer these questions, the chapter combines ethnography with pragmatic discourse analysis, focusing on the speech acts of migrant women observed in an institutional context, the Immigrants Table (Tavolo degli immigrati) in the city of Naples (Italy) during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. This was carried out during a long-term ethnographic fieldwork (2018–2022) conducted with visible migrant women in the role of representatives of ethnic organisations and/or communities. The chapter shows how migrant women, by making themselves audible in public, create themselves as active political subjects by publicly claiming their membership in the social and political community and transforming their relationship with institutional political power. The words of migrant women at the Immigrants Table allowed for reflection on the dialectic of recognition and the performative exercise of citizenship, configuring themselves as a particular political act of citizenship. The analysis shows hows migrant women are capable of challenging the boundaries of national citizenship by creating new forms of belonging and coexistence. The analysis also allow for advancing theorizing on citizenship, as audible citizenship, and broadening the spectrum of acts of citizenship to include political speech acts.