Focusing on discourses and practices of identity in an Italian organization in London, this article examines the relationship between the construction of the identity of places and the construction of terrains of belonging. Various forms of cultural practices that mark out spatial and identity boundaries for the London Italian population are discussed in relation to the deployment of gender and ethnicity. Advancing a corporeal approach to identity formation, it is argued that displays of the Italian presence in London operate through (...) the repetition of regulatory norms that produces the effect of materialization of cultural belonging through the ethnicizing and gendering of individual bodies. Gender and ethnicity are deeply embedded in one another and their entwinement is to be understood as the outcome of their construction along similar bodily lines. Also, the author shows that gender and ethnicity are mutually dependent on each other for their construction; imperatives of gender serve to stabilize a fluctuating and indeterminate ethnic culture, while ethnic conventions naturalize the different positions men and women occupy in social life. (shrink)

This article begins at a crossroads; it straddles the difficult ground between the recent public outcry against sexual violence and concerns about the coloniality of voice made visible by the recent decolonial turn within feminist theory. Wary of concepts such as “visibility” or “transparency”—principles that continue to inform the call to “break the silence” by “speaking up” central to Western liberatory movements—in this article, I return to silence, laying the groundwork for the exploration of what a revised concept of silence (...) could mean for the development of practices of cross-cultural communication that do not play into coloniality. (shrink)

Continuing the dialogue: postcolonial feminist scholarship and Bourdieu — discourses of culture and points of connection Postcolonial feminist theories provide the analytic tools to address issues of structural inequities in groups that historically have been socially and economically disadvantaged. In this paper we question what value might be added to postcolonial feminist theories on culture by drawing on Bourdieu. Are there points of connection? Like postcolonial feminists, he puts forward a position that aims to unmask oppressive structures. We argue that, (...) while there are points of connection, there are also epistemologic and methodologic differences between postcolonial feminist perspectives and Bourdieu's work. Nonetheless, engagement with different theoretical perspectives carries the promise of new insights — new ways of ‘seeing’ and ‘understanding’ that might enhance a praxis‐oriented theoretical perspective in healthcare delivery. (shrink)