Making Family: Racialized Migrant Women and the Formation of Chosen Political Families in Collective Action

This contribution investigates how racialized migrant women build a chosen political family in collective action and conceives of this process as a relational outcome of migrants’ mobilizations. Drawing on the concept of chosen family first elaborated by LGBTQ+ scholars, this contribution investigates how racialized migrant women come together despite their differences and reconstitute a sense of family that supports them in their everyday lives as well as in political participation. Through participant observation and interviews conducted in Rome with a group of racialized migrant women, this article sheds light on how participants conceive of each other as members of a chosen family, as a result of the mobility of affects that follows migration. Moreover, it looks at how the signifier “family” is mobilized by simultaneously drawing on and transforming traditional conceptions of family. A chosen political family contributes to building a collective identification for political engagement while also providing an affective ground in the everyday lives of racialized migrant women. The case explored provides an example of how family is mobilized by racialized migrant women for participatory and transformative purposes. This is all the more relevant for the ways it inherently contrasts with political projects endorsed by far-right and conservative religious movements that use heteronormative family as a nativist building block of the nation.