Autonomy and Self-Realization of Migrant Women. Constitutional Aspects

Examining the relationship between Italian constitutional provisions and the legal status of migrant women offers an opportunity to provide a re-signification to the entire constitutional project and to put its inclusiveness to the test. From this standpoint, interpretation of the constitution is essential for dealing, with renewed vigour, with the complex power dynamics involving the relationships between gender and migration. A reading of the constitution capable of taking to heart the contributions of feminist legal theory and critical race theory allows us to correlate the person - in his or her dimension of gender, relationships and interdependence - with the constitutional project of self-determination and self-realization. The proposed approach to constitutional interpretation takes its inspiration from the so-called 'intersectionality' between the multiple grounds that may contribute towards impeding individual and collective self-realization: an interpretive method not founded upon individual qualifications of the person or the social group, but which is aware that each subject - individual and collective -embodies his, her or its own cultural synthesis with internal contradictions and conflicts. The central role of the person and of social groups, in which individual personality is played out, should inspire an approach that looks to subjective positioning in power relationships as a whole, while not splitting the person into his or her various legal qualifications. An interpretation of the constitutional text in the sense proposed here must, however, come to terms with the tendency of reducing the possible hermeneutic margins afforded by the text itself. The condition of migrant women in Italy, in particular, clearly demonstrates how the devices of exclusion and segregation present in the legal system have repercussions that multiply rather than add to one another certain differences envisaged in the constitution. This concerns in particular the areas of sex (and the correlated differences in terms of sexuality, gender, and gender identity) and personal status (which must include that of being migrants, both regular and irregular).