The pretext of veil. A research on the conceptions of gender and mixed relations of Islamic young women and men living in Italy

Migrant families and second generations play a key-role in present European change concerning gender orders. Their efforts whether to adapt themselves to western mentalities and lifestyles or to preserve their own traditions and identities unavoidably overlap and impact on the struggles on opening or closing gender relations, by reintroducing rigid identities and dichotomies in continuously transforming societies, by contrasting the blurring of boundaries, by proposing new meanings and perspectives in conceiving women and men. So, today several gender images reflecting many different cultures and historical temporalities confront each other in the public sphere. Very often the women body is not only the symbol but also the physical “place” of these struggles. This paper presents the results of an empirical qualitative study aimed at exploring the conceptions about gender relations diffused among young people of Islamic origin living in Roma (Italy), in the conviction that it is strongly necessary to know how cultures often perceived as a threat are concretely transforming in everyday relationships with our practices and institutions. The idea is that of using the Islamic veil as a pretext: during semi-structured interviews to a group including both young Islamic women and men, a first question about the habit to wear/not to wear the veil is the pretext to investigate strategic themes, like power of religious precepts in Islamic youngsters lives, parental influence, gender conceptions and stereotypes, meanings of freedom, perception of western women and men, attitudes to mixed relations, feeling towards hosting societies.