Performing Muslimness. Proximity and Visibility in the Italian Space.

The chapter highlights the theoretical relevance of the construct of performance in grasping the ambivalence intrinsic to the relationship between the cultural inscription of difference and embodied subjectivity. Performance is a concept that focuses on the body and non-cognitive experiences in producing social life. The latter has constituted our field of investigation in the four years of field research. The general aim was to analyse the process of becoming an Italian Muslim woman through the lens of everyday embodied practices. Inspired by Göle's work (2005), we investigated culturally interpenetrated contexts where the encounter with the other is a process of contact/clash, embodied, visceral, violent and subjectively oriented. The performance's analytical construct helps to capture the multiplicity of ways in which Italian Muslim women produce new spatialities and are produced by them. By mixing up classifications and representations, performance allows us to grasp the event as an unfinished and dynamic process, a tension to escape reproduction.