Abstract
Based on 30 narrative-biographic interviews with second-generation Greek and Italian women who have migrated from the United States to their ‘ancestral homelands’ of Greece and Italy, our article explores nuances of their stigma management by focusing on the interaction between their pre-repatriation past and post-repatriation present and the spaces of inclusion and exclusion. Adopting the method of narrative-biographic analysis, we present three detailed case studies of repatriated women – organized as composite biographies – to illuminate from different angles the process of stigma management and the phenomenon of stigma mobility. Highlighting the dynamics of the reproduction of the diasporic patriarchy through repatriation to the ‘ancestral homeland’, we introduce and elaborate on the concept ‘nativity voucher’ in reference to ethno-cultural resources that repatriated people use to facilitate their spaces of inclusion.
Keywords
Introduction
Migration and migrant integration studies in Europe concentrate for their most part on flows from poorer to wealthier countries. This article takes up a somewhat unusual and less studied migration flow: that of US-national women, usually with university education, who ‘return’ (although they have never actually lived there) to their ‘ancestral homelands’ of Italy and Greece. This article focuses on their process of social integration in the place of origin of their parents and more specifically on how they manage the double stigma of being a ‘foreigner’ even if co-ethnic, and a woman that does not fully fit with the local gender roles and family/work models.
Relevant studies have shown that diasporic women and returning female migrants are frequently subjected to gender-ethnic stigmatization within their families and/or local/ethnic communities (Christou and King, 2011; Rumyantsev, 2012). However, very little is known about the dynamics of this process, including migrants’ capacity to manage their stigma especially when within the transnational context of two countries, that of birth and the other of origin and return. Scholars who work in stigma and repatriation studies look for new – under-studied – cases to illuminate this process. One such case study is American women ‘returning’ to Italy and Greece.
There are around 100,000 US-nationals living in Italy and Greece as second-generation repatriated women (Wennersten, 2008). It is also a well-known fact that Italians and Greeks are visible diasporas in the United States noted for their strong in-group solidarity, devotion to ethnic cultural traditions and – especially in relation to second-generation women – gender-biased ideology of ‘home-return’ (Callinicos, 1991; Christou and King, 2011; Trundle, 2014). At the same time, the ‘ancestral home’ countries of Italy and Greece have predominantly unchallenged structures of patriarchy, especially in rural areas with clear cases of gender-based stigmatization of immigrant women as ‘immoral’ or too ‘emancipated’ (Isaakyan and Triandafyllidou, 2014; Christou and King, 2011; Trundle, 2014). Apart from the pioneering studies conducted by King and Christou, there has been by now no in-depth research on second-generation repatriated women in these two countries, who choose to live in a homeland they never knew other than from family narratives. There is insufficient knowledge about how they may possibly feel about being stereotyped in ethnic and gendered terms by local society and especially on how they themselves may engage with such dynamics if any (Christou, 2006; Christou and King, 2011).
According to the classic definition by Goffman (1963), stigma is ‘a deeply discrediting attribute that reduces the bearer from a usual [mainstreamed] person to a discounted one’ (p. 3). Creating negative labels and responding to them, the stigmatizer and the stigmatee often manipulate femininity – or socially defined attributes associated with ‘good versus bad woman’.
This article investigates from an insider perspective the interplay between returnee-women’s rejection and acceptance of stigma and, particularly, their use of femininity politics in negotiating their new living space and making sense of their lives. Based on 30 narrative-biographic interviews with second-generation Greek and Italian women who have migrated from the United States to their ‘ancestral homelands’ of Greece and Italy and more specifically to the small island towns of origin of their parents, our article explores nuances of their stigma management by focusing on the interaction between their pre-repatriation past and post-repatriation present and the spaces of inclusion and exclusion.
This article starts with an overview of relevant concepts taken from the wider diasporic literature notably of ‘ancestral return’ (Christou, 2003a), and ‘diasporic bubble’ (Christou and King, 2011), but also the wider notion of ‘stigma’ (Goffman, 1963). Adopting the method of narrative-biographic analysis (Creswell, 2013; Denzin, 1989), we present three generic cases of repatriated women, which are organized as their composite narratives and which illuminate from different angles the process of stigma management. Showing interaction between the women’s pre- and post-diasporic experiences, the article highlights the dynamics in the reproduction of the diasporic patriarchy through repatriation to and settlement in the ‘ancestral homeland’ and argues that stigma may be transferred across borders. Our findings also introduce and elaborate on the concept of ‘nativity voucher’ in relation to factors affecting repatriation experience.
Diasporic upbringing and repatriation
Scholars of diaspora studies stress the importance of the ‘diasporic bubble’ – an interactive framework within which the second-generation migrants are brought up in diaspora (Christou, 2003a, 2003b; Sheffer, 2003). This framework consists of rules, expectations, beliefs and established cultural norms within a diaspora to which diasporic members – particularly second-generation women – are subjected (Callinicos, 1991; Moskos, 1999; Tsemberis, 1999). The overall diasporic bubble rationale centres around the ‘ancestral home’ return. The ‘ancestral home’ such as Greece or Italy is constructed in family narratives as a vibrant place imbued with real life and humanistic values – in contrast with the nonchalant and alienating environment of the country of diasporics’ current residence (Christou and King, 2011; Sheffer, 2003). On one hand, the incorporation of some ancestral values (e.g. healthier food, religious traditions, spirituality, historic richness and the overall idea of a faraway land magic that gives zest to life) becomes a positive, enlightening experience for diasporic children.
On the other hand, some diasporic bubbles may be sustained through strong patriarchal norms, advocating the ultimate and undisputable decision-making power of the father and the subordination by him of females in the family including his daughters. Scholars thus recognize the highly controversial nature of diasporic bubbles, ranging from ‘the idealization of the diasporic family to the abuse of the patriarchal power’ (Christou and King, 2011; Moskos, 1999). Moskos (1999) shows that the second-generation women may not be only abused by their fathers but also made to believe in the morality of this abuse. The so-called ‘conscious decision to return in order to fulfil the dream of the parents’ is, in fact, a forced decision because, from the very beginning, the person was not given any choice for an alternative route (Christou, 2006: 88).
This situation resonates with what Bourdieu (1989) defines as ‘symbolic power’ – the process of making other people unconditionally accept certain ways of behaviour, thought and perception – often without any reflexivity. According to Bourdieu (1989), symbolic power often makes a much stronger effect than any other type of power because it penetrates people’s minds from childhood and shapes their ‘tastes’ (or internalized choices), which are extremely difficult to amend with time. Such ‘cultural tastes’ (what to eat, where to live, whom to marry etc.) may disrupt social mobility of undermined people by forcing them to make choices that they might not have made under other circumstances. The dominated person (diasporic woman) finds it difficult to object because of the fear of appearing tasteless, or inappropriate, to the social circle in which she becomes imprisoned by the symbolic power (of her father or husband).
The motivation for the ancestral return among second-generation migrants in general and second-generation women in particular can be contradictory. There are diasporic women who believe that they engage in self-invigorating journeys of self-discovery, which are translated into ‘searching for roots’ or returning to one’s cultural and historic base, and marked by ‘an emotional connection to the ancestral homeland’ (King and Christou, 2014: 89). At the same time, its negative side forces second-generation women to engage in repatriation as the only option available in order to escape from the diasporic patriarchy (Callinicos, 1991; Christou and King, 2011; Moskos, 1999; Tsemberis, 1999).
Their parents – and even diaspora scholars – often think about such repatriation as unproblematic and predict a rather optimistic future to the repatriating woman, assuming that she de facto has the voucher to the ‘ancestral home’ community both on the jus sanguinis and jus soli terms. However, the research conducted by Christou and King (2011) shows that the reality of integration turns out to be harder than imagined, implying that such ethnic capital may not work effectively all the time. In this article, we introduce the term nativity voucher to speak of the symbolic capital that these people have as perceived members of the in-group (thanks to their ancestry) but at the same time having to show that they ‘fit’ this in-group and ‘deserve’ to belong. In this ‘fitness’ test, their cultural capital, notably knowledge of the language, of traditions and customs, play an important part (see also Christou and King 2011; Rumyantsev, 2012). However, what is more important is in vesting this human and cultural capital with an ethnic social capital, notably forging alliances with the community. Thus, the nativity voucher is Janus faced. It gives a ‘credit’ to the repatriating women but also pushes them to fit with preconceived roles that are highly gendered and highly ethnicised and where their link to their country of birth (the United States) is almost a liability.
Studies on return migration confirm that female returnees are often subjected to stigmatization in their ‘ancestral homes’ (Isaakyan and Triandafyllidou 2014; Kubal, 2012; Rumyantsev, 2012). In a broader sociological interpretation offered by Jones (1984) and widely used by sociologists, stigma is ‘a mark that links a person to undesired characteristics’. Research on migration acknowledges that such stigmatization often has a strong sexual connotation (Ali, 2010; Christou, 2006). Looking at experiences of sexually stigmatized women, Riessman (2000) notes that their responses to stigma are very ‘complex and contradictory’ (p. 120). While disrupting the patriarchy, the woman may also ‘collaborate’ in its reproduction because she often ‘rethinks [rather than rejects] stigmatizing interactions to give past incidents new meanings’, because she is subjected to the phallocentric (male-dominated) ideology.
Methodology
It is in the light of these reflections that we approach our 30 narrative, in-depth interviews conducted with second-generation Greek and Italian women who have migrated from the United States to the ‘ancestral’ Greek and Italian places of origin (islands for their most part). The research question that arose from the narratives relates to how they emancipate from or reproduce the diasporic patriarchy after return in the effort to negotiate their settlement in the ‘ancestral’ places of origin. We conceptualize this as a practice of stigma management because these women may find themselves cornered in stereotypical patriarchal structures that have assigned to them appropriate roles and behaviours – to the extent that they challenge such roles both in their pre- and post-return life, they are stigmatized.
Our informants include 20 Greek American and 10 Italian American women who have repatriated from the United States to their parents’ home-islands: Crete, Rhodes and Naxos in Greece, and Sicily, Sardinia and Capri in Italy. Based on the premise that ‘narrative stories shed light on identities and on how people see themselves’ (Creswell, 2013: 70), we conducted narrative-biographic interviews with these women (each lasting 2-3 hours). The applied narrative thematic analysis places emphasis on what has been said by our informants – that is, on their understanding of their own experience (Creswell, 2013; Denzin, 1989; Denzin and Lincoln, 2005). The narrative representation is always grounded in the basic principle of ‘re-storying, or reorganizing individual stories into a coherent interpretive framework’ (Creswell, 2013: 90).
This resonates with the post-modernist drive in reflexive qualitative research towards recognition of alternative narrative models of analysis and representation when applied to complex and sensitive issues such as sexuality and ethnic stigma (Ellis and Bochner, 1996; Wertz et al., 2011). In order to protect informants’ identities yet bring forward the authenticity of their testimonies, the method of composite narrative is recommended (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005; Todres, 2007).
Creating composite fictional characters from individual interviewees’ narratives, the composite narrative (or composite biography) allows the researcher to reach a desired ‘balance between texture and structure through their blending’ (Wertz et al., 2011: 2). A composite biography, or a generic biographic case, serves to illuminate ‘a composite picture of the sensitive phenomenon emerging from fragile individual stories’ (Wertz et al., 2011). In line with these ethical demands, we have re-contextualized and regrouped the narrative segments from our data into three compound case studies. The chosen approach serves to explain subtle nuances while preserving the wholeness of the life-story and anonymity (given the extreme sensitivity of data) (Denzin, 1989; Denzin and Lincoln, 2005). All names and specific geographical locations are altered with a view of protecting the anonymity of the informants.
We are thus presenting three cases (both illuminative and compound) that highlight two opposed types of stigma management (acceptance or rejection) and negotiation of inclusion/exclusion as a female returnee within a system of patriarchal norms. To be more precise, these generic cases have been comprised to illuminate the following differences that were observed in 30 individual biographies: socio-economic conditions of relocation; family circumstances and in-family relations prior to and post repatriation; the socio-cultural (re)positioning of the woman and her significant others (later defined in this article as ‘ethnic capital’ or ‘nativity voucher’) and emerging reactions to stigma.
The first two composite characters, Elektra and Kerstin, repatriate to make a new start, mainly for personal reasons. Elektra goes back and renovates the ‘ancestral home’ whereas Kerstin buys a new home in her father’s hometown of origin. They both defy local norms about what is appropriate behaviour by dating local men, but they also both negotiate their position through alternative channels – Elektra through her successful real estate firm and Kerstin through her novel writing. The body politics, however, involved in this negotiation are particularly pronounced. The whole process revolves around their gendered behaviour and personal versus professional life. There is also a clear contradiction in how they manage the stigma attributed to them: they partly accept it as they are aware of the local norms but they also refuse it at the same time by introducing new dimensions on which to be judged, their professional or intellectual skills. Elektra epitomizes this negotiation in her sentence: that is, how they remember I am a person. Among our informants, seven persons conform to Elektra’s narrative and six people to Kerstin’s.
By contrast, the case of Velvet who has returned to live in a Greek island exemplifies the acceptance of local norms – the stigmatized returnee plays by the rules and thus seeks to eliminate the stigma. This story reflects experiences of 10 more informants who returned as adults mainly to keep with the expectations of their parents. These are cases of women who eventually accepted the patriarchal relations in the diaspora and in their ancestral hometown eventually turning them into their own social capital and distancing themselves from the ‘stigmatized’ returnees like Kerstin or Elektra mentioned above.
The study thus uses the analytical procedures from the methods of narrative biography and composite biography: biographical re-contextualization or re-storying, analysis of turning points and emerging epiphanies, and narrative segment analysis. The starting point of our analysis is that the story itself is both a piece of data and an analytical category that speaks of its own (Creswell, 2013; Denzin, 1989; Denzin and Lincoln, 2005; Ellis and Bochner, 1996). The informants’ narrated stories were deconstructed and then reconstructed (reassembled) with attention to what Denzin (1989) defines as ‘turning points’ (or ‘critical events’) that facilitate life changes or interruptions and emerging mini-theories about life itself (‘epiphanies’). For example, the turning point could be the father’s adultery, followed by epiphany about the normalization of lies. The overall narrative data were also codified and regrouped into narrative segments related to the developing mega narratives of repatriation and stigma: pre-stigma, stigma mobility, ethnic voucher and transnational patriarchy.
Return, gender and negotiating local norms
Islandness and foreign femininity
We have chosen to study experiences of women returning to Mediterranean islands because their socio-cultural contexts make them both very difficult for female migrants and interesting for scholars. First, such places have ‘unique but beleaguered culture’, associated with very local tradition. Second, such islands are viewed as the South-European migration border – or ‘sentinel’ – which makes any migrants appear ‘potentially disruptive of this fragile islandic identity’ (Bernardie-Tahir and Schmoll, 2014: 3).
Given the constant irritation factor of expanding global tourism, such crystallization of glocalization on the islands presents a rather difficult challenge for female migrants who would like to settle there (Baldacchino, 2008; King, 2009). All our informants confess the difficulty of being a newcomer in general and a foreigner in particular to a Greek or Italian island. Moreover, it is not easy to remain ‘who you actually want to be’, they add. As King (2009) argues, ‘Islands involve relatively homogenous and intimate societies with a strong sense of common identity: everyone knows everyone else…and there is an equally close knowledge of the local environment – every house and every beach is known and recognized’ (p. 58). One of our interviewees further notes on the overall climate of sexual stigmatization, related to the environment of tourism prevalent in her Greek island: Overseas women who come to such islands are de facto seen by local men as ‘sexual tourists, who come for pleasure and sex, while the local guys of all ages feel flattered by an opportunity to satisfy American women’s needs’.
Looking at all her relationships on the island, she admits (as also confirmed by the rest of the interviewees) that a sexual adventure with an American woman makes an islander-guy proud of his own masculinity and strengthens his social status within his buddy circle and, consequently, within the overall patriarchy-structured local community: You know, here on the island, there is such an expression as ‘to go for a kamaki’, which means ‘to go fishing’. Between themselves, they call me ‘kamaki’. If you want to break this stereotype, you must prove that you are an honourable Greek woman. You cannot be both here – American and Greek. If you are American, you are de facto labelled as kamaki. If you do not want to be seen as a kamaki, you should change yourself.
This kamaki image is very difficult to sustain because the local people have the sexual tourist gaze at foreign femininity and, at the same time, expect American women to have the same sexual tourist gaze at local men. So, to a certain extent, the US migration to such islands (including repatriation) is envisioned by locals as part of the global sex industry, with a priori assigned roles. This is the overall impression that all our informants have and which is also supported by a number of other works about American expats living in exotic locations (Fechter, 2016).
Elektra and Kerstin: defying local norms
Elektra is a woman in her late 30s. She grew up in a Greek immigrant family who owns a restaurant business in New York. She was at the age of 22, graduating from New York University (NYU) with a business degree, when her father started to plan the family’s return to Greece and Elektra’s marriage with a guy from his home village.
Although Elektra saw her future only in the United States, she perceived negotiating with the parents as a futile effort. As soon as she had tried to say no, the father began shouting at her about the evils of America, which illuminates the production of what can be understood as the indirect (covert, abstract or inclusionary) stigma. The negative cultural token was not assigned specifically to Elektra as her personal label. It was posed to her as an identity dilemma: you are not one of them, bad Americans – you are one of us, Greeks.
This dilemma made Elektra start looking for her ‘own’ ways to stay in the United States. She quickly ‘married the first man available’ because she knew that her father would respect her more as a married woman. Her father finally abandoned the idea of returning. In his youth, he had committed a crime in his home village and fled to the United States in order to escape imprisonment. Although many years had passed, he was still remembered badly in his hometown community. He wanted to return there with his diasporic daughter and to show everyone that she was the perfect Greek girl – and his renovated nativity voucher back to the community. His own daughter was seen by him as a valid form of ethno-cultural capital accumulated in diaspora. And after Elektra had disrupted his relocation plans, the structure of the nativity voucher became thinner and he saw no reason for returning anymore.
Elektra admits loving her father despite his selfishness and mistakes of his youth until one day her world perception was suddenly changed by a shocking discovery: her father had a long-term girlfriend. The epiphany that she had developed as a result of this turning point was that ‘human life is pragmatically assembled on the amoral principles of lying to each other and that the only way to emerge though this environment of lying is to invent another lie’. Thus, a critical event related to in-family betrayal of diasporic values gave rise to a ‘self’ mini-theory in defence of moral value manipulation, which would later include a strong element of femininity politics for Elektra.
In the meantime, Elektra, who already had two small children, was desperately searching for a possibility to divorce her husband. She was abstaining from making an official divorce claim because she still felt like a diasporic Greek woman, who would become a complete disappointment for all her family. So she was looking for a round-about-way to initiate the separation. Her husband was a well-to-do-man, running lucrative family business in New York, which suddenly became a target for local mafia attacks. To save their lives and especially the lives of their children, Elektra very quickly relocated to Greek, to the home village of her parents, where she has been living in their ancestral house for almost 10 years at the time of the interview.
In Greece, she was welcomed as local people remembered her mother very positively and after all she was a mater familia saving her children from the evils of America. She settled in the abandoned ancestral house, which she and her rich husband renovated. She was therefore seen as ‘a mature Greek returning home because it was the best place’. Her maternal relatives helped her to establish her own real estate firm while her US degree and prior experience of running her husband’s firm were seen as the proof of her professionalism. She proudly says, ‘My business is important and I know how to run it. That is why I am wanted and respected here – for my American professionalism, which local people here do not have’.
However, being bored with the everyday local life and still wanting to divorce her husband, Elektra began dating local men, who invested in her business though at the detriment of her reputation. She eventually ended up in a long-term relationship with a colleague, who was her neighbour, married and father of her younger daughter’s best friend. The situation was silently tolerated by all (the man, his wife and Elektra) as in her own words ‘This is what everybody here does, and this is fine until it is detected’.
The situation drastically changed after the affair became known in the community, and it also exposed her children and the whole family to the fierce criticisms from other parents at school. Elektra admits now having a very negative reputation and feeling torn among three different categorizations imposed by the community: ‘the new Greek business woman’, ‘a slut from New York’ or ‘her impudent father’s daughter – an apple from the same tree’. As she concludes, ‘This is how they actually remember that I am still someone’. Such a disclosure of her private life had actually become her second turning point, having facilitated her stigma mobility and epiphany towards the customization of stigma.
Elektra’s co-national Kerstin, a former business executive from Chicago in her late 40s, has also experienced a similar form of stigma mobility and customization, although in a milder form. Having grown up in an Italian diasporic family, Kerstin now lives in an Italian island.
When she was already in her late 30s, she was advised by her father on changing her profession to that of business administration. He simply said, ‘Kerstin, you should requalify and become a lawyer or a business executive: America is the country of lawyers and businessmen!’ Kerstin admits not being very happy with that decision but sighs, ‘What could I do? An Italian daughter must not contradict her father. This is how I was brought up, and at that time I was not quite ready to defend my life position yet’.
She spent another 4 years studying business administration while her father paid for her studies, and did a 2-year internship in a firm to which her father had recommended her. Having worked in this firm for a few years as a business executive, she opened her own media business with her father’s financial support. She never married – she says that this was because she was not able to find a guy whom her father would like and who would like her father.
After her father died a few years ago, living in Chicago without him did not make sense for Kerstin. She ‘needed a grieving space and wanted to pay a tribute to his memory’. She decided to move to this Italian island because it was her father’s birthplace and because he always wanted them to go there together. When she arrived in her father’s native town, no one there seemed to remember him anymore. But having inherited the money, she bought a house on that island and eventually stayed there as she fell in love with a local fisherman, Franco, 20 years younger than her.
At a certain point, Franco, with whom she has had a ‘roller-coaster’ relationship, left her for a local woman of his age, and Kerstin was faced not only with loneliness but also exclusion by the community. Her neighbours noted, ‘You are not one of us – you do not even have an ancestral house!’
Velvet: accepting local norms
Velvet, a woman in her late 40s, comes from Los Angeles and now lives in a Greek island, the birthplace of her both parents. She graduated from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). However, the same year, both her parents were diagnosed as terminally ill and given no more than a year to live. They wanted to repatriate in order to die in their homeland.
Having grown up in diaspora, Velvet was always kept isolated from the outside world, apart from the time when she had classes at school and at the university. She almost never went to the beach because her parents did not allow her to go out on her own, even when she was already a young adult in her early 20s.
Velvet wanted to stay in Los Angeles because she clearly saw her future (including career) there. However, she admits the zero possibility of contradicting her parents: ‘Greek daughters who grow up in diaspora are scared to say no to their parents – so I was just forced to come here [to Greece]’.
Upon repatriation, Velvet had problems with employment because her degree was not locally recognized, but her relatives helped her to start a business of her own – a private English language school. Her parents had inherited two ancestral houses and turned one into the school building. Velvet’s relatives also supported her business financially so as to help her stay in the Greek island. After she had opened her private school, her aunt introduced her to her future husband, and they married very fast. Her new in-laws restructured her school into a family-owned tourist company, in which she is now the administrator.
Velvet admits being an obedient daughter and an exemplary wife, who does not question her relationship with her husband. She consciously uses the network and socio-cultural resources offered by her relatives and the wider local community adapting thus to the role prescribed for her as a diasporic returnee daughter.
Multiple layers of inclusion/exclusion
The three life stories above exemplify two main types of negotiation of a returning woman’s position in the local community. Actually, none of these women is fully included or fully excluded. They may be symbolically excluded from certain domains of local life and included in others. Velvet is fully included in her extended family network and local community but excluded from outside-the-community social life and from many possibilities of her career development. On the contrary, Elektra is fully included economically within the local framework of her professional development: she has her own real estate firm and many local clients who support her business. She is not fully excluded from the local communal life either as she is still the mother of her Greek children, who disseminates values from her culture inter-generationally and who lives in the ancestral house. She is also seen as ‘the daughter of her father’ or ‘the apple having not fallen far from the tree’, with the ‘father’ and the ‘tree’ categories perceived as ‘residual’ yet ‘intrinsically Greek’. So even in such a stigmatizing categorization, she is still understood by her neighbours as ‘Greek’ – untraditional but local and more than just kamaki. However, her mode of participation in the local culture is different from that of Velvet.
Velvet’s choice in favour of accepting the ‘stigma’ of being Greek American turns it into a social asset: She admits really benefitting from the everyday support of her relatives. Although this support comes as symbolic power, blocking her decision making in many ways, it provides herself and her children with a high level of security and safety. However, the price for this kind of cultural membership is Velvet’s respect for and eventual internationalization of the stigma rules. This pact includes her recognition of the legitimacy of the ‘bad Anglophone foreigner stereotype’, limiting her socialization with other non-ethnic co-nationals and taming her female body in order to keep it within the legitimate framework of the socially accepted local norms.
Elektra’s choice to defy the stigma and to continue to promote her ‘illegitimate’ body has, in fact, made her highly visible in local life, thus blocking her access to the communal female culture and, at the same time, enabling her pass to career development within the local male-dominated environment. In this reference, Riessman (2000) notes on the contextual situatedness of stigma, saying that in the eyes of some people, some experience may look stigmatizing – while, when understood by others, it may seem as an advantage.
Elektra’s case illuminates the phenomenon of positive stigma – or the beneficial aspect of ethnic sexual stigmatization. While her promiscuity is rigidly criticized by her relatives and neighbours, it is welcomed by her male colleagues and clients, who perceive her as ‘an aggressive and fearless risk-taker from America’ and who consequently view her as ‘a woman worth trusting and investing in business’ (quotes from her interview). Although her business was initially supported by her relatives, this support would not be enough for its proliferation. Constantly expanding her local clientele network through intimate relations with influential local men (both for pleasure and business) has become a levelling force between the domains of her inclusion and exclusion on the island.
Negotiating a gendered belonging
Taking stock of this rich empirical material, we would like to point to three elements that come out from this study. First is how stigma is actually created while already at the diaspora and before return so that when stigma as a foreigner is repeated at the homeland, the women have already interiorised it. Second, that local norms are partly accepted and used in negotiating one’s position in the community even when her behaviour explicitly defies them. Third is that the overall process of inclusion/exclusion can be best conceptualized through the notion of nativity voucher that refers to the ethnic and social capital that each returnee has at her disposal or manages to mobilize.
Stigma is assigning to someone a socially undesirable attribute/mark to separate someone from the mainstream population (Chen et al, 2011; Stafford & Scott, 1986). It is an attribute that conveys a social identity that is devalued in a particular society (Crocker & Major, 1998). Riessman (2000) has shown that migrants or returnees experience the so-called ‘minority’ stigma – they do not fully belong at destination but they are also ‘foreigners’ in the homeland. Our informants were raised not to fully belong already while in the United States. They were reminded that fully mainstreaming and integrating into the US culture was not desirable for their parents. Restricting walks to the beach or play time with classmates or even choices about study and work was part of making and keeping them ‘authentic’ Greek/Italian daughters. But this involved the stigmatization of ‘a bad American girl/woman’ – this is, what they should avoid becoming or being. This is what can be conceptualized as the pre-stigma – or the pre-repatriation, diasporic stigma. It was an overt process of stigmatization, based on the symbolic power of the parents rather on straightforward societal labelling. It was the in-family stigma experience.
We define the pre-stigma as the first stage (equivalent to preparation for stigmatization or training for becoming used to the stigmatization experience) in stigma processes with more complex structures such as those related to migration and diaspora. The majority of studies work with more classic understanding of the minority stigma – when the stigmatized population is the ethnic minority. Our examples of pre-stigma show that the mainstreamed majority (the American society) can be understood as stigmatized by the minority (diaspora) prior to rather than just in response to or after repatriation. 1 For the stigma to shape tastes and habits, a fixed structure or a fixed societal mini-context such as family is important. Stressing the social effect of stigma, Link and Phelan (2001) define it broadly as ‘something that is created and affixed on people through social processes’ rather than in a static, pre-given fashion. One such social process of stigmatization is education or family up-bringing, and our informants’ pre-stigma was a family educational process preparing them for the repatriation and somehow already attributing to them a negative gendered identity.
Although the informants’ parents had left Greece and Italy for the United States before the digital divide in the 1950s to 1960s, the majority of our informants (20 women) did maintain contacts with their ‘ancestral homes’ through regular summer holidays, regular post, telephone conversations and later correspondence. However, such previous knowledge of the country did not prevent them from the difficulties of settlement and also from stigmatization. Our findings and many other studies confirm that such brief visits are akin to tourism, during which the person has a very limited perception of the country, while virtual communication strongly contributes to romanticized versions of ‘ancestral homeland’ (Isaakyan and Triandafyllidou, 2014; Rappoport and Lomsky-Feder 2008; Rumyantsev, 2012).
Upon returning to the ‘ancestral homeland’, women take a new step in their diasporic condition. They test the limits of their acceptance or rejection and re-negotiation of the diasporic norms which upon return become the mainstream communal norms. Velvet was never able to contradict her father while in the United States. Similarly, she did not contradict his will after return. On the contrary, Kerstin and Elektra showed the first signs of resistance to their fathers while still in the United States. Their acts of resistance were not identical, ranging from moving out to a separate apartment, to choosing an occupation or marrying a man not approved by the father. If we compare Elektra and Velvet, their parents’ decision to relocate to the ‘ancestral home’ in Greece was met by separation in the former case and by compliance in the latter case.
Earlier research argues that forcefully repatriated second-generation women are better mainstreamed than romantic and circumstantial returnees (King and Christou, 2014). Our findings show that this may be explained by the symbolic power of the father who is directly present at the moment of repatriation. When the father is geographically distant, his transnational avatar in the face of the lover/husband becomes a much softer substitute and cultural dominator as he provides the woman with more space for trying the new Greek type of identity (Elektra).
However, defiant behaviours are not fully discouraged by the informant’s family and may be supported through diasporic female solidarity. Her female relatives (mother or sister) may suggest that she re-style stigma responses, or re-pack her femininity politic. The recommendation may be to become a more complacent lover – that is, to avoid making public scandals and to be ready to wait for several years. Thus, when the wife of Daphne’s Dad came to Elektra’s house for a fight, Elektra (from her mother’s advice) chose not to fight back and later received a black eye. In other words, the negotiation takes place with a partial acceptance of the prevalence of local norms.
All those significant others of the repatriated woman (including her father, mother, lover etc.) comprise a very interesting phenomenon that can be observed in diaspora and repatriation studies – the nativity voucher, which strongly affects the gendered dynamics of returnee integration and hybridization of diasporic identities. We use this term to speak of wider ethnic capital that goes beyond just ancestry. The nativity voucher includes ownership of an ancestral family house in the parents’ hometown, the reputation of both father and mother and density of the kin-network – all factors that are important in negotiating one’s position in the local community.
Velvet and Elektra have the strongest nativity vouchers but chose to use them in opposed ways. Velvet accepts the local norms and seeks to assimilate while Elektra mobilizes her nativity voucher to defy them. Kerstin is probably in the weakest position and thus choses to re-negotiate her role and reputation transnationally: she is now seeking to publish a Franco-centred autobiographical book in the United States rather than locally.
Conclusion
The discovered phenomenon of stigma mobility shows that our informants were actually stigmatized in two different geographical settings although by people from the same social world. Involvement of all old and new actors in one complex circle of stigma production had made the stigma very mobile. Although it was the same ‘anti-American’ stigma moving across the ocean, the stigma mobility was not mechanical but dynamic, progressing in from covert to more overt, aggressive forms. In the United States, the women were never stigmatized as ‘Greeks’ or ‘Italians’ by the local majority. Their Americanness was first neglected by their parents and then explicitly demonized by their local communities in repatriation.
The suggested nativity-voucher theory is to facilitate a better understanding of stigma management while pointing to its complexities. For example, their stigma did not always become ‘accepted’ or ‘rejected’ in a pure form. It was often modified by the informant into a form of social capital she could apply as an identity tool in some situations.
Due to its complexity, the nativity voucher can actually have a paradoxical effect: women with strong nativity vouchers may be more prone to challenge dominant local norms compared to those women who feel they have weaker resources. This may be possibly because people do not always inherit millions and mansions but also parental debts and dilapidated houses. Neither can all items in the nativity voucher be positive. This finding is worth researching further in diaspora and returnee studies with a special focus on gender.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: This research is part of the project ‘FEMIDE/Female Migrants from Developed Countries in Southern Europe’, which was funded by the Marie Curie Actions - Intra-European Fellowship [grant number REF # 298752] and hosted by Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS), European University Institute (EUI), Florence, Italy.
