Abstract

Based on original ethnographic material, this article focuses on the citizenship discourse of migrant women engaged in the public sphere in the city of Naples (Italy). The analysis of narrative interviews highlights the meanings they attribute to their everyday experiences of citizenship, living and acting as citizens. The article contributes to enriching studies on lived citizenship and the meanings of citizenship from an intersectional perspective by showing how the meanings migrant women attribute to citizenship can vary with their placements. Narrative interviews highlight the fluid meanings of citizenship, showing how not only different positionings, but also intersubjective processes that are activated at the local level are central to the ways in which migrant women conceive of citizenship and identify themselves as citizens. By contributing to the conceptualisation of citizenship as a synthesis of normative and substantive dimensions, which in migrant women’s narratives appear closely intertwined, the article challenges both the theory and politics of citizenship in a more inclusive sense.