Migration Stereotypes and Gender per il simposio: Gender and Migration

The phenomenon of migration involves society in its entirety, introducing new cultural realities which slowly change our customs. Often, to enter into a group, it is necessarily to adapt to some uniform characteristic elements of that group, thereby giving up a part of oneself; whether it is the ethnic minority giving up part of themselves, or the society welcoming them, the process is one of acculturation (Berry, 2001). This process is also facilitated by the image that we have of the “other” and by our capacity to assign a role to these “others” in the different emotional and relational contexts. In order to explore the core of meanings attributed to immigrants in their own context of belonging, an in particular to women and men, an exploratory study was conducted comprising 150 young students from Campania enrolled in their first year of Clinical Community Psychology at the Federico II University in Naples. These subjects (100 females and 50 males), aged between 21 and 35, provided personal narratives on the following topic: “Thinking of an immigrant...”. 150 items were gathered on migrant women, and 150 on migrant men. The contents of these narratives will be examined using Taltac software (Bolasco).