Abstract
“Here in Italy I go to the doctor alone, although I do not understand everything, it is the same for the doctor! We are both in difficulty! (Whereas In Turkey doctors would have obliged her to speak in Turkish and not Kurmanji)”.
(Rihan, married with two children. Venice 2010)
“My mother sent me here - Italy - after my father’s death in order to stay with my younger brother who is a refugee in Italy with severe health problems due to tortures received in the Turkish prison). She told me that her wish was to hear my brother’s voice and mine together so she could have died peacefully”. (Rojin, single woman. Rome 2011)
Women are often considered responsible for their families’ health care needs beyond their economic, social and educational status. ‘The body, as the focal point of self-construction as well as health construction, implicates gender in the everyday experience of health’ (Saltonstall 1993). In the Kurdish case the family can be seen as representing an extended body that takes into account all of its members. In this paper I explore Kurdish women’s everyday acts, decisions and narratives on the issues of health and illness in their life prior to, during and after their migration experience in Italy. Spatial and temporal dimensions are seen as a flow where the violence, oppression and exclusions experienced in Turkey are combined with women’s new status in Italy enabling women to act as experts in transforming their strategies regarding health. Based on ethnographic research and interviews conducted between 2010 and 2012 with Kurdish migrant women (aged 16-70) I argue that Kurdish migrant women in Italy do not refer to themselves as victims or mere providers of care but as active agents involved in the transformation of their practices and discourses. By using (among other strategies) transnational informal networks around Europe, interviewees seem not only to ensure the possibility of preserving and practicing traditional home made remedies and treatments, but also to expand the biomedical realm through the possibility of addressing themselves to different national health systems (other than the Italian and Turkish one).
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