Activism through Identities: Building Shared Alliances against Homophobia and Racism in Palermo

Scholars and activists of antiracist and antihomophobic movements have recently been analysing the phenomena of ‘gay imperialism’ and ‘sexual democratisation’ in European countries. Italy represents an exception among these countries due to its record on sexual and human rights. On the one hand, in fact, Italian law does not allow marriage, civil partnerships, and child adoption for homosexual people. On the other, its institutions often violate the rights of migrants and impose on them punitive conditions to acquire citizenship. In Italy, therefore, racial and sexual minorities share a lack of rights and a clandestine condition. This is particularly true in Sicily, one of Europe’s ‘peripheries’. This chapter looks at the practices of antihomophobic and antiracist movements in Palermo, Sicily’s largest city. It analyses processes of coalition building among parts of these movements, particularly the creation of a feminist meeting space called ‘La migration’. Palermo has long been considered a stereotypically backward place for civil and sexual rights. What solidarities, but also tensions, traverse the sexual and racial question in such context? How does the coming together of lesbian-queer native and migrant subjects transform their sense of belonging in a peripheral setting? In the Mediterranean context, the dichotomy between a ‘European’ sexual emancipation and the ‘backwardness’ of other cultures loses meaning. What shared strategies of resistance do activists thus put in place? The chapter explores the intersection and disjuncture of activists’ senses of belonging and estrangement vis-à-vis local and ethnic communities, native and migrant cultures, LGBT and antiracist associations.