Practices and rhetoric of migrants’ social exclusion in Italy: intermarriage, work and citizenship as devices for the production of social inequalities

The article aims to investigate the intersection of legislative dimensions, economic conditions and intimate life contributing to racialising and marginalising the poorest non-European migrants. First, this article focuses on the central role played by the private life in claiming citizenship rights and in building a sense of belonging within migratory contexts. As a result, mixed couples become a border zone through which the state disciplines immigrants according to their class, nationality and gender. On the other side, mixed couples and their intimate lives define resistance against the state’s biopolitical power to control people and become the space of intimate citizenship. Second, the article analyses the matrix for immigrants’ exclusion and differentiation embodied within the institutional and legislative system through immigration and citizenship laws. Therefore, the ‘coloniality power matrix’ becomes an active component of the naturalisation system of social differences at an institutional level.