Sensory Intersections. Experiences of Racialisation and Gender Violence Among Migrants in Lisbon

Based on 40 in-depth interviews with migrants (men and women) living in Lisbon from former colonies in Africa, Brazil and Hindustan, this paper develops the notion of sensory intersectionality to understand narratives of racial categorisation and gendered violence. Narratives collected using the Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) provided insights into the nuanced complexities of racial and gender identification, highlighting the key role of sensory experiences of otherness. Sensory experiences contribute to identity construction and perceptions of self and otherness. Rather than static belonging to predetermined identity categorisations, the migrants interviewed provided deeply emotional - often painful and distressing - accounts of the violence they experienced as racialised and gendered subjects. Experiences of intersectional violence, shaped by racialised and gendered forms of oppression, are often deeply and viscerally felt. The rapid growth of the far right, based on a lusotropicalist ideology that continues to the present day, has fuelled a sense of fear and suspicion, leading to palpable accounts of suffering.

Against this backdrop, this paper examines how different groups of migrants - men and women - experience intersectional violence as a result of multiple and interdependent processes of social inequality in which race and gender play a key role. However, these intersectional inequalities are given further materiality through emotional embodiments of subalternity. Migrants' stories of violence and discrimination can only be understood through the plural mobilisation of intersectional framings and will illustrate the importance of including sensory elements in accounts of intersectional discrimination and violence. Masculinities and femininities are deeply imbued with these dynamics and become palpable realities through narratives of sensory embodiment.