The Citizen's Body, the Migrant's Habitus: Class and Embodied Friction in Venezuelan Displacement to Peru
(2025) The migrant body in South-South migrations — Location: Manchester, UK (15.December.2025)
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- What happens when a traveling middle-class habitus collides with a receiving context that reads the migrant body as hyper-sexualized and disposable? This paper investigates the embodied experiences of university-educated women displaced from Venezuela to Lima, focusing on the friction between internalized class dispositions and the external imposition of the stigmatized “Venezuelan body”. Drawing on 23 biographical interviews, including a subset of Peruvian-Venezuelan citizen-migrants, the study examines how migration produces a biographical rupture in which institutional cultural capital is devalued, forcing women to mobilize embodied resources—grooming, comportment, and professional self-presentation—to perform middle-class respectability and resist stigmatization. Yet, these performances encounter a critical limit. Even for women who hold Peruvian citizenship, middle-class self-presentation is destabilized by their accent, which marks them as Venezuelan upon speaking and triggers sexualized, de-professionalizing readings. The paper conceptualizes this as embodied friction: a constant, exhausting labor of trying to maintain a middle-class identity in a body socially coded as “available” or “suspect”. This friction is particularly salient for citizen-migrants, as the accent line—a sonic boundary of belonging—can override both phenotype and legal status, rendering citizenship a weak form of capital when the body is marked as Other. By bringing Bourdieusian analytical tools into conversation with feminist and intersectional frameworks, the paper shows how inequality is enacted through bodily encounters rather than formal legal status alone, contributing to emerging work on embodiment, class, and South–South migration.
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Izaguirre, L. (2025). The Citizen’s Body, the Migrant’s Habitus: Class and Embodied Friction in Venezuelan Displacement to Peru. The migrant body in South-South migrations, Manchester, UK. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/276278