His-stories of Belonging: Young Second-Generation Turkish Men in Austria

Abstract

Public discourses about the children of migrants tend to focus on various difficulties that they encounter in adjusting to host society environments. More specifically, discourses that focus on the sons of Muslim migrants are further infused with ideas about “the Muslim man” who is thought to be the antipode of the enlightened “Western man”. This paper moves beyond such Orientalist descriptions in presenting three case studies of young men of migrant Turkish background living in Vienna. Integrating theoretical approaches of migration and masculinity studies, the young men's positionalities and narratives of belonging are presented. These narratives are diverse and change over the course of the young men's biographies. Their complexity and flexibility are a reflection of the young men's negotiation of their social and discursive environment. To capture this relational character, the paper suggests that these processes be analysed as strategies employed to claim social space.

Keywords:

• Belonging
• Intersectionality
• Masculinity
• Migration
• Youth

Notes

1. Susanne Spindler's recent study on imprisoned migrant men being one of the very few exceptions.

2. For a thorough critique of classical conceptions of generations within migration studies from a transnationalist perspective, see Peggy Levitt and Mary C. Waters.

3. I conducted the interviews in the course of my MA thesis and re-analyse them here applying the theoretical approach I develop in my PhD thesis, which I am currently writing at the Central European University, Budapest.

4. All names were changed to ensure anonymity.

5. I borrow this term from Gayatri Spivak.

6. Hakan's ethos about good people is informed by Islamic norms and values, but the point is that it does not create boundaries along lines of ethnic origin or religion.

7. Note that tactics, as used here, must not be understood as the rational choice of a profit-maximising autonomous individual. Rather, tactics are understood, drawing on de Certeau (23), as practices of those with social power and property. In this view, a wide range of practices can be seen as tactics of claiming space – from the conscious formulation of political claims to the temporary appropriation of space by hanging out at a street corner.