Embodied Geopolitics: The Discursive Construction of Refugee Men and Masculinities in Turkey

ABSTRACT

A new wave of displaced people from Afghanistan arriving in Turkey in August-September 2021 generated public debates about how the country would protect its borders while continuing to face the ‘problem’ posed by more than 3 million displaced Syrians. Much of these debates centred on refugee men and scrutinised their bodies and bodily acts to produce them as Other. This article analyses how the racialised and gendered depictions of refugee men in Turkey discursively produce geopolitical spatial hierarchies. Our analysis includes political leaders’ speeches, news articles, and opinion pieces published in mainstream media outlets and social media about displaced people from Syria and Afghanistan since 2016. We build on and contribute to feminist geopolitics and refugee studies by focusing on refugee men and masculinities, teasing out the contradictions in the geopolitical narratives centred on refugee men’s bodies, and analysing their implications for representing civilisational hierarchies. Using the concept of embodied geopolitics, we show how the dominant anti-refugee discourse in Turkey operates through a series of contradictory -but eventually complementary- geopolitical depictions of refugee men’s bodies, appearance, and behaviour that simultaneously masculinise and feminise them. These portrayals present refugee men either as fighters or cowards, as modern or backward. We argue that gendered and racialised refugee bodies animate geopolitical narratives and demonstrate that bodies are not simply territories with fixed meanings. Instead, they are constantly and simultaneously inscribed with multiple meanings that operate together and, ultimately, produce international hierarchies, ethnic boundaries, and the modern/backward dualism.

Acknowledgements

We would like extend our thanks to Christopher Courtheyn, Patricia Ehrkamp, Caroline Faria, Shae Frydenlund, Sameera Ibrahim, Suad Jabr, Jenna Loyd, Adam Saltsman, Anna Secor, Nathan Swanson, Rebecca Torres, Valentina Glockner, and Emanuela Borzacchiello who participated in the Feminist Geography of Refugees workshops during Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 and provided us (and others) valuable feedback and comraderie. We also thank the participants of the 2022 Feminist Geography Conference at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the 2020 Unsettling Borders Conference at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Thanks for UNC Center for European Studies, Jean Monnet Center for Excellence, for their support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use the term refugee to include displaced people and asylum seekers who have already applied or will apply for refugee status. In Turkey, refugee status is legally restricted geographically to those displaced from Europe and currently, there is no path to gain permanent refugee status for those from Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan, but these populations are granted ‘temporary protection status’. However, for the purposes of this article, we use the term refugee broadly to include all those who have been displaced by war, violence, and instability. We are following de Genova and others (De Genova 2017) who point out that distinctions between these populations are very difficult and often problematic to make beyond the legal realm.

2. Sonuç shared his twits as a thread in six parts on April 17, 2022. The quotations above include only the first and fourth twit of the thread.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.