Masculine borders as alienation of racialized, undocumented south Asian migrant workers in Greece

ABSTRACT

Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistani low-class male migrants in Greece are marked by migrant precarity due to their undocumented status and by a flattened South Asian racialised masculine identity. Collectively othered, they struggle with symbolic borders created by colonial and postcolonial encounters, national identities, religion, and masculine expectations. This article explores how ideologies of prejudice and divisiveness in Greece work in tandem with articulations of othering and national (un)belonging from the men’s home countries to define both their interpersonal relationships and labour outcomes in Greece. It proposes the concept of ‘masculine borders’ to describe processes through which culturally specific masculinities of South Asian men are (re)produced or reconfigured relationally and hierarchically to each other by the capitalist project with the aim of alienating and discipling workers. With such everyday bordering discourses, a novel articulation of Marxian alienation of workers from each other emerges. In this case, masculine norms mesh with Islamophobia and racism to thicken masculine borders between Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Indian men, assisting in the efficient accumulation of surplus by the capitalist class.

KEYWORDS:

• Greece
• bordering
• racism
• alienation of labour
• masculine borders

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ardis Ingvars for proposing a seminar on bordering regimes and masculinities in transition of racialized migrant men in Reykjavik and the Department of Sociology, University of Iceland, and RIKK-Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference for hosting it. Thanks to the working group of the special issue for their thoughtful questions and insights and to Paritosh Kumar, Angela Pietrobon, Laddu and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank all the migrant men who took valuable time out of their work to share their life stories with me.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Alienation is also evident in the gig economy, where the very nature of platform work and labour control isolates workers from each other and thus creates powerlessness; see Glavin, Bierman, and Schieman (2021) for details.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by SSHRC Insight Development Grant, award no 430-2020-00040, the Fund for Scholarly Research and Creative Work and Professional Development (Adjuncts), and SSHRC Institutional Grant, Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada.

Notes on contributors

Reena Kukreja

Reena Kukreja is Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University. She is cross-appointed to the Department of Gender Studies and the Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University. She divides time between teaching, research, and filmmaking. She has published in journals such as Geoforum, Gender & Society, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Men & Masculinities, Modern Asian Studies, and the Journal of Intercultural Studies. Her monograph on marriage migration in India, Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage Migration and Dispossession in Neoliberal India was published by Cornell University Press in April 2022. Her research interests include migration and development, marriage migration, South Asian masculinities, political economy, caste, and trafficking. Currently, her work examines the intersections of masculinity, sexuality, securitisation of borders and religious fundamentalism on the lives of undocumented South Asian men in Greece.