Introduction: everyday bordering regimes and transitioning masculinities of racialized migrant men: a case study of the EU

ABSTRACT

The introduction to the Special Issue (SI) presents the collection’s theorization on the impact of everyday, micro-level borders that are propelled by discourses of Islamophobia, racism, and ethno-nationalism related to racialized migrant men’s masculinities in the European Union (EU). Along with the increased movement of racialized (Muslim) men to the EU’s shores have come crisis narratives about their otherness to b/order them. These borders operate in everyday encounters between migrant men and local communities as much as between groups of migrant men themselves, whether it is in the realm of livelihood strategies, romantic desires, assertions about sexuality and sexual identity, homosocial interactions, or friendships. This SI uses the frame of ‘transitions’ to interrogate how transitions in masculinities and masculine self-perceptions are shaped by b/ordering that is enacted every day and in the everyday against racialized migrant men. It argues that masculinized Islamophobia and masculine border(ing) thicken borders between these men and the natives to justify the men’s migrant (un)deservingness. The SI also brings into discussion strategies of masculine resistance and refusal that b/ordered men undertake through enactment and embodiment of caring masculinities or by their refusal to subscribe to norms of hegemonic masculinity.

KEYWORDS:

• Europe
• migrant men
• racism
• masculinized Islamophobia
• masculine bordering
• migrant masculinity

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Dr. Ardis Ingvars, the Department of Sociology at the University of Iceland and RIKK – Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference, Iceland for hosting the SI workshop in Reykjavik in April 2022. Thanks also to all the SI contributors for their comments in putting this introduction together and to Dr. Ingvars for their detailed comments on the draft introduction. Finally, a big thank you to all the anonymous reviewers of the SI articles who gave their time and intellectual energy willingly and to Ulf Mellström and the editorial team at NORMA who endorsed the SI’s focus from the very outset - without this, the SI would not have come to light.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Mairtin Mac An Ghaill and Chris Haywood (2022) argue that the British state security regime creates a masculine racial stratification, with Muslim men of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage framed as embodying threatening masculinity.

2 As I finalized this introduction, tragically, one event after another unfolded in June 2023 to underline how racism, Islamophobia, and necropolitics govern (and determine) the lives of racialized men in Europe. Achille Mbembe (2003) defines necropolitics as the use of social and political power ‘to dictate who is able to live and who must die.’ In France, an Algerian-heritage French youth, Nahael, was shot point blank by police officers on 27 June 2023, an act condemned as yet another instance of institutional police violence against racialized men there (Amnesty International, 2023). Earlier that month, off the coast of Greece, a fishing boat carrying over 750 migrants from countries such as Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, and Afghanistan sank, with only 102 survivors. Pleas for help by those on board were ignored by a Greek coast guard ship that stood by and did nothing for hours as the boat sank (The Washington Post, 2023). Around the same time, considerable public money and resources were used for an intensive multi-country ocean search for five millionnaires whose submersible was on an extreme tourist trip to the wreckage of the Titanic (PBS, 2023). This has all naturally brought up uncomfortable questions about race, class, ethnicity, and nationality as determining factors for whose life is valued and deemed worthy of saving (or not). Gislason and Ingvars (2018), in their study of refugees in Greece, demonstrate the non-worthiness of migrant deaths, for these never get the same degree of moral mobilization as the deaths of local activists.

3 A similar tactic of bordering and borderwork, through racism and discrimination, is also used against the native other in Europe, most notably the Roma community and the indigenous Sami people in Sweden, Finland, and Norway (Loftsdóttir & Jensen, 2012).

4 This narrative also allows elite White Europeans to conveniently ignore the ugly reality that much of the labour in their homes and fields is performed by the racialized migrant others, a point that Gallo and Scrinzi (2016) bring out in their study of reproductive labour in Italy. Despite Europe taking pains to forefront egalitarianism as its core value, a hierarchical social order predominates through low-paying and precarious immigrant niche sectors (Gullestad, 2002). Racialized, class borders deny mobility to the racial underclass, yet the same racialized migrant others find themselves exploited through temporary labour migration regimes and low-paid reproductive labour.

5 Two edited collections, Deconstructing Europe: Postcolonial Perspectives (Blaagaard & Ponzanesi, 2013) and Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: Exceptionalism, Migrant Others and National Identities (Loftsdóttir & Jensen, 2012), showcase exclusionary discourses from the EU and Nordic countries. In the Nordic countries, the long history of racism, both against indigenous communities and non-native racial others, is often met with institutional denial and silence. Gullestad (2002), in her work on Norway, describes how the term innvander constitutes a powerfully violent, exclusionary, and stigmatizing label for racialized migrants with no hope of ever being considered Norwegian (pp. 49–58).

6 PEGIDA is a shorthand for a pan-European anti-Islam group called Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, or Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes in German.

Additional information

Funding

Research was funded by the SSHRC Insight Development Grant.

Notes on contributors

Reena Kukreja

Dr. Reena Kukreja is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University. She is cross-appointed to the Department of Gender Studies and affiliated with the Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University. In 2018, she was a Visiting Fellow at the International Migration Research Centre at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo. She divides her time between teaching, research, and filmmaking. Her research interests include migration and development, political economy, labour migration, masculinities, marriage migration, and caste. Her current research examines the intersections of masculinity, sexuality, securitization of borders and religious fundamentalism on the lives of undocumented South Asian men in Greece. She has published in journals such as Geoforum, Gender & Society, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Modern Asian Studies, Journal of Intercultural Studies, and Men & Masculinities. Her monograph on marriage migration in India, Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage Migration and Dispossession in Neoliberal India (Cornell University Press) was published in 2022.