‘He must be a man'. Uncovering the gendered vulnerabilities of young Sub-Saharan African men in their journeys to and in Libya

ABSTRACT

Based on personal narratives collected in Sicily with refugees and asylum seekers, this article aims at uncovering the gendered vulnerabilities of young Sub-Saharan African men transiting to and through Libya. Overall, participants’ narratives construct the journey to Libya as a landscape of gendered opportunities to perform competent manhood. This suggests the existence of a common masculine discourse regulating the interactions among travellers and with smugglers in this arena. Here, the illegal dimension of crossing is presented as a site where participants must prove their ‘value’ as ‘men’. This discourse offers legitimation to dangerous smuggling practices and violence enacted by the illegality industry. Within this rigid understanding of masculinity, migrant men’s vulnerability in Libya can be understood as the product of situated masculine and racial hierarchies; between migrants and smugglers/armed groups and among migrants. These gendered vulnerabilities are exacerbated by conditions of fractured mobility, the situation of travelling alone, the proliferation of weapons associated with the post-Gaddafi scenario and gendered/racialised patterns of incorporation in the Libyan illegal economy. Ultimately, due to this continuum of gendered violence, participants are ‘forced’ to embark on the sea crossing towards European shores.

KEYWORDS:

• Vulnerability
• masculinity
• violence
• migration
• Libya
• refugee crisis

Acknowledgements

This article is based on research undertaken for my PhD thesis. I would like to thank my participants who granted me the privilege and responsibility to tell their stories. I am grateful to Dr Coretta Phillips and Dr Hakan Seckinelgin for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. My special thanks go to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The author confirms that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article. Due to the specificity of the study population (refugees and asylum seekers), further access is restricted for privacy and safety concerns.

Notes

1 With the term 'irregular migration' I refer to ‘the phenomenon of people crossing borders outside accepted legal pathways’ (Gerard and Pickering 2013, 339).

2 I am influenced by the critical migration scholarship that sees patterns of irregular migration in the region as produced by the EU border regime (Ansems de Vries and Guild 2019).

3 I borrowed this term from Andersson (2014) as it captures well the complex relationship between ‘mobility, gender and shifting subjectivities’ enacted by transnational movements and experiences (Cresswell and Uteng 2008, 2).

4 Only one participant in my sample arrived in Italy by plane.

5 Those who travelled through Libya before 2011 are acknowledged in the text.

6 As argued by Cresswell and Uteng (2008), narratives of mobility play a central role in the production of gender difference as a social and cultural construct.

7 The term ‘gendered enterprise’ is used by Connell (2005, 187) to illustrate the gendered dimension of colonial empire where men were at the forefront of its bureaucracy and military. Connell’s use, in my understanding, is much more oriented toward grasping the gendered structural features of the ‘empire’, as a system. Although one could argue that the migration complex across the CMR is a gendered enterprise in Connell’s terms, as men occupy all the positions of power, my use of ‘gendered enterprise’ is completely oriented at the individual level to grasp the unfolding of participants’ gender performance in their stories of crossing.

8 Participants often refer to these forms of detention by armed groups as ‘kidnapping’.

9 Participants do not directly use the term ‘vulnerability’ but they all recount a common experience of high exposure and susceptibility to violence due to their positionality in Libya.

10 Participants highlight the role of the Islamic religion in shaping gender relations in Libya.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of a 3-year Doctoral Training Award grant (PhD Scholarship).