Multiple masculinities of Polish migrant men

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the negotiation and re-shaping of multiple mobile masculinities among recent Polish intra-European migrants. It explores the impact of family and cross border relationships with other family members and friends on men’s identities and the enactment of masculinities. Drawing on the data collected for five thematically linked qualitative research studies, we consider voices of men, as well as juxtapose them with the reflections shared by their partners. One of the questions leading the analysis is whether the hegemonic masculinity still holds for the Polish men abroad. While we suggest that it dominates the men’s narratives, we seek to highlight its limitations and the emergence of stories pointing to divergent and plural masculinities. We explore how the alternative non-worker roles of migrant men as husbands, fathers, sons and friends figure into the picture.

KEYWORDS:

• Masculinities
• Polish migration
• migrant men

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Justyna Bell completed a PhD in Sociology from Queen’s University Belfast, UK. After defending her doctoral thesis, Bell worked as a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, Jagiellonian University, Poland and Oxford University, UK, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Wroclaw, Poland and Warsaw University, Poland. She also took a post-doctoral research position at the Centre of Excellence for Public Health, Queen’s University Belfast. She is currently a guest researcher at Norwegian Social Research.

Paula Pustułka earned a PhD in Sociology from Bangor University in Wales. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. Paula has extensively published on the nexus of gender and migration, focusing particularly on Polish migrant motherhood.

Notes

1. For each quotation, we provide an anonymized name of the respondent, followed by their age, the marker of which study they were interviewed for (see Table 1), and their country of emigration.

2. Paula Pustulka's PhD research was funded by the 125th Anniversary Research Scholarship at Bangor University (2010–2013) and supervised by H. Davis. Its resulting thesis Polish mothers on the move – gendering parenting experiences of Poles raising children in Germany and the UK was defended in 2014. Supplementary funding was garnered through the DAAD and PON UJ London grants.

3. ‘Polish Schooling in Britain: tradition and modernity’ project was completed in 2012 by the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in cooperation with Jagiellonian University.

4. Justyna Bell's PhD research was funded by the Department of Education and Learning, Queen's University Belfast (2008–2012) and supervised by R. Miller. Its resulting thesis Between continuity and change- Narratives of Polish migrants in Belfast was defended in 2012.

5. The research leading to these results has received funding from the Polish-Norwegian Research Programme operated by the National Centre for Research and Development under the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2009–2014 in the frame of Project Contract No. Pol-Nor/197905/4/2013. Findings used here stem from Work Package 2 Migrant families in Norway – Structure of power relations and negotiating values and norms in transnational families study. Pustułka was a researcher on this project.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bangor University (125th Research Anniversary Scholarship); Department of Education and Learning, Northern Ireland; German Academic Exchange Service London; Norway Grants [grant number Pol-Nor/197905/4/2013].