Poetic desirability: refugee men’s border tactics against white desire

ABSTRACT

This article explores how former refugee men position their desirability as they un-settle in European countries. The masculine performance of desirability is examined through the intersectional lens of racialization, affective bordering, sexualities, and erotic encounters. The paper builds on multi-sited ethnographies, conducted mainly in Greece and Germany between 2012 and 2022, centred around masculinities in border activist movements. During first encounters, the men in this study would position themselves as autonomous desirable beings. However, they quickly experienced dismissal or sexual objectifications. They were sexually desired as exotic but discarded as potential life partners, due to the lack of aspirational labour and uncertain legal status. Thus, their beings became depleted in the technologies of the white desire that exploits marked bodies. In affective response, they negotiated the terms of their recognition. Their tactics included shaming women’s choices, deflating local men’s hegemony, forming reciprocal contracts, and visioning love in the future. This pattern continued through men’s engagements across European borders and was repetitive. Therefore, I argue that they performed a ‘poetic desirability’ to position their masculine beings as equal and in resistance to the bordering violence of white (un)desire.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective bordering
• sexual objectification
• desires
• masculinities
• refugees‌

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The men in this study were offered to choose their own pseudonyms.

2 Someone who builds on networks to facilitate access to resources and/or to settle disputes.

3 All but two identified as cis, performing the gender role related to the sex assigned to them at birth.

4 Sami identifies as straight but embeds some feminine attributes and occasional desire for men.

Additional information

Funding

The author was supported by the GEXcel Program at Karlstad University, Sweden in 2021 and Equality Opportunity Fund in Tübingen University, Germany in 2022. The doctoral fieldwork was done in association with Panteion University in Greece.

Notes on contributors

Árdís K. Ingvars

Árdís K. Ingvars is an adjunct in the faculty of Sociology, Anthropology and Folkloristics at the University of Iceland, and a researcher at the RIKK Institute. Currently she is focusing on the experiences of queer refugees who are deported from the Nordic states to Italy and Greece on the Dublin grounds. She has, furthermore, been associated with the Centre for Gender Studies at Karlstad University and Migration and Diversity at Tübingen University where she followed refugee activists from a previous study in Greece, as they (un)settled in Germany.