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

On 29 July 2022, Alika Ogorchukwu, a disabled Nigerian male refugee selling trinkets, was beaten to death by a native Italian man in Civitanova Marchea in Central Italy. Witnesses to the daytime murder on a busy street filmed his death instead of intervening to prevent it. The Italian police argued that the killing was apparently provoked by the migrant man’s incessant begging. The Association Center Services for Migrants in the Marche Region asserted that Orgorchukwu’s death was precipitated by his calling the man’s girlfriend ‘beautiful’ and touching her arm (Mhaka, 2022).

Fast forward to April 2023 when Britain’s Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, in her discussion of child sex abuse in the country, deliberately singled out British Pakistani men as holding ‘cultural values totally at odds with British values, who see women in a demeaned and illegitimate way and pursue an outdated and frankly heinous approach in terms of the way they behave’ (Adu, 2023). In one fell swoop, by evoking a mythology of common ‘British values,’ she b/ordered all present and future generations of British Pakistani men as cultural deviants and misogynists.¹ Further, Braverman sought to churn up a moral panic among white Britons by claiming that British Pakistani men especially targeted ‘vulnerable white English girls’ (Al Jazeera, 2023). The setting up of a police hotline where whistleblowers could report on such men sought to integrate ordinary Britons in the everyday state-approved surveillance of racialized males (UK Home Office, 2023).

In the above cases, the men’s race, religion, and masculinity appeared intimately conjoined as exclusionary b/ordering apparatuses that denied them equality in terms of citizenship rights or even life itself, as in the instance of Ogarchukwu. The cultural production of European White supremacy and white masculinities as civilizationally purer results in racialized non-native men being re-ordered as deviant and threatening outsiders. Through institutionalized b/ordering tactics and hegemonic discourses about racialized masculinities, ethnicity, religion, and national identity, migrant men encounter micro and macro aggressions that criminalize and dehumanize them in their everyday lives in the EU.² The consequence of such b/ordering oppressions? The forging of unwelcome transitions in masculinities of racialized (Muslim) migrant men and the strengthening of public perceptions about their masculinities as dangerous or culturally non-conforming.

In the last few decades, there has been a burgeoning scholarly interest in borders and border regimes – increasingly so after 9/11, as more state-driven hard borders were constructed coupled with the rhetoric of securitization of borders that employs a much flogged justificatory trope of saving our people from terrorist others (Anderson, 2013). At a structural level, border regimes are commonly understood to be a system of control and management that operates through legislations that institutionalize, regulate, push back, or deter migratory movement. Border regimes also operate through the physicality of militarized borders that exist as walls, detention centres, refugee camps, holding facilities, or by interdictions at sea. Through such militarization, border regimes criminalize certain groups of migrants more than others, and in doing so, they justify the institutionalized carceral approach of restricting and deterring their movement (Ryan, 2019). Border regimes in Europe, as elsewhere in the Global North, are reflective of societal attitudes and policy changes that are often exclusionary toward racialized migrant bodies (Benedicto & Brunet, 2018; Christensen & Jensen, 2014; Loftsdóttir & Jensen, 2012).

Simultaneously, scholarly works now reconceptualize borders, borderwork, and bordering regimes as ‘diffuse, differentiated and networked’ (Rumford, 2008, p. 3). An interdisciplinary lens of inquiry contends that bordering processes are multi-scalar, that borders are also invisible and internalized, and that borderwork, commonly understood as actions undertaken informally in support of state-instituted borders, is enacted by a range of non-state actors, and is experienced differently by different groups of (im)mobile people in social life (Parker & Vaughan-Williams, 2013). The term everyday, or vernacularized, bordering connotes socio-cultural boundaries that are diffuse, horizontal, and multi-scalar. These are enforced by individuals and communities, with differences between the normative ‘us’ and the alien or foreign ‘them’ as bordering frontiers (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, & Cassidy, 2019). Elder (2006) uses the term ‘soft borders’ for boundaries between people that are drawn from ideologies and discourses. Everyday soft borders against racialized others draw on memories embedded in one’s psyche through discourses such as Eurocentrism and Orientalism. The media plays a significant supportive role in continually re-affirming such b/ordering discourses through cultural production (Wigger, 2019). The consequence? Everyday and ordinary social spaces and mundane encounters emerge as sites of informal b/ordering between ordinary people in the form of exclusionary tactics and behaviours, surveillance, or control, to list a few. This transforms ordinary people into foot soldiers or borderguards of institutionalized b/ordering that they internalize and accept as the norm.

Scholars have examined everyday discourses of bordering and b/ordering operative through ideologies (Parmar, 2020; Rumford, 2008; van Houtum & Naerssen, 2002; Yuval-Davis et al., 2019). In relation to migrant men, the primary focus has been on structural or institutionalized bordering regimes (Griffiths, 2015; Saucedo, 2011); the nexus between migration and (im)migrant masculinity (Charsley, 2005; Donaldson, Hibbins, Howson, & Pease, 2009; Gallo & Scrinzi, 2016; Wojnicka & Pustulka, 2017); how the EU b/ordering discourse is internalized by racialized migrant men and exhibited as masculine hate against co-ethnics (Kukreja, 2023) or resisted in order to stage (im)mobile masculinities (Ingvars & Gislason, 2018). A few others have examined how border controls are Islamophobic and gendered to the detriment of racialized male migrants (Kukreja, 2021; Rexhepi, 2018; Scheibelhofer, 2012).

However, there remains a scholarly gap in interrogating the interface of everyday soft bordering with ‘masculinities in transition’ for migrant men whose ‘otherness’ is embodied by their racial and masculine identity in Europe. In Masculinities in Transition (2011), Robinson and Hockey argue that men try to make sense of their masculinities and masculine identity formation as they move or transition between the public and private spheres of employment and domesticity. The term ‘transition’ or the phrase ‘transitioning masculinities’ are employed to describe processes through which men navigate masculinity and relational masculine hierarchies in their everyday lives. These encompass the fluid movement from one masculine hierarchy to another, or the embodying of multiple masculinities in their transition from public to private sphere or vice versa amidst a range of actors.

This Special Issue (SI) uses the frame of ‘transitions’ to focus on how these occur in the masculinities and masculine self-perceptions of racialized migrant men, and on how transitions in masculinities are shaped by everyday b/ordering enacted every day and in the everyday against these men in the EU. In doing so, it furthers scholarly discussion in critical studies in men and masculinities (henceforth CSMM) about the interplay of transitions and b/orders and bordering discourses in determining masculine outcomes for racialized (im)mobile men along the intersecting and layered oppressions of migrant status, class, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion.³ The collection of articles demonstrates how migrant masculine (un)deservingness and partial or full exclusion are justified and normalized. The SI also brings into discussion strategies of masculine resistance that b/ordered men undertake through enactment and embodiment of caring masculinities or through their refusal to subscribe to constructions of their otherness by border regimes.

The concept of masculine borders describes processes through which culturally specific masculinities are used relationally and reconfigured when confronted with everyday bordering. Migrant men’s masculinities, as defined through hegemonic discourses about sanitized White masculinities in the EU, get employed to thicken borders between ordinary people – resulting in bordering masculinities. An arsenal of circulating imaginaries with a colonial geneology about such masculine others (re)enforces hierarchies and exclusions. To clarify, the framing of masculinities as dangerous, deviant, or misogynistic operates as a structural and systemic b/ordering device aimed at racialized (Muslim) migrant men. This is highly productive as it displaces the blame for heightened surveillance onto the men and their ‘masculinities-as-bordering.’ It also lends itself to a relational thickening of masculine borders between groups of b/ordered men, as demonstrated in Kukreja’s article in this SI.

The choice of the EU as a focus of our inquiry is deliberate, as it has witnessed increased movement of racialized migrants to its shores, seeking safety, education, or employment. Simultaneously, member state governments have widely employed crisis narratives to legitimize stringent border regimes. Since 2015, given the so-called refugee crisis, the EU has invested considerably in erecting physical borders, externalizing its fences through restrictive visa and refugee regimes, outsourcing border control to third countries such as Turkey, Libya, and Morocco, and establishing virtual fences through the technologization of security and surveillance of the movement of people (Akkerman, 2018). Far-right discourses, political mobilization of native citizens in favour of restrictionist immigration policies, and vigilante masculinities performed by neo-Nazi groups have also gained increased and worrying traction over large parts of Europe (Bjørgo & Mareš, 2019). Central in the spread of the ideology of racial nationalism and right-wing populism is the spectre, oftentimes, of the racialized, masculine (Muslim) migrant other as a threat to the body politic of EU nations.

The silence on race, the salience of race

The questions ‘[W]hat is Europe’ and ‘Who is a European?’ (De Genova, 2016, p. 77; italics original) force us to reconsider how Europe and Europeanness are produced socio-politically. According to van Houtum and Pijpers (2007), people’s desire for and comfort with border management that differentiates between the good citizen and the undesirable or unwanted other stem from a fear of losing ‘a community’s self-defined identity’ (p. 291).

Critical race scholars have long argued that there is a deliberate erasure of race and racism in the mythmaking of Europe as race free, despite the boundedness of race with Europeanness (Goldberg, 2006).⁴ This ‘profound deception’ about racism as a problem that lies outside of Europe (Lentin, 2008, p. 500) allows Europe to project itself as uniquely modern and anti-racist.⁵ However, ‘race refuses to remain silent’ simply because ‘it isn’t just a word. It is a set of conditions, shifting over time’ (Goldberg, 2006, p. 337). This forces a recognition that such ‘borders of whiteness’ (Bonnett, 1998, p. 1044) are inherently violent against racial others in Europe.

Racism’s alluring classificatory possibilities make it immensely productive for bordering regimes to be instituted, both structurally and at the everyday, systemic level where it is diffused into the vernacular of daily existence. Such boundary making, or racialization of borders, requires narrative plausibility for the public to accept it and for it to gain legitimacy. Conveniently, the colonial crisis, a term Ghassam Hage (2016) uses for the trope of a besieged liberal and feminized Europe needing protection, derived from a persistent colonial archive alive in people’s memory about sexually threatening natives, comes in handy. Thus, gendered colonial archives and colonial geneologies about native (Muslim) men are repackaged with a new twist of cultural alienness, as evidenced by Suella Braverman’s comments about British Pakistani men (Adu, 2023).

Stuart Hall’s (2021) statement ‘in but not of Europe’ (p. 376) captures the dilemma of unbelonging that migrants confront when faced with ‘myths of Europe’ that revolve around whiteness as a foundational difference (pp. 377–380). With Eurocentrism and the racial ideology of whiteness operating as two sides of the same coin in contemporary Europe, ethnicity and culture have emerged as efficient bordering categories that define who is and is not a European (Lentin, 2008). Culture-based discrimination, or cultural boundaries, takes as its starting premise the cultural outsiderness of certain groups of people. It also creates a moral community of people sharing the same moral and cultural values – a discourse of sameness as opposed to difference. Cultural racism, as a new avatar of racism, is easier to accept and adhere to as it uses a more subtle language of exclusion centred around (non)assimilation. Inclusion is promised only on condition that the cultural others shed their cultural primitiveness. Cultural literacy tests instituted in some EU countries are employed to underscore the supposed failure of some racial, ethnic, or religious others to shed their ‘misfit’ cultural values (Boulila & Carri, 2017). This legitimizes differentiated scales used to evaluate the exclusion/inclusion of migrants under the overarching discourse of unassimilable cultural otherness.

That an exclusionary European whiteness, with a subtext of cultural and religious similarity, is a crucial determinant in shaping migrant outcomes and trajectories of (im)mobility was especially laid bare after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in the spring of 2022. Since then, the EU has continually lowered or made borders permeable to welcome Ukrainians, using the arguments that they ‘are culturally European’ and ‘take part in our civilizational space’ (Diallo, 2022). The operationalization of a differential refugee regime was made abundantly clear in Bulgarian Prime Minister Kirl Petkov’s comments that:

These are not the refugees we are used to … These people are Europeans … These people are intelligent, they are educated people … This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists. (Associated Press, 2022)

‘Masculine bordering’ in masculine transitions

Recent interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches to studying migration and masculinities recognize that relations of power and (dis)privilege shape diverse migrant masculine experiences. Further, complex and fluid identities such as those based on race, class, sexuality, nationality, or ethnicity are embodied by migrant men in different socio-spatial locations (del Aguila, 2013; Farahani, 2013). In turn, these embodied identities shape masculine experience, anxieties, and performances, as well as masculine outcomes in migration governance, the labour market, and social relations (Aboim, 2023; Choi & Peng, 2016; Gallo & Scrinzi, 2016; Kukreja, 2023).

As is well understood, masculine identities and ranking within masculine hierarchies are contextual, relational, and tied to unequal relations of power. Normative hegemonic masculine ideals operative in any given society are dependent on its legitimizing institutional ideologies. These are derived from discourses and imaginaries that seek to ‘fix’ one form of masculinity as hegemonic and socially prized, and to which all men should aspire. However, masculinity as defined by relations of power appears to lack space for men to express the masculine vulnerability embodied in their emotional lives (see Hanlon, 2012, for more). CSMM scholars have demonstrated that migration, as a gendering process, has different outcomes for men and women, due to differential gendered norms and discourses about gender roles, gendered identity, and expectations. One edited volume entitled Migrant Men: Critical Studies of Masculinities and the Migration Experience (Donaldson et al., 2009) set the tone for adopting an intersectional approach to study migrant men and ‘migratory masculinities’ and the role that citizenship status, immigration process, religious identity, ethnicity, and transnational relations play in shaping migrant men’s masculinities, masculine expectations, and self-perceptions about their own masculinities. Rethinking Transnational Men: Beyond, Between and Within Nations (Hearn, Blagojević, & Harrison, 2013) examined how masculine identity formation in transnational spaces has been shaped by unequal power relations between the Global South and Global North.

Themed special issues such as those on ‘migrant men and masculinities’ (Charsley & Wray, 2015) and ‘men and migration’ (Wojnicka & Pustulka, 2017, 2019) have similarly looked at the role of relations of power in shaping masculine outcomes for migrant men in host societies and transnationally in home countries. Also valuable is one study with a geographic focus on ordinary Arab men in the Middle East that provides insights on how conflicts and displacement affect masculinities and the men’s efforts to be ‘good men’ and be ‘good at being men’ (Inhorn & Isidoros, 2018, p. 2). Finally, Migratory Men: Place, Transnationalism and Masculinities (Stahl & Zhao, 2023) examines transnational masculine identity formation and outcomes as shaped by postcolonialism and contemporary gendered globalization.

Scholarly works have also interrogated the role and impact of bordering regimes on shaping masculinities and masculine outcomes for migrant men (De Hart, 2017; Ingvars, 2019; Kukreja, 2019, 2023; Sanò & Della Puppa, 2021) and how asylum policy and law discriminates against and emasculates male asylum seekers (Griffiths, 2015). Of value to our discussion about how masculine transitions are crafted is the recognition that ideologies and discourses, as bordering regimes, have the power to re-construct migrant masculinities ‘politically, imaginatively, culturally, and ethnically’ (Khosravi, 2009, p. 602).

The literature on migrant masculinities reveals migration as a pathway to fashioning models of masculinity perhaps not possible in the home country, whether for earning a better livelihood or articulating sexuality and desire. With mobility, however, transitions in masculinities are wrought at multiple, intersecting levels. This reconfiguration occurs as the migrant men struggle to reconcile their masculinity with locally operative masculine norms and gender regimes.

Within Europe, another more efficient bordering is built around the trope of savage masculine others (De Hart, 2017; Scheibelhofer, 2012). European White heterosexual masculinity asserts its hegemonic masculine ranking by framing all other masculinities as backward, dangerous, or effeminate (Dyer, 1997). The state, through institutionalized discourse about migrant men as terrorists and security risks, facilitates a hegemonic notion of native White masculinity as civilized and liberal (Norocel, Saresma, Lähdesmäki, & Ruotsalainen, 2020; Prattes, 2022).

Notions of caring masculinity are also not imagined for racialized men or those from the Global South. Caring masculinity is defined as an ethics of care, where men integrate positive emotion and emotional labour, thus posing a counternarrative to norms of hegemonic masculinity that define masculine success through power, wealth, physical prowess, and societal status (Elliott, 2016). That said, a monolithic essentialized trope of toxic or dangerous masculinity is normatively employed against racialized migrant men – one where their masculine identity is essentialized as marked by patriarchal oppression, misogyny, deviancy, and crime. Caring masculinity is framed as uniquely European, investing White elite men and White masculinity with caringness and the ability to demonstrate emotional labour and affective ties (Hubinette, 2019). When used discursively through the frame of White masculinity, caring masculinities can be used as a racializing tool (Prattes, 2022, p. 722), as occurs in the instance of racialized migrant (Muslim) men in Europe.

The framing of migrant masculinities as dangerous and inimical to European values garners support among the natives, thus paving the way for enacting restrictive migration governance. The transition to marginal or dangerous masculine other status causes the men to try ‘even harder to live and act like “real men”’ (Donaldson & Howson, 2009, p. 7), as masculine (dis)privilege is negotiated across intersecting and layered registers of migrant status, race, class, ethnicity, religious identity, education, and/or age, to list a few. These determine how migrant masculinities are framed in relation to existing models in host societies and how these force a transformation in the men’s self-perception – from responsible, caring men to dangerous others who need containment. The marginalization of non-native men also occurs through racialized class borders (Hage, 2016, pp. 43–44).

Masculinized Islamophobia: b/ordering Muslim migrant men

Racialization in Europe is closely associated with religious affiliation, primarily that of Islam and Muslims (Lentin, 2008, p. 498). Grosfoguel (2012) argues that apart from a global racial/ethnic hierarchy, there exists a global religious hierarchy in which the subalternization of Islam is attributable to Christianity (pp. 10–11). He links this religious hierarchization to the fertile relationship between colonialism and evangelizing Christianity, as both sought new territories and people to plunder or convert. Islamophobia can arguably be considered cultural racism as it essentializes Muslim cultures and frames its concept of cultural inferiority through the perceived ‘inferior habits, beliefs, behaviours, or values of a group of people’ (Grosfoguel, 2012, p. 13).

Negative media portrayals of Muslims as threats to the West, especially after 9/11, have fanned public anxiety over the immigration of Muslim (male) migrants and played a central role in intensifying Islamophobic discourse in contemporary Europe (Abdelkader, 2017). Islamophobic discourse, using the pivot of difference, conveniently erases accountability from the EU’s exclusionary ethnonationalist project for its discriminatory practices and prejudice. Instead, it holds Muslims responsible for their own b/ordering – their Muslimness, as a biological destiny, it is argued, predetermines their cultural ungovernability and non-assimilability (Bunzl, 2005, p. 502; Rytter, 2023).

Islamophobia is also masculinized. It is best described by the term masculinized Islamophobia to encapsulate a concept in which all Muslim men are pathologized as terrorists. Masculinized Islamophobia consists of a set of institutionalized and vernacular bordering practices that draw strength from an enduring legacy of colonialist and Orientalist imaginaries of barbaric and rapacious native men. This leads to a further thickening of the masculinized b/ordering that confronts migrant, racialized Muslim men in their everyday life. While this shapes unwelcome transitions in their masculinities and masculine self-perceptions, it also problematically idealizes European White masculinity as culturally superior. It also sanitizes native (White) men of any anti-feminist stance, misogyny, or gendered sexual violence. The British Home Secretary’s oversight of a British Home Office report attributing the majority of sexual abuse crimes to White men is a case in point (Cockbain & Tufail, 2020). A similar narrative of ‘rapefugee’ about racialized migrant single Muslim men, following the Cologne New Year’s Eve incident, excluded any discussion of sexual violence and rape by White European men (De Hart, 2017, pp. 29–30). Such narratives also simplistically cast White men, through a patriarchal lens, as masculine protectors of the nation and its women against ‘racialized invader[s]’ (Boulila & Carri, 2017, p. 288; De Hart, 2017). The violence of heteropatriarchal male privilege becomes easier to manifest outwards, onto ‘foreign’ men conveniently positioned as existential gendered cultural threats.

Nagel (2002) argues that ethnic boundaries also constitute sexual boundaries wherein ‘each defines and depends on the other for its meaning and power’ (p. 10). The breaching of ethnosexual frontiers through ‘sexual links with ethnic others’ (Nagel, 2002, p. 113) unleashes a ‘circuit of paranoia’ (Khosravi, 2009, p. 599) with an Islamophobic overtone. As Khosravi (2011) notes, ‘the gender and racial aspects of the border intersect, making Muslim men the main targets of the current border regime’ (p. 77). Here, the colonial archive of White men’s rescues of brown and Black women from native men’s patriarchal misogyny (Mani, 1987), and their protection of European White women from sexualized threats by Black and brown Muslim men comes in handy. The descriptor ‘Muslim masculinities’ for all Muslim men is invested with negative connotations – mapping these as an incapacity for intimacy or emotional labour, as patriarchal oppression, and as inherently sexually deviant and dangerous others. Arguably, these perceived hypersexualized Muslim (migrant) men and their unassimilable cultural otherness would require Fortress Europe – its necessity being positioned as a precondition for preserving the EU’s liberal values.

Anti-Muslim bias is also evidenced structurally with Muslim asylum seekers experiencing higher rates of rejection in EU countries as compared to Christian applicants (Emeriau, 2022). A study on public attitudes on migration in Europe has also revealed greater prejudice toward Muslim migrants as compared to migrants in general, with 24% of Europeans favouring a limit to Muslim immigration (Gusciute, Peter, & Richard, 2021, p. 156).

The institutionalization of Islamophobia is further fuelled by the rise of neo-Nazi and populist ultra-right politicians and political groups that seize on public anxiety about Muslims and Islam as antithetical to the essence and understanding of Europe and Europeanness. Policies exhibiting anti-Muslim bigotry and an institutionalized anti-Muslim bias have allowed the emergence of hate groups such as Stop Islamization of Denmark, Golden Dawn (Greece), and PEGIDA.⁶ Such groups disseminate a mythology of European Islamization and carry out acts of Islamophobic violence, ranging from burning the Koran, Islam’s holy book, to committing actual violence against Muslims (Mulhall & Khan-Ruf, 2021). That this reaps rich political dividends is evident from the big electoral win of the Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia), the far-right party led by Giorgia Meloni in Italy in September 2022, with its rallying call of ‘no to the violence of Islam’ (Balmer, 2022).

As an ideological bordering device that operates in the form of cultural racism, masculinized Islamophobia has real-life ramifications for all migrant Muslim men. Their Muslimness, reductively framed through the lens of ‘culture’ and unassimilability, reinforces that they are incapable of being egalitarian, displaying positive emotionality, or performing emotional labour associated with caring masculinity (Boulila & Carri, 2017; Britton, 2019; De Hart, 2017). As several of this SI’s articles discuss, this forces multiple unwelcome transitions in the men’s everyday lives and their own perceptions of their masculine selves.

Focus of the special issue

This SI takes the conversation on b/ordering regimes, masculine transitions, masculinized Islamophobia, and migrant masculinities further by interrogating the impact of everyday and structural (b)ordering against racialized migrant men and migrant masculinities in the routine process of daily life. It argues that symbolic and social boundaries and border regimes play a central role in shaping (un)welcome transitions in migrant masculinities. These borders operate in everyday encounters between migrant men and local communities as much as between groups of migrant men themselves, whether in the realm of livelihood strategies, romantic desires, assertions about sexuality and sexual identity, homosocial interactions, or friendships.

Extending the concept of bordering regimes to encompass symbolic boundaries that are constituted culturally and reproduced through the binaries of ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ the SI inquires into how exclusionary discourses and ideologies such as racism, Islamophobia, and ethnocentrism intersect and interact with the masculinities and masculine aspirations of migrant men whose ‘otherness’ is embodied by their racial, religious, ethnic, and/or gendered identity. It examines the micro-level impact of ‘everyday constructions of borders through ideology, cultural mediation, discourses, political institutions, attitudes and everyday forms of transnationalism’ (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, & Cassidy, 2018, p. 229) and their role in contouring transitions in racialized migrant masculinities.

The SI argues that our conceptual understanding about masculine transitions and transitioning masculinities needs to acknowledge how institutional and everyday borders craft masculine outcomes for migrant men. At the basic level, transitioning to a new geographic space in the EU, where ‘belonging’ is predicated on exclusionary identity markers and (non)citizen status, in itself constitutes a transition from the home to host country’s masculine hierarchy. In this context, the men’s masculine ranking and masculine transitions are recalibrated due to exclusionary discourses of Eurocentrism, racism, and Islamophobia that facilitate the (re)production of unequal social relations of power and inequality.

This SI’s seven articles engage conceptually and theoretically with questions such as: How do everyday borders regulate and/or (re)shape masculinities in ‘transition?’ How do migrant men (re)negotiate their position in migrant masculine hierarchies and make sense of their fluid masculinities in transition? How do culturally specific masculinities of origin and host countries and masculine norms operate as borders in defining the livelihood strategies, decisions about onward migration, and/or familial responsibilities of mobile ‘transitioning’ men? What forms do symbolic borders morph into when migrant men enter into or aspire to romantic liaisons or relationships with co-ethnic/co-nationals or citizens of host countries? What form does migrant masculine subjectivity have to take to resist, contest, or refuse b/ordering, either by performing caring masculinities or refusing to subscribe to Eurocentric norms of masculinity?

The seven fine-grained articles draw on a rich corpus of empirical data spanning diverse EU countries to focus on racialized men, as regularized citizens, migrant workers, refugees, asylum seekers, or ‘illegal’ migrants. The SI brings main areas of academic thinking such as critical studies in men and masculinities, critical border studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, family studies, political economy, critical race theory, and migration studies into dialogue with each other. This interdisciplinary process allows us to embrace new conceptual and theoretical tools for identifying and examining where, how, and when borders are created, heightened, or dismantled for racialized men, and how these lend themselves to (re)shaping transitions in the men’s masculinities.

Migration to Europe and employment in immigrant-niche jobs that permit men to immediately send remittances back home make them transition from failed to respectable adult masculinity and thus to a respectable masculine status transnationally (Kukreja, 2021; della Puppa, in this SI). Similarly, a deliberate move to Europe allows some men an opportunity to shake off masculine norms and expectations they grew up with and instead embrace a masculinity they feel more comfortable with (see articles by Carnassale, Cerchiaro, and Henriksson et al., in this SI). On another and deeper level, transitions in masculinity occur as migrant men transition from being a son to a father, from a lover to a partner or husband, from a friend to a lover, or to someone who can express their non-heteronormative sexuality without fear (see articles by Ingvars, Carnassale, and Henrickson et al., in this SI). Yet, undergirding all these shifts in the masculine registers of migrant men is the stable bordering category of race.

The SI argues that racialized migrant men are forced to inhabit lifeworlds defined by hostile and racialized bordering that is rendered mundane and banal, all while navigating multiple challenges to their masculinity and masculine self-conception as they attempt to live as ordinary men. Masculine bordering is experienced intimately through social, cultural, and legal practices that enforce unequal and oppressive hierarchies and relations of power. These borders also extend through technology by creating barriers to resources and services for asylum seekers and migrants (see Damianos, in this SI).

As the articles demonstrate, masculinized bordering and masculinized Islamophobia, operating on a binarism of migrant masculinity as culturally alien, deviant, dangerous, exotic, hypersexualized, or emasculated, permeates into the vernacular. Embedded in the collective EU psyche, these filter into daily life through unconscious horizontal fences that pivot along the axes of masculinity and ‘difference.’ With White racial privilege remaining unmarked and unnamed (Frankenberg, 1993), the racial violence unleashed on non-White non-Europeans gets justified on the grounds of the migrant’s unassimilable cultural otherness and inherent deviancy.

The collection brings to the fore processes through which bordering regimes influence migrant men’s masculine encounters with co-ethnics, co-nationals, lovers (or would-be lovers), family members, employers, and co-workers to shape transitions in masculinities. It forces us to attend to the persistence of borders and b/ordering that operate in different guises to (re)shape the mobilities, encounters, mediations, and refusals of racialized migrant men. While acknowledging that everyday bordering victimizes male migrants through the banality of everyday measures of exclusion and surveillance, the SI also showcases the men’s subjectivities in undertaking pragmatic refusals and resistances against their b/ordering in order to make peace with their manhood and their masculine responsibilities. The SI foregrounds diverse examples of caring masculinities and emotional labour performed by migrant men, thus repudiating the masculinized Islamophobia and White normative masculinity that b/order them as dangerous and uncaring. Such agential acts neutralize the power of racialized and masculinized bordering regimes that dehumanize.

The first article, ‘“I want to own myself:” Digital bordering, migrant masculinities, and the politics of refusal,’ by Stephen Damianos, is a novel theorization on refusal enacted by racialized male asylum applicants against digital bordering undertaken by the Greek Asylum Service. Its use of Skype to pre-register asylum claims (a now discontinued practice), the article argues, is experienced as digitized racism and exclusion as the men wait, unsuccessfully, for months or years for a call. Through interviews with asylum-seeking men in Athens, Damianos shows how this digitized borderscape forces a transition to how the men conceptualize their masculinity and masculine identity as marked by non-desirability and racial othering. The men’s refusal, as an act of subjectivity, enacted by deleting the Skype app from their mobile phones, allows them to reconstitute new masculine futures for themselves that they feel they can control. This deliberate un-bordering that allows for ‘masculine self-recognition,’ Damianos argues, is wrought with ambivalence due to their deliberate embrace of illegality.

Ardis Ingvar’s ‘Poetic desirability: Refugee men’s border tactics against white desire’ is derived from her decade-long engaged ethnographic research with racialized male refugees in Greece, Germany, and France. It provides insights on their masculine resistances against ‘white desire’ that sexually exoticizes their bodies for white consumption. White desire and the logic of racial capitalism that confines the men to low-paying immigrant-niche jobs result in their ‘undesirable masculinity’ as potential long-term partners. Ingvar showcases how the men affectively rescript themselves as ‘autonomous sexual beings’ by engaging in a ‘poetics of desirability.’ This poetics, imbued with agency yet also drawing on immense emotional borderwork, gives them space to negotiate their sexuality and desire on their own terms. In doing so, they are able to dissipate the ‘poetics of melancholia’ that hounds them as racialized sexual objects.

Reena Kukreja’s article ‘Masculine borders as alienation of racialized, undocumented South Asian migrant workers in Greece’ examines how memories of bordering from home countries, derived from colonial and postcolonial encounters between the three South Asian countries of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, shape the men’s masculine encounters in Greece. This mobile bordering, in conjunction with Islamophobia, is used productively by migrant labour regimes to create a new form of Marxian alienation of workers. Islamophobia pits Pakistani men as terrorists, while the Indians, because of their Sikh religion, get valorized as model workers – resulting in (un)welcome transitions in the men’s migrant masculinities. Kukreja, using a political economy lens, argues that the thickening of masculine borders forces docility among disparate groups of labouring men and disunites them as they jockey for the same pool of agricultural jobs, allowing the capitalist class to efficiently accumulate surplus from them.

‘From son to father: Memory, fatherhood and migration in the life stories of Muslim men married outside their religious group in Belgium and Italy’ by Francesco Cerchiaro adds a new dimension to understanding how bordering, as an everyday practice, operates within family life to re-shape migrant fathering masculinity. The men’s symbolic border crossing by marrying local Christian women facilitates more painful everyday bordering within the enactment and experience of fatherhood. This understudied aspect of migrant Muslim masculinity and parenting of bi-racial children reveals the tangled masculine transitions wrought on the men through Islamophobic and racist bordering, as they ‘cope with their gendered and generational transitions as sons, fathers, and husbands.’ The article poignantly reveals that the men’s memories of their fathers and culturally specific fathering must be negotiated and reconciled with dominant norms of fathering masculinities. This emotional borderwork forces a dissonance in how they understand and manage their masculinity and fatherhood.

Dany Carnassale’s ‘Undoing the boundaries of heteronormative masculinity: Transnational experiences of Senegalese MSM living in Italy’ takes up another dimension of bordering regimes that pivots on the intersections of non-heteronormative sexuality, masculinity, race, and religious identity. The article focuses on Black, Muslim migrant Senegalese men who have sex with other men (MSM) who relocate to Italy primarily through asylum claims about their threatened sexuality. It reveals demands placed by humanitarian actors on racialized Muslim male asylum seekers to perform denunciatory scripts about Islam and their societies to gain asylum status. Such asylum scripts of sexual victimhood reinforce problematic tropes of Muslim others as homophobic – in this sense, literal borders are loosened to grant asylum only by thickening Islamophobic tropes. However, Carnassale demonstrates that the men build and nourish solidarities and transnational emotional ties creatively by rejecting the dichotomy of a sexually progressive Italy versus a backward homophobic Muslim Senegal.

‘Waiting or dating? Migrant bachelors in the European borderscapes,’ by Andreas Henriksson, Ulf Mellstrom, Andrea Priori, and Katarzyna Wojnicka, analyses how singlehood is experienced by Bangladeshi and Syrian men in Italy and Sweden through the lens of everyday bordering enacted by host societies and men’s communities. The article brings forth a much-needed discussion on masculine transitions linked to class and migrant status. The internalization of racialized borderscapes by the Bangladeshi and Syrian men to define European/White masculinity as being opposed to non-White masculinity and singlehood sets the tone for experiencing their masculine singlehood as filled with experimentation and openness or as a morally fit waiting period until they transition to an adult, mature masculinity defined by marriage and fatherhood. The authors also reveal another type of invisible cultural bordering operationalized by the men’s families, kin networks, and compatriots as a form of ‘social control’ to keep them ‘within the boundaries of a “proper way” of being a man and single.’

The final article, ‘Chasing the dream: Masculinity and male honour of Italian-Bangladeshi men relocating to London,’ by Francesco della Puppa, examines the social bordering that operates between co-ethnics as a form of social and symbolic capital as migrant men cross political and symbolic borders. Bangladeshi-Italian men’s migration to Britain along with their families is propelled by intergenerational racist bordering experienced in the form of limited upward life opportunities in Italy. Here, the everyday bordering experienced by the men is social – both upward and downward – as they cross multiple political borders, from Bangladesh to Italy and then on to Britain. The article details how the relocation to London allows for a positive transition in the men’s masculinities, as the ‘male honour’ associated with this migratory success accords them higher symbolic capital. Yet, as della Puppa shows, their precarious job status due to racism in the workplace demotes them socially in the ethnic masculine hierarchy, thus leading them to experience downward social mobility.

With this Special Issue, we hope to encourage future scholars to undertake interdisciplinary engagement about transitions in racialized migrant men’s masculinities caused by area-specific everyday bordering and exclusionary regimes in other parts of the world. It would allow for more nuanced knowledge to prevent the flattening of racialized masculine identities into dangerous others, creating ground for critical scholarly activist engagement against discourses and regimes of hate.

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).

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.

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.