Masculinities within the

immigration context
  Refugees’ manhood perpetuated by the European Refugee Crisis.
 Migration is a profoundly gendered procedure: construction of
masculinities in different diasporic spaces.
Today’ Agenda  Sexual experiences and transition to adulthood among young
Moroccan men in Europe.
  Explores the conflicting accounts of refugee manhood
perpetuated by the European ‘refugee crisis’.
 Semi-structured interviews with over 40 unaccompanied young
men between the ages of 16 and 25 about their wellbeing and
Agent, Victim, Soldier, welfare experiences in Europe.
Son: Intersecting
 Interview participants were selected through a mix of referrals
Masculinities in the from gatekeepers and support centres and through snow-ball
European ‘Refugee sampling.
Crisis’
 The sample is in no way representative and the findings are not
Allsopp, J. (2017) generalisable
 Three norms of refugeehood and masculinity that appear most
prominently in my analysis of these gendered accounts of the
‘refugee crisis’.
  Masculinity (Connell 1987) is associated with traits such as
violence, aggression and dominance.
 Some feminist scholars have long argued that the ideology of
militarism is intrinsically linked to masculinity and war.
 Other researchers contends that ‘it is not that “masculinity”
generates war, but rather that the process of militarization both
Militarized draws on and exaggerates the bipolarization of gender identities
in extremis’.
Masculinities  A common trope of centre-right European media has been to
portray migrant and refugee men through this hegemonic lens,
associating them by default with the violence they have fled
(Rettberg and Gajjala 2015).


 The crumbling of the stereotyping of refugee man as a potential
threat and the construction of a parallel identity of refugee man
an individual in need of help.
 Men’s accounts frequently betray a vulnerability that challenges
not just subjective ideas of manhood and strength, but also
reveals the fallibility of the militarized nation state system in
which it has been argued that masculinity finds its most violent
manifestation (Mama 1998; Nagel 1998).
 The border is where refugees often experience a reification of
militarized masculine identities and also find themselves at their
most vulnerable.
 At the frontier, nationalism and militarized masculinities blur,
making it a site of contested identities and power.
 Where migrant and refugee men seek to shed this militarized
mantel of masculinity and expose their vulnerability they are
often feminized; cast as morally deviant; or depicted as ‘other’
to the dominant militarized model of a man in a time of war.
  The ‘refugee crisis’ is one of the first times we have seen this
pacifistic image of man as protector and nurturer as an actor in
flight.
The father  US Presidential candidate Donald Trump in relation to the ‘refugee
figure and crisis’:
‘…—three weeks ago I’m sitting and I’m saying, “isn’t that a shame?”
provider And then I said to myself, “Wow. They’re all men.” You look at it. There
are so few women and there are so few children. And not only are they
men, they’re young men. And they’re strong as can be—they’re tough
looking cookies. I say, what’s going on here?” (Rhodan 2015).

  in 2015, 66.26% of adult migrants registered through Italy and
Greece were male.
The threat of  All unmarried young male migrants as a specific ‘type’ of threat.
the strong  Helms (2015) reports, for example, that among volunteers from
young male Austria who mobilized in support of refugees to take them from
Hungary, some refused to take single men, preferring to return
empty because there were no more families to transport.
  While both men and women undergo displacement, and
experience its consequences differently, class, ethnicity, age and
education, among other factors, have significant effects on how
Diasporic each goes through the immigration process.

Masculinities  The receiving countries also process them differently and slot
them into pre-determined racially gendered boxes. Therefore,
Farahani, F. (2012) men and women in the same family will experience their
displacement and its consequences in different ways.

  The processes involved in the constructions of masculinity among
young Moroccan migrants in Europe, specifically in France and
Heteromasculinities: Italy.
 A group of young Moroccan men between 20 and 30 years old,
Sexual experiences who arrived in Europe during their adolescence—between
fourteen and nineteen to twenty years old—and who left their
and transition to native land mainly (but not exclusively) to study.
adulthood among  Every young man interviewed defined himself as “Muslim” but not
everyone defined himself as “practicing Muslim.”
young Moroccan
 The young people interviewed come mainly from urban centers in
men in Europe. Morocco rather than from rural areas of this country.
Fidolini, V. (2020) 
  The interviewees’ constructions of hegemonic models of
masculinity often changed according to the actors involved in
the interactions described by the interviewees themselves.
Construction of  A clear distinction between their lives in Europe on the one hand
masculinities and their lives in Morocco on the other hand. This apparently
simplistic distinction allows the young men to define and
among young differentiate the scenarios of their sexual experiences by
drawing a hegemonic “premarital model” of masculinity.
Moroccan  A “cultural factor” which justifies, in his view, different sexual
behavior with different women.
  The young interviewees make a clear division between a
biographical phase of experiences dedicated to “young
experiences” and governed by “reversible choices” and another
more mature phase during which “adult” responsibilities must
Construction be taken.
of  Future expectations are placed on religiously sanctified marriage,
the only framework capable of converting illicit sexuality
masculinities ‘haram’ into licit conduct ‘halal’.
among young  Construction a “biologized masculinity”: in which the man’s profile
was reduced to the action of a mandatory (hetero)sexual role.
Moroccan  A man’s instinctive and irrepressible heterosexual desire as a
“natural” feature of their masculinity.

  These masculinities are a the result of “socially constructed
Construction relationships which are produced and reproduced through people’s
of actions”.
 The heteronormativity expressed among these Moroccan men is
masculinities produced, reproduced, and resignified by different actors in
among young multiple ways according social scenarios and relationships
(Beasley, Brook, and Holmes 2012).
Moroccan