White migrant masculinities in Thailand and the paradoxes of Western privilege

This study examines the counter-paradigmatic migration of Westerners into Thailand, focusing on men in transnational intimate relationships in the northeastern region. We explore how the particular spaces in which they settled affected these migrants' capacities to perform what they saw as hegemonic masculinities over time. We find that they initially experienced an increase in status that they were able to convert into assets in romantic relationships, permitting them to position themselves as ‘providers’ and ‘real white men,’ drawing on masculine ideals from their home countries as well as a diffuse neocolonial imaginary. In the long run, however, these identity constructions were subject to internal contradictions and attrition. They were also place-bound, creating both financial and social obstacles to a return home, particularly for those without ties to transnational capital. The ways these patterns differ from those in existing scholarship underline how both the particular spaces of migrant settlement and temporal dimensions are critical for the analysis of migrant masculinities.     

‘It can be dangerous for the uterus’: hegemonic masculinity and cooperative recycling in São Paulo,Brazil

This study examines performative social relations, specifically the role of hegemonic masculinity in shaping gendered space. First, by drawing on personal experiences and qualitative data from my research in São Paulo, Brazil, I examine the most salient aspects of hegemonic masculinity in the lives of female recyclers. Second, I suggest that masculine domination is not simply something established by men which aims to oppress women, but hegemonic masculinities can be (re)produced by women. I affirm this notion by exploring the ways in which hegemonic masculinity and common perceptions of social roles, abilities, and inabilities are discursively (re)produced by female recyclers. In particular, I argue that exploring the subordinate position of women is a productive means to gain a deeper understanding of hegemonic masculinity, while also, the concept of hegemonic masculinity is an effective tool for understanding the subordinate role of women. My experiences with the recyclers provide a context through which the fluid, complex, and dynamic nature of hegemonic masculinity can be further revealed.     

Traumatic masculinities: the gendered geographies of Georgian IDPs from Abkhazia

Over 200,000 people became internally displaced after several violent conflicts in the early 1990s in Georgia. For many internally displaced persons (IDPs), gender relations have been transformed significantly. This translates to many women taking on the role of breadwinner for their family, which often is accompanied by the process of demasculinization for men. In this article, we examine the construction of masculinities and analyze the gendered processes of displacement and living in post-displacement for Georgian IDPs from Abkhazia. We identify the formation of ‘traumatic masculinities’ as a result of the threats to, though not usurpation of, hegemonic masculinities. Drawing on interviews, we highlight how IDPs conceptualize gender norms and masculinities in Georgia. Despite the disruptions that displacement has brought about, with the subsequent challenges to IDPs' ideal masculine roles, the discourses of hegemonic masculinities still predominate amongst IDPs. We further illustrate this point by identifying two separate gendered discourses of legitimization that attempt to reconcile hegemonic masculinities with the current contexts and circumstances that IDPs face. These new traumatic masculinities do coexist with hegemonic masculinities, although the latter are reformed and redefined as a result of the new contexts and new places within which they are performed.     

Gendering pastoral power: masculinity,affective labour and competitive bonds of solidarity among Filipino migrant men in Saudi Arabia

This article draws on Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to understand Filipino men’s care work and the making of migrant masculinities in Saudi Arabia. Feminist scholars have indicated the gendered nature of pastoral power and emphasized what Young refers to as the ‘logic of masculinist protection’ that characterizes the contemporary security state. However, the notion of pastoral power invites further consideration of the taken for granted cultural assumptions about the way that hegemonic masculinity and forms of homosociality are characterized mainly by aggression, competition and dominance. Men’s talk about and practical involvement in assisting fellow migrants in diasporic settings foregrounds the way that an ethics of care runs up against and is entangled with the competitive bonds of masculine solidarities. While markers of material success are privileged in measuring migrant men’s accomplishments in country of origin, practices of care become central to men’s achievement of symbolic power and social legitimacy especially among their peers in the diaspora. That spatialization is also linked to temporally shifting models of masculinity and normative expectations about men over the life course.     

Bodies,beaches and bars: negotiating heterosexual masculinity in southern Thailand's tourism industry

This article explores the gender politics of heterosexual masculinity by detailing the practices of masculinity and heterosexuality among a group of Thai men working in the tourism industry in Thailand's south. The research is based on ethnographic data obtained during a number of field visits between October 2000 and January 2007 to Pha-ngan Island in southern Thailand. It is positioned within the geography literature on masculinities and heterosexuality, extending the current literature on cross-cultural negotiations of masculinity by exploring negotiations of heterosexual masculinity in a context where differing cultural notions of hegemonic masculinity come into dialogue. Specifically, I detail the articulation of heterosexual masculinity by Thai bar workers through their encounters with three key ‘Others’: Thai transgendered people; tourist women; and tourist men. These encounters provide a context through which the complexity and instability of both hegemonic and subordinated masculinity can be explored. In particular, I argue that the delineation of these masculinities is both contextually and culturally specific. The encounters also provide an opportunity to investigate the importance of spatiality to the performance of heterosexual identities.     

“It will kill your dreams,your goals,your everything”—Humanitarian migrants,governance through containment and the Italian accommodation system

While asylum seekers await the outcome of their claims to protection in Italy, they are dispersed to accommodation centers administered by subcontracted non-governmental agencies where they receive reception and integration services. In addition, in line with guidelines from the regional government, social operators regulate migrant behavior and mobility through the use of the use of behavioral regulation, deployed temporalities, and various forms of surveillance. Using the lens of migration governmentality and specifically, containment (Tazzioli and Garelli, 2018), this research explores the impact of these forms of governance on migrant settlement outcomes. I do so through a case study of accommodation centers and migrant experiences within accommodation centers in Turin (Italy) conducted in the winter of 2018 and 2019. Findings suggest that migrants are infantilized through the process, one which provides few opportunities to exert autonomy over self-direction and preferred settlement outcomes. Contained within reception centers without opportunities for external engagement, migrants are prevented from developing social ties or place attachment more generally. Migrants reject their subordinated status, and, exhibit a familiar form of autonomy in the post-reception period—migration, including circular and cross border mobility.     

Contested mobilities: gendered migration pressures among Cambodian youth

This paper explores how gender norms and expectations shape the migration decision-making processes of Cambodian young people, in a community characterized by high levels of migration to Thailand. Based on qualitative fieldwork with migrant and nonmigrant youth, I examine how young people make sense of migration and its local alternatives, and highlight the various gendered pressures that young people, and particularly men, experience for migration. Given the lack of local life-making alternatives that neatly conform to hegemonic masculine ideals, young men experience strong pressures for migration and encounter negative social judgments where they seek to stay put. In contrast, young women experience less forceful migration pressures, perceive meaningful alternative life-making projects in the village, and feel more free to actively resist migration. More generally, my findings highlight the importance of interrogating gendered processes of migration not only in terms of how they affect women and those who choose to migrate but also with consideration to how they affect men, and those who choose – or would prefer – to stay home.     

Geography of belonging: nostalgic attachment,transnational home and global mobility among Romanian immigrants in Spain

This article explores how human global mobility is linked to a sense of home and belonging and outlines ways in which European Union (EU) enlargement could contribute to broader debates about migration, both empirically and theoretically. To accomplish this aim, I use the context of Romanian migration to Spain. Since EU enlargement in 2007, Spain has emerged as a major destination for Romanian migrants. The main argument of the paper is that transformations in the EU over the past 20 years through its open border policy have changed migrant workers into EU movers, and this change affects people's perceptions about sense of home. This analysis is prompted by a qualitative and narrative turn in migration studies, and an emphasis on new mobility pathways in accounting for the embodied dimensions of migration. Key to the paper is an analysis of how people can maintain a sense of home while being on the move. It attempts to demonstrate that migrants' experiences of belonging in their host country may vary greatly depending on the time of movement, the politics of EU borders, the nature of mobility and personal and individual circumstances.     

Crafting masculinities: gender,culture and emotion at work in the surfboard industry

This article examines the masculinities of male workers in the context of an emotionally rich form of labour: surfboard-making. Contributing to emerging research around the emotional and embodied dimensions of men's working lives, the article maps the cultural, emotional and embodied dimensions of work onto masculine identity construction. Combining cultural economy theory, emotional geographies and in-depth ethnographic methods, I reveal how surfboard-making has become a gendered form of work; how jobs rely on (and impact) the body and what surfboard-making means to workers outside of financial returns. Following a manual labour process, and informed by Western surfing subculture, commercial surfboard-making has layered onto male bodies. Men perform ‘blokey’ masculinities in relation with one another. However, doing manual craftwork evokes close, personal interaction; among co-workers but also through engagements with place and local customers. Felt, embodied craft skills help workers personalise boards for individual customers and local breaks. Beneath masculine work cultures and pretensions, surfboard-making is a deeply emotional and embodied work. Labour is dependent on haptic knowledge: sense of touch, bodily movement and eye for detail. Contrasting their blokey masculinity, surfboard-makers rely on intimate links between their bodies, tools, materials, customers and surfing places. These ‘strong bodied’ men articulate a ‘passion’ and ‘love’ for ‘soulful’ jobs, demonstrating how waged work comprises alternative masculinities, shaped by working culture, relations and labour processes. A cultural economy framework and emotionally engaged research approach are valuable for challenging hegemonic masculinity, important for achieving more inclusive, tolerant and equitable workplaces.     

Being a man in the horse capital: Mexican farmworkers’ masculinities in Kentucky

Recent immigration to the U.S. south has been of much interest to scholars with economic, social, and regional interests. This article contributes to these interests by analyzing the ways that Mexican men who migrated to Kentucky think about, represent, and perform their masculinities on two foaling farms in the area surrounding Lexington. These perspectives point to how migration impacts the participants’ ideas about gender relations. By considering their masculinities as they intersect with other aspects of their identities, this analysis questions widespread notions of the Mexican ‘macho’ or ‘machista’, demonstrates how masculinities are created in tandem with other aspects of identity such as class, and discusses the complexity of interactions with hegemonic masculinities (e.g. a ‘machista’ identity). The research was performed through participant observation and semi-structured interviews on two horse farms with 15 farmworkers.     

Parents of global youth: contesting debt and belonging

In the United States, recently arrived migrant youth encounter competing media and institutional discourses that cast them as dependents who have been rendered ‘left behind,’ ‘on their own,’ or ‘unaccompanied’ by their parents. A corresponding narrative emerges in which young migrants’ parents are framed as abusive, neglectful, and ignorant. Combined, these portrayals may garner specialized services and contribute to success in the legal realm. At the same time, however, they fail to recognize and even imperil the intimate intergenerational networks that facilitate transnational migration. In this article, we trace the homogenizing power of public discourses on young people and their families across two diverse ethnographic contexts, that of Chinese and Guatemalan migration. Focusing in particular on narratives of debt and belonging, we argue that the pervasive pathologization of migrant youths’ parents diminishes and contorts valued relationships over time. It correspondingly demands broader efforts to historicize and to contextualize youth mobility.     

(Troubling) spaces of mountains and men: New Zealand's Mount Cook and Hermitage Lodge

In this paper we trace one pervasive expression of hegemonic New Zealand national identity that developed around the sport of mountaineering from the 1880s, culminating in Sir Edmund Hillary's historic first climb of Mount Everest in 1953. The image of the masculine mountaineering hero, developed on and around New Zealand's highest peak, Mount Cook, is, however, inherently unstable, and we focus on two sites of potential disruption. First, we examine the experiences of white mountaineering women on Mount Cook. These women both embraced the masculinist identity of hero and destabilized it. Women's mountaineering points to the active and complex construction (rather than simple reproduction) of imperialisms, nationalisms and masculinities. Second, we examine the role played by the Hermitage Lodge situated at the base of Mount Cook. Narratives about mountaineering too often ignore the huts, lodges, the places of staying behind. The roles performed by women (and some men) who never had the opportunity and/or the desire to climb but instead 'kept the home fires burning' and supported the efforts of others can be examined as a way of productively challenging the entrenchment of national identity around the masculine mountaineering hero.     

Men and the Desert: Contested masculinities In Ice Cold in Alex

This article explores the relationship between space, identity and film through the war film genre and in particular Ice Cold in Alex (1958). Although war films have suffered particular neglect by geographers, their appeal is enduring, helping to shape British national identity and popular constructions of masculinity. Through an analysis and critique of the film, this article makes two interconnected points. First, it highlights the value of film to geographers as a creative medium in which spaces and identities are imagined, (re)created, contested and negotiated. Second, it brings recent work on masculinities to bear on a detailed examination of Ice Cold to illustrate how war films have produced and sustained a specific unconventional form of heroic masculine British national identity through the passage of an ‘off-road’ movie. Here we demonstrate that masculinities are forged not only in the maelstrom of power interrelationships between men and other men and between men and women, but also importantly in relation to the landscape, in this example the desert as other. This glimpse allows us to challenge hegemonic norms as well as the construction of the desert as an active agent in the co-construction of the main characters' identities.     

Emotional and relational approaches to masculine knowledge

In this article I experiment with emotional and relational approaches to further understand the ways that masculine privilege operates in the academy. In doing so, I build on longstanding feminist geographical discussions of masculine knowledge. I argue that emotional and relational more-than-human approaches to examining knowledge offer valuable opportunities to explore the ways that masculine privilege operates through the discipline and lay bare normative Enlightenment (humanist, Cartesian, masculine, Eurocentric) constructions that shape current hegemonic knowledge systems.     

Masculinities and Fieldwork: Widening the discussion

Although recent work on masculinities has emphasised the complex ways in which masculinities are produced, performed and interpreted in different contexts, to date these insights have been given little consideration in relation to the process of ethnographic research itself. In this paper, I explore the negotiation of masculinities during fieldwork, with an emphasis on issues confronting male researchers who fail to conform to dominant expectations of ‘manliness’ which have currency in a given setting. I review how male social scientists have written about their fieldwork experiences, and note that many of these accounts in some ways serve to reinscribe the hegemonic masculine positions of their authors. Through a discussion of my own fieldwork with young people in a British voluntary organisation, I address how my masculinity was critiqued and policed, particularly by young men. I conclude by calling for a wider discussion of masculinities and fieldwork. However, I also note my ambivalence about writing the gendered self into research, if this means that those who conform to hegemonic ideals will be validated in reaffirming these identities in print while others are asked to expose the ways in which they fail to do their gender ‘right’.

Aunque obras recientes de masculinidades han enfatizado las maneras complejas en que masculinidades se producen, se representan su papel, y se interpretan en contextos diferentes, hasta la fecha estas perspicacias no han dado mucha consideración con relación al proceso mismo de investigación etnográfica. En este artículo, exploro la negociación de masculinidades durante el trabajo de campo, con un énfasis de temas se enfrentan investigadores masculinos los cuales no se conformen de las expectaciones dominantes de ‘hombría’, lo que tiene valor en escenarios específicos. Reviso como científicos sociales masculinos han escrito sobre sus experiencias en el campo, y noto que muchas de estos relatos en algunos modos sirven para reinscribir las posiciones hegemónicas masculinas de sus autores. A través de una discusión de mi propio trabajo de campo con jóvenes de una organisación voluntaria británica, concluyo que requerimos una discusión mas amplia de masculinidades y trabajo de campo. Sin embargo, también noto mi ambivalencia de escribir su género mismo dentro de su investigación, si se significa que los que se conforman a las ideales hegemónicas estén validado en reafirmando sus identidades publicado, mientras se preguntan otros a revelar las maneras en que se fracasen para hacer su género ‘correcto’.     

Migrant masculinities: Bangladeshi men in Singapore's labour force

Although there is a growing body of scholars who have examined the reproduction and experiences of masculinities, research on the experiences of migrant men remains relatively limited. While I continue to draw upon insights from these scholars of both migration and gender, my data show that there remains considerable potential to contribute to this research field, in particular, analysing the reproduction of masculinity through a class lens. Drawing upon migrants' own narratives and notions of class by Bourdieu, I examine how Bangladeshi men make sense of their labour migration to Singapore, particularly after they fall out of work. Their responses are not only based upon instrumental calculation, but are also powerfully shaped by a complex set of normative gendered formations that can further constrain them.     

Twentysomethings and twentagers: subjectivities,spaces and young men at home

This article examines young men's (aged 18–25 years) meanings of home and practices of homemaking, comprising material and social relations. The discussion contributes to three areas of geographical interest: home, masculinities and youth. Both geographies of home and masculinities have begun to consider men's experiences and meanings of home, but young men's domestic practices remain largely unexamined. Geographical work on youth has examined housing transitions, but the gendered experiences of young men need further interrogation. To provide insight into young men's homemaking, this article presents qualitative case studies drawn from fieldwork that investigated relations between masculinities and domesticities in Sydney, Australia. Young men are arguably out-of-place at home in conventional discourses of gender and space, but homes are nevertheless crucial sites for shaping masculine subjectivities. Masculinities and homes are co-constituted through domestic practices, generating diverse intersectional subjectivities and spaces. In this article, three subjectivity-space, or masculine-domestic, relations are discussed, which also counter the centring of heterosexual couple family homes in domestic imaginaries: young men in parental homes, share-housing and ‘alternative’ family homes. I examine similarities and differences across and within these masculine domesticities. This multiplicity of ‘youthful masculine domesticities’ offers a set of qualitative examples for use in public rhetoric that seeks to redress uneven gender dynamics in contemporary domestic life.     

‘I am going,with or without you’: autonomy in Bolivian transnational migrations

Autonomy has often been seen as a precondition for achieving gender equality, yet feminist scholarship has been rather ambivalent towards it. In this article, I explore this ambivalence by drawing on the experiences of migrant women, particularly mothers, focusing on the ways in which they negotiated their mobility with their partners. By analysing women's experiences of migration within a context of multi-sited and longitudinal, itinerant ethnography, I historicise their life accounts and place them within a broader framework of social and economic structural changes. On this basis I explore the concept of autonomy, particularly in relation to the exercise of women's agency within a context of market-oriented neoliberal reforms. I also question the potential of women's autonomy for gender equality and argue that there are at least two reasons for feminist scholars to continue being ambivalent towards autonomy.