Migration triggers significant changes in gender norms. Migrants might be faced with unfamiliar value systems and feel impelled to renegotiate their own gender identity. Often, migrants are under social pressure to ‘modernize’ what culturally hegemonic (white) majorities consider migrants’ ‘backward’ stances to gender equality and/or variety of sexual identities expressions. Many scholarly works follow this path and focus on supposed cultural distance between majorities and migrants and ask if and how this gap might be closed. New evidence suggests that male migrants might be less flexible than female migrants in terms of accepting and adopting more diverse ways of performing gender roles and sexual identities.
We want to extend these narrow views on migrant masculinity and take the lens of intersectionality to understand how male migrants negotiate their own gender identity and performances when confronted with diversity of lifestyles and expressions related to ethnic, religious, gender and sexual identities of population in cities where they now reside. We draw on our ongoing research with intra-European and non-European migrants in Germany in order to address how their ethnic/racial and social backgrounds intersect with their gender identities and norms of masculinity. For example, we look at how catholic Polish men in Berlin negotiate their masculinity vis-à-vis a cosmopolitan gay community and/or Turkish and Arab men, or how young refugees from Muslim countries experience German lesbian secular lifestyles and/or feminist Turkish activists. Intersectional approach paired with focus on ‘negotiated (gender/sexuality) order’ (Anselm Strauss) helps us to reveal dynamics of masculine identities in migration.

Katarzyna Wojnicka, PhD, is sociologist with a particular interest in critical men and masculinities studies, migration studies and European studies. She holds a doctoral degree in sociology from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland (2013). Before joining DeZIM she worked as Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany and University of Leeds, UK. Her research has been published in various internationally recognized outlets such as Palgrave MacMillan;Routledge; Men and Masculinities; Social Movement Studies and others.

Magdalena Nowicka is Professor for Migration and Transnationalism at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She holds a doctoral degree in Sociology from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich (2005). Her research and teaching activities are in the field of transnational migration in Europe, cosmopolitanism and conviviality, social inequalities, diversity, racism and qualitative research methods. She led the project „TRANSFORmIG. Transforming Migration – Transnational Transfer of Multicultural Habitus“ funded by the European Research Council Starting Grant Scheme (2013-2018) as well as various projects on Polish migration to Germany.

Magdalena Nowicka
Professor
German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM)
Humboldt University in Berlin
nowicka@dezim-institut.de