Circumcising Migration: Gendering Return Migration among Somalilanders

Abstract

This article explores ongoing return migration to Somaliland within a gendered perspective and sees it as a distinctly male practice. Whereas many studies of gender and migration focus primarily on women, this article unfolds practices and perceptions of masculinity among Somaliland male return migrants. Somali notions of masculinity, virility and potency have been challenged as a result of the civil war and global dispersal of Somalis. In the article it is argued that return migration from Western countries can be seen as a way of recreating lost images of masculinity and femininity. Male returnees express their masculinity in installing themselves as the potent agents of change and penetration of the purified, feminised and virgin homeland. The article argues that the actual circumcision of the male and the female body, that plays a fundamental role in the establishment of categorically clear and opposed gender categories, is replaced by a symbolic or more abstract circumcision of the diaspora and homeland.