From son to father: memory, fatherhood and migration in the life stories of Muslim men married outside their religious group in Belgium and Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Based on biographical interviews held in Italy and Belgium with migrant-Muslim men married outside their own religious group, the article argues for the importance of including memory as part of the theoretical framework in which to locate and interpret migrant fatherhood. Looking at mixedness as a social laboratory in which to study the intersection of gender, migration and parenthood, the findings suggest that the rupture with the polygamous model of their fathers lay behind the decision of some of these men to marry a woman from the majority group and adhere to the model of fatherhood of the new country of settlement. However, for the majority of the participants, the findings demonstrate that fatherhood is much more complex than the dominant binary division between traditional and Western models of fatherhood assume. These fathers experience ambivalent emotions and constantly struggle in mediating their double presences and absences as fathers: on the one hand, they have established, thanks to the native partner, a privileged closer relationship with the new context, but, on the other, they may experience a sense of ‘dissonance’ in the management of their masculinity and of ‘loss’ in the transmission of the self to their children.