His-stories of Belonging: Young Second-Generation Turkish Men in Austria

Abstract

Public discourses about the children of migrants tend to focus on various difficulties that they encounter in adjusting to host society environments. More specifically, discourses that focus on the sons of Muslim migrants are further infused with ideas about “the Muslim man” who is thought to be the antipode of the enlightened “Western man”. This paper moves beyond such Orientalist descriptions in presenting three case studies of young men of migrant Turkish background living in Vienna. Integrating theoretical approaches of migration and masculinity studies, the young men's positionalities and narratives of belonging are presented. These narratives are diverse and change over the course of the young men's biographies. Their complexity and flexibility are a reflection of the young men's negotiation of their social and discursive environment. To capture this relational character, the paper suggests that these processes be analysed as strategies employed to claim social space.