‘I am the God of the House’: How Albanian Rural Men Shift their Performance of Masculinities in the City

Abstract

Migration triggers significant developments in gender norms and identities. Cultural and spatial dislocation influences the ways people renegotiate their gender schemas and shifts the performances of masculinity and/or femininity. Scholars have mainly focused on its impact on women, overlooking its importance in shaping men’s identity. This paper focuses on rural migrant men moving to the city. It explores the strategies they use to renegotiate traditional performances of masculinities in the context of their spatial dislocation and wider socioeconomic developments and urbanization in a suburb of Tirana, Albania. Using an ethnographic and auto-ethnographic narrative approach, this paper reveals that traditional performances of masculinities confronted with modernization are shifting and being reshaped in the new urban environment where generational differences and the emancipation of women are now apparent.