Negotiating Refugee Deservingness at Europe’s Southern Frontier: Masculinity and Race in Sicilian Asylum Centres

Abstract

AbstractBy drawing on qualitative interviews with Sub-Saharan African international protection holders/seekers, conducted in Sicily in 2016/2017, the article investigates how hierarchies of deservingness reactivated by the refugee ‘crisis’ discourse are reproduced in small communities where all-male refugee centres are located and what the effects of these are on day-to-day interactions between refugees and Sicilians in the locale. In particular, I argue that gender hierarchies reproduced by the refugee regime intersect with racist and patriarchal structures outside the centre, resulting in the placement of refugee men at the bottom of any hierarchy of deservingness in the locale. This frames specific ways in which all-male refugee centres are interpreted as enclaves of Othered masculinities due to their assumed bogusness. Thus, participants’ masculinity emerges as a key site for locally negotiating boundaries of inclusion/exclusion between black and white communities—both inside and outside the centre.