Poetic desirability: refugee men’s border tactics against white desire

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores how former refugee men position their desirability as they un-settle in European countries. The masculine performance of desirability is examined through the intersectional lens of racialization, affective bordering, sexualities, and erotic encounters. The paper builds on multi-sited ethnographies, conducted mainly in Greece and Germany between 2012 and 2022, centred around masculinities in border activist movements. During first encounters, the men in this study would position themselves as autonomous desirable beings. However, they quickly experienced dismissal or sexual objectifications. They were sexually desired as exotic but discarded as potential life partners, due to the lack of aspirational labour and uncertain legal status. Thus, their beings became depleted in the technologies of the white desire that exploits marked bodies. In affective response, they negotiated the terms of their recognition. Their tactics included shaming women’s choices, deflating local men’s hegemony, forming reciprocal contracts, and visioning love in the future. This pattern continued through men’s engagements across European borders and was repetitive. Therefore, I argue that they performed a ‘poetic desirability’ to position their masculine beings as equal and in resistance to the bordering violence of white (un)desire.