ABSTRACT The introduction to the Special Issue (SI) presents the collection’s theorization on the impact of everyday, micro-level borders that are propelled by discourses of Islamophobia, racism, and ethno-nationalism related to racialized migrant men’s masculinities in the European Union (EU). Along with the increased movement of racialized (Muslim) men to the EU’s shores have come crisis narratives about their otherness to b/order them. These borders operate in everyday encounters between migrant men and local communities as much as between groups of migrant men themselves, whether it is in the realm of livelihood strategies, romantic desires, assertions about sexuality and sexual identity, homosocial interactions, or friendships. This SI uses the frame of ‘transitions’ to interrogate how transitions in masculinities and masculine self-perceptions are shaped by b/ordering that is enacted every day and in the everyday against racialized migrant men. It argues that masculinized Islamophobia and masculine border(ing) thicken borders between these men and the natives to justify the men’s migrant (un)deservingness. The SI also brings into discussion strategies of masculine resistance and refusal that b/ordered men undertake through enactment and embodiment of caring masculinities or by their refusal to subscribe to norms of hegemonic masculinity.

ABSTRACT Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistani low-class male migrants in Greece are marked by migrant precarity due to their undocumented status and by a flattened South Asian racialised masculine identity. Collectively othered, they struggle with symbolic borders created by colonial and postcolonial encounters, national identities, religion, and masculine expectations. This article explores how ideologies of prejudice and divisiveness in Greece work in tandem with articulations of othering and national (un)belonging from the men’s home countries to define both their interpersonal relationships and labour outcomes in Greece. It proposes the concept of ‘masculine borders’ to describe processes through which culturally specific masculinities of South Asian men are (re)produced or reconfigured relationally and hierarchically to each other by the capitalist project with the aim of alienating and discipling workers. With such everyday bordering discourses, a novel articulation of Marxian alienation of workers from each other emerges. In this case, masculine norms mesh with Islamophobia and racism to thicken masculine borders between Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Indian men, assisting in the efficient accumulation of surplus by the capitalist class.

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.

ABSTRACT Over the past two decades, global media audiences have witnessed the development of a phenomenon known as Pan-East Asian soft masculinities, present in Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, and South Korean pop culture. This construction, characterised by male entertainers’ effeminate appearance and personality traits, has seen both celebration and backlash worldwide and attracted scholarly attention. Contributing to such literature, this article features case studies of three Vietnamese male and female research participants’ unfavourable reception of soft masculinities in romantic South Korean television dramas. Once fascinated with South Korean pop culture, which has established its presence in Vietnam over two decades, the adult informants now view Korean soft masculinities as inauthentic, immature, unpragmatic, and inappropriately feminine. Such views are intimately linked to their lived experiences, including disillusionment with life and romance. To shed light on the informants’ attitudes, the article uses R. W. Connell’s concept ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity and gender anxiety to reveal the influence of norms on the informants’ gender perceptions. It helps fill the gap in research on the resistance to Korean soft masculinities in Vietnam and contributes to the literature on Korean pop culture and non-fans as well as contemporary Vietnamese society.

ABSTRACT The article focuses on the transnational trajectories of Senegalese MSM (men having sex with other men) living in northern Italy. It highlights how these individuals creatively adapt or challenge their masculinity and sexuality, taking into consideration the dominant gender norms prevailing in both Senegal and Italy. In Senegal, homoerotic practices are officially condemned, while in Italy they are frequently the source of overlapping discriminations. By looking at the experiences of Senegalese MSM, the article looks at how concrete and symbolic borders may be built and contested, but also how transnational trajectories actively contribute to challenging the hegemonic forms of masculinity in many aspects of everyday life.

ABSTRACT Recent studies suggest that the potential conflict between health-awareness and masculinity has become less relevant due to men’s adaptation to post-industrialization and labor markets affected by neoliberalism. The concept of hybrid masculinity, which refers to men’s incorporation of practices associated with femininities and discursive distancing from masculinities, has been repeatedly used in this discussion. Yet, men’s affective meaning-making around masculinities and femininities has been left relatively underexplored. Drawing on 18 interviews with Southern Finnish men of varying ages and socio-economic backgrounds, this article explores men’s affective meaning-making around work-related health behaviors associated with masculinities and femininities. This study shows that these men demonstrate sympathy and admiration for some femininities and make frustrated remarks about masculinities involving neglect of emotional and bodily needs. However, they also construct masculinity as an illness-like mentality and men as victims of masculinity, rather than its proactive producers. Moreover, gender-flexible health behaviors are constructed as valuable insofar as they meet the needs of the organization and work process, and they are positioned in contrast to effeminacy and selfishness. This study demonstrates that men’s gender flexibility in constructing a competent self in working life is compatible with affective meaning-making that maintains misogyny and symbolic boundaries between genders.

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.

ABSTRACT The article presents results from an interview study on migrant bachelors and discusses differences between Bangladeshi migrants in Italy and Syrian migrants in Sweden, in how they present as singles. Interviewees articulate a simplified distinction between singlehood in Europe and singlehood in Bangladesh or Syria. Singlehood has been theorized as wavering between a period of waiting and a lifestyle with its own inherent value. In our sample, while Bangladeshis describe bachelorhood as a period of waiting, distancing themselves from what they see as European singlehood, Syrians tend to embrace singlehood as inherently valuable and prefer a ‘European way’ of being single. We argue that this difference between the groups is connected not primarily to national or regional cultures, but to how racialized borders shape the two groups in Europe, as well as to the role of class positionalities in determining attitudes toward singlehood.

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the gender identity transformations of Italian-Bangladeshi men who, after first migrating from Bangladesh to Italy, then undertook a further onward migration, relocating, along with their families, to London. The paper shows the ambivalences and contradictions, in terms of male honour, involved in the new migration towards the UK. Specifically, it shows how the crossing of multiple borders, as well as their arrival and stabilisation in political-territorial contexts that were socio-historically constructed by colonialism as prestigious and wealthy areas, may increase the symbolic capital and male honour of male Bangladeshi migrants. However, if this experience increases their symbolic, gendered and social credentials, it also implies trajectories of professional, biographical, and social downgrading that compromise their image and position as ‘successful’ men.

ABSTRACT Although there is growing scholarship on marginalized migrants and racialized masculinities, studies on how migrant masculinities influence gender norms in the origin countries remain limited. This article explores the formation of multiple masculinities among low-paid Bangladeshi labour migrants to the Middle-East and South-East Asia. I pay particular attention to how migration influences men’s attitudes towards gender norms in their home country. This ethnography reveals that Bangladeshi migrant men advocate for female ‘modesty’ and religious schooling for women in their native communities. Struggling to achieve hegemonic masculine power abroad, men uphold rigid masculinities back home often by relying on a patriarchal interpretation of Islam. Regardless of the diverse ways in which Islam is practiced in the host countries, migrant men returning from both the Middle East and South-East Asia exhibit similarly conservative views on gender norms. This article highlights the need for further research that examines how formation of multiple masculinities among migrant men may impact gender relations in their native communities.