LAUSR

As the ‘Men and Migration in Contemporary Europe’ conference (Wojnicka, 2016) took place at the Centre for European Research at the University of Gothenburg back in 2016, we were being bombarded with the media-frenzy around migrant men. This might have simmered down by 2019 in terms of volume, yet the framing has not been altered. Some examples include headlines such as ‘Many refugees walking across Europe are ‘fit young men looking for work’’ (Chorley, 2015) and ‘Why Britain should be worried by this flood of young male migrants’ (Afzal, 2016) in the Daily Mail, ‘Sex – mob in Cologne: Were the perpetrators really refugees?’ in Bild (Karkheck et al., 2016), ‘Abnormal number of young men a problem for Sweden’ in Göteborgs-Posten (Hudson, 2016), and ‘Migrants in Germany are getting more brutal’ (TVPinfo, 10 Apr. 2019). Media discourses, fuelled by politicians of nationalist and populist persuasions, tend to portray all migrants – regardless of their origin – as male and dangerous (Wojnicka & Pustułka, 2017). In 2016, media coverage was at its peak and large groups of male refugees seeking asylum in Europe were photographed and exemplified threats of difference as nonwhite, unpredictable incomers from distant cultures. Their presence on the continent was associated with significantly contravening European ‘gender equality’ agenda and regimes. Such fears were conveyed not only by the media and politicians, but also by certain academics who shared this type of convictions (Hudson, 2016). Hence, the above-mentioned conference’s primary goals were to engage in evidence-based discussions and empirical verifications of prejudice linked to male migrants. The conference and ensuing publications sought to widen the category of ‘migrant men’ by underlining that this group is far from homogeneous. In that sense, the organizers and involved scholars succeeded in re-opening the scholarly discussion concerning men, masculinities and migration processes. Notably, the intersection of gender and mobility is not a new field, though it was formerly preoccupied by studies on the disadvantages and challenges faced by migrant women. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, complementary arguments emerged in regard to men. This is crucial in that, for many years, masculinity as an important factor influencing migration had been neglected. Drawing on the case of women, we know that femininity is not only redefined by migration – for instance when women become breadwinners and can renegotiate gender contracts. Also mobility – in itself – must be conceptualized differently when it is realized by women. Similarly, migration as a process influences the changes in defining, negotiating and performing masculinities, while male migrants create a myriad of migration forms. Stating that migration is a gendered and gendering process has conspicuous consequences for men, women and societies, with the notion of migrants’ sex preconditioning our reception of migratory flows. The latter understanding helped to initialize a proper debate, and analysis of and research on the connections between male gender and migration, often adjusting the frameworks and dynamics of integration and/or transnationalism. From multiple angles, scholars examined migrant men in the context of labour markets, family transformations, as well as social problems such as domestic and sexual violence, youth criminality or culturally-specific crimes