CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Scheibelhofer, Paul |
|---|---|
| Title | Integrating the Patriarch? Negotiating Migrant Masculinity in Times of Crisis of Multiculturalism |
| Summary | In this thesis, I study how Turkish migrant masculinities are represented in the Austrian context, how these representations are used politically and how migrants themselves engage with this context. To do so, I employ discourse analytical as well as ethnographic methods and analyze different sites of knowledge production around migrant masculinity. I start with a critical discussion of existing research on Turkish migrant men in the German speaking context and problematize culturalistic notions of Turkish masculinity that can be found in this body of literature. Upon that, I develop an alternative approach to the study of racialized masculinities, bringing together critical masculinity studies, critical migration studies and feminist postcolonial theory. Equipped with this theoretical approach, I analyze Austrian migration law and accompanying political discourses since the 1960s to show the role that shifting constructs of migrant male others play in legitimizing migration legislation. My analysis shows that racialized images of archaic Turkish migrant masculinity are currently employed to discredit multiculturalist politics and argue for strict migration policies. Upon that, I present three chapters in which I studied how Turkish migrants engage with the dominant images. First, I focus on the contemporary discourse of homophobic Muslims and ask how a group of migrant LGBT activists in Vienna engage with this discourse and which notions of Turkish masculinity they construe in their work. The analysis not only documents the activists’ strategies of engaging with stereotypes within the white gay scene in Austria, but also shows how the activists frame problems and needs of gay Turkish migrants and the diverging solutions they found. In the following chapter I present the analysis of a group of young men with Turkish migrant background, who engaged in rap music and seemed to correspond to images of problematic Turkish youth. But, based on interviews and ethnographic data, I show the work that the young men put into crafting a ghetto persona that is more hybrid than the dominant images about Turkish youth would have it. Finally, we get to know a young Turkish migrant film maker, who used the medium of film to criticize masculinity constructs amongst Turkish migrants in Austria. As his engagement in art made him ever more critical of questions around representation, he decided to make a film about this very study, highlighting complicated questions about representation. I end this study, by critically discussing how images of migrant Turkish male Otherness are used to establish notions about a modern normative Western masculinity. Furthermore, I discuss the limits of integration oriented research and argue for the need to decolonize research on racialized masculinities. Such research should aim to highlight intersectional structures of dominance as well as sites of friction, contradiction and resistance to these relations of power. |
| Supervisor | Helms, Elissa |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/scheibelhofer_paul.pdf |
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