ABSTRACT
This chapter brings together the concepts of marginalised and masculinities to explore young Muslim men's experience of growing up in Britain. Within a British context, across theoretical, media and policy discourses, until recently, marginalisation was often associated with a vocabulary that was informed by a materialist position which privileged political economy. The chapter traces a range of fragmented male subjectivities, social trajectories, cultural belonging and their contested meanings around state-sanctioned marginalisation. It explores a key theme of how are we able to 'know' about the interplay between ethnicity and religion, given the prevalence of state-led representational strategies. The chapter focuses in particular on the emergence of the transformation of ethnic difference to religious difference and young men's negotiation of the categories of difference. It considers three-year critical ethno-graphy in focusing on a third generation of young British Muslim men of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage, as a classed, ethno-cultural and gendered category.
