ABSTRACT
The interstices of gender and migration are now being more thoroughly mined for analyses which can shed light on the reformation of identities and inequalities in the twenty-first century global economy (Piper 2007; Tastsoglou and Dobrowolsky 2006; Willis and Yeoh 2000). However, such work tends to equate gender with female migration, often obscuring the presence of men. As both Joanna Herbert and Ali Ahmad argue in this volume, the cultural and economic (re)construction of masculinities, as migrants and refugees become enmeshed within new localities and transnational systems, remains neglected: part of a wider neglect of masculinity as a domain of analysis within social science (Gutman 1997). Transnational migration has generally created conditions in which identities — those of gender, ethnicity, class, nation, religion — are destabilised, rendering locatedness problematic (Appadurai 1996; Hall 1996). In what follows, I outline the complexity of such interstices using a case study to highlight the changing ways in which certain identity markers (those of gender) are foregrounded as a kind of response to the simultaneous invisibility of others (those of ethnicity and ‘nation’).
