ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s there has been a proliferation of research on women in studies of migration and their experiences and role within the migration process (Morokvasic 1984; Pedraza 1991; Phizacklea 1999; Willis and Yeoh 2000; Ryan 2003), yet this has often led to the neglect and over-simplification of men’s experiences. South Asian men, for example, have been cast in the role of aggressors and stereotyped as tyrannical patriarchs (Chopra, Osella and Osella 2004, 2-3). As a result, there has been a call for a more nuanced and complex understanding of how the changes that women experienced and the women’s agency impacted on masculine privilege and how masculinities have intersected with other factors which threatened men’s self esteem, such as racism and classism (Mahler and Pessar 2006; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). There is a need to examine the experiences of men in relation to women and to examine masculinities by taking a more holistic account of the men’s lives (Gutmann 1997).
